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This chapter deconstructs the carefully crafted marketing rollout of the US-based Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) in 1997, which was presented as the biggest launch in women's sports history. Through a textual and rhetorical analysis, this chapter argues that the WNBA and its corporate partners – through the bundling of distribution channels, sponsorships, and advertising strategies – created three distinct, and at times ideologically conflicting, images of the league: the WNBA as valid capitalistic enterprise, the WNBA as a masculine validation of female athleticism, and the WNBA as a symbolic moment in the political struggle of women for equality. Yet, while this initial, fractured marketing of the league provided a space for cultivating a challenge to dominant gender politics, this space was ultimately restricted to white, heterosexual conceptions of women as the league's array of marketing strategies were unified in reproducing regressive representations of race and sexuality that animate contemporary US sports. However, in institutionally maintaining this narrow, limited space for challenge and protest against inequality, the WNBA nonetheless sanctioned the league as one where players could still fight against injustice. Ultimately, this space would provide a platform for WNBA athletes to enact pioneering challenges against police brutality and racial injustice that would contradict the league's strategic aims.

Over 30 years have passed since the enactment of Title IX, the legislation that required all schools receiving federal aid to provide “equal opportunity for both sexes to participate in interscholastic, intercollegiate, intramural, and club athletic programs” (East, 1978, p. 213). Since 1972, girls’ and women's sport participation has increased in high schools, colleges and universities, the Olympics, and professional sports. Researchers interested in the study of gender and sport have raised critical questions and conducted empirical research concerning the meanings of masculinity and femininity, the implications of sport participation, the meanings of heterosexuality and homosexuality, gender equity, and media coverage of sports (Dworkin & Messner, 2002). One persistent theme in the literature on girls’ and women's sport participation is the connection between athleticism and femininity. Historically, researchers have used the role conflict perspective or the apologetic defense strategy to examine girls’ sport participation. In this chapter, I analyze athleticism and femininity on a high school basketball team using a third framework.