Swimmer Dara Torres’s comeback to her sport at 41 years of age was a prominent story from the 2008 Beijing Olympics. While her record making swims made her comeback an athletic success, the importance of her comeback extends beyond her athletic accomplishments. Media representations of Torres during her comeback construct her body and the lifestyle that produced it as inspirational—or fitspirational. Although the term circulates widely in U.S. popular culture, and despite its importance in reframing what a woman’s ideal body is and how it is achieved, fitspiration has not received much attention from scholars. In this article, we use the constructed narrative of Torres’s 2008 comeback to demonstrate how notions of individualism, self-monitoring practices, personal responsibility, and empowerment in conjunction with long-standing ideological portrayals of women athletes erase social inequalities and perpetuate heteronormative ideals. The constructed narrative produces her as a fitspirational figure whom American women should emulate. Furthermore, this process transforms Torres from an elite athlete to a mom who used sport to regain her fitness. Her status as an elite athlete is marginalized and her body becomes attainable through the representation of her age and motherhood as barriers that can be overcome through self-monitored consumptive practices.
Existing across multiple media platforms, Barstool Sports (“Barstool”) is one of the most important sport brands in the United States. While Barstool’s critics frequently assert that the company is “racist,” few, if any, detail how their racial politics work. Through a brief genealogy of Barstool’s cultural history and a close critical reading of “The Barstool Documentary Series,” we show how Barstool’s racial politics operate through gender—specifically the affective appeal of Big Man sovereignty and the homosocial bonds of White fratriarchy —to create and normalize racially exclusive and White male-dominant social worlds that dovetail remarkably with racial and gender ideas that organize what Maskovsky calls Trump’s “White nationalist postracialism” and the Proud Boys’ “Western chauvinism.”
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