Abstract:
This thesis investigates the extent to which the enactment of Title IX in 1972 directly
permitted the emergence of women’s professional sports organizations. I note the initial
ambiguity as to Title IX’s applicability to women’s participation in organized athletics
and the resistance leveled against Title IX’s enactment. I then analyze the establishment
of women’s professional sports: women’s professional athletic organizations resulted not
from Title IX but from the expansion of the neoliberal market. Women’s sports were
positioned as advantageous to corporate investment via the confluence of the advent of
the postfeminist era, the sociopolitical signification of hard bodies as representative of
proper American citizenship, and the marketization of the women’s fitness market. The
convergence of such developments served to discursively articulate women’s elite sports
as financially profitable to corporate investors. I also reflect on the dominant scripts
utilized to generate demand for women’s professional sports.
