Qualifying Times (Sport and Society) by Schultz Jaime

Author:Schultz, Jaime
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

6. A Cultural History of the Sports Bra

The U.S. women's victory in the 1999 World Cup certainly was “a kick,” as Time described it.1 After 120 minutes of spectacular scoreless action, the championship match between the United States and China came down to a penalty shoot-out. One after the other, ten athletes—five from each squad—traded shots. A key save by American goalkeeper Briana Scurry evened the score at 4–4, opening up the possibility for her team's success. In the tenth and final spot was Brandi Chastain, who stepped up, drove the ball into the top corner of the net, and clinched the win for the U.S. In her book, It's Not about the Bra, Chastain recounted the now-famous moments that immediately followed.

If you're lucky, a moment like this happens once in your lifetime, and when it does, your response can only be uncalculated. So while forty million watched on television and in front of over ninety thousand people (including the President of the United States) at the Rose Bowl, I took my shirt off. It was spontaneous. It made me notorious. It was not the sort of thing anybody expected a woman athlete to do…. But in the end, it was just a moment, a celebration. At that instant, as I lifted my shirt, it was as if I'd shed the weight of the entire tournament and replaced it with the thrill of victory and fulfillment at the same time.2

The media blitz that ensued, however, was indeed (with all due respect to Chastain and her teammates) all “about the bra.” Featured on the front pages of newspapers and the covers of major magazines, discussed at water coolers, parodied by comedians, debated on chat sites, and the focus of questions for contestants in the Junior Miss America pageant and on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? attention to Chastain's celebration reduced one of the most significant moments in sport history to one that gave the world “that girl in the sports bra.”3

The moment came at the end of a decade that witnessed both the rise of women's sports and the increasing visibility of sports bras. Worn as foundational athletic equipment, as a stand-alone top, or as a costume statement by the likes of pop singers Britney Spears and Sporty Spice, sports bras are more than utilitarian. In the context of physical culture, fashion, and marketing campaigns, they contribute to the ways in which women relate to their bodies—bodies that are at once externally bound and internally managed by the bra. The public spectacle of women in their sports bras also contributes to redefinitions of feminine aesthetics and the body beautiful, as well as to the continued trivialization of female athleticism.

These themes were especially pronounced in the popular media's reactions to Chastain's celebration and in 1990s sports-bra advertising, both of which generated consideration of physically active and breasted forms of female embodiment. Yet there was a critical undercurrent beneath what seemed to be celebratory images, for they drew attention to notions of women's sexual difference and positioned their bodies as sexualized objects.

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