Playing with beauty: prominent sportswomen talk about their experience of social attitudes toward appearance and beauty

Abstract

Throughout history, women have gained attention through their physical appearance. Even at the end of the 1990s, sportswomen often receive as much attention for their physical appearance, as they do for their sporting abilities. This thesis had two main aims: firstly, to explore the idea that collective attitudes toward beauty could affect the sporting performance of female athletes and, secondly, to give voice to some of the questions that sportswomen raise in relation to sport and image. To achieve this, I interviewed four prominent female athletes and found that social expectations concerning beauty and appearance can affect their performance in both negative and positive ways. In order to understand the context of their experiences, I explored social and cultural discourses that featured beauty, femininity and image and the power arrangements that these discourses promoted. The findings were interpreted from a feminist perspective recognising the individual's experience as a location for examining society and culture.