After the Northern Lights: Florence Griffith Joyner and the Making
of Contemporary Women's Sport
by Leslie Heywood
State University of New York, Binghamton
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Table of Contents
Shooting stars, exploding cinders, her feet barely
The lines of her muscles
Stretched tighter than any tree. She cried
When she won it a second time and we cried
When she stood on that platform
`Fastest woman in the world,' for we felt
Something in our chests leap and stretch.
Florence, you were so far
Ahead of the rest of them that day
Your legs were hungry jaws
And we were no longer afraid
To be female and fierce,
No longer afraid
To feel ourselves full of spaciousness
And angry light.
I. Making a Spectacle of Oneself: Negotiating Race,
Gender, and Celebrity to Build a Culture that Values Female Athletes
If you live in America and have not heard of Florence Griffith
Joyner, either you were born sometime after 1986, which would have made
you two at the time of her triple-Gold medal performance in the Seoul
Olympics of 1988 and so not necessarily amenable to mass media
bombardment, or you are one of those cultural recluses, who lives their
life isolated from the media culture of television, radio, and print
media, a culture which has largely become what we think of as
culture, the only horizon we as Americans unilaterally share. As media
critic Douglas Kellner writes, “Radio, television, film, and other
products of the culture industries provide the models of what it means
to be male or female, successful or a failure, powerful or powerless.
Media culture also provides the materials out of which many people
construct their sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality,
of sexuality, of `us’ and `them.’ Media culture helps shape the
prevalent view of the world and deepest values: it defines what is
considered good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil.”
Florence Griffith Joyner, a sprinter, became a permanent part of
media culture in the early days of June, 1988, when in the Olympic
trials she set the world record in the women’s 100 meter (10.49
seconds) and 200 meter (21.34 seconds) events. In multiple ways, she
helped transform the U.S. cultural sense of ethnicity, gender, and race,
what it means to be taken seriously as an athlete and who, according to
these variables, should be taken seriously. She gave us new “materials”
to consider what was possible for female athletes, who had, with a few
exceptions, largely been marginalized as “unfeminine” or ignored.
She renegotiated the traditional male/female, white/black,
powerful/powerless divide in ways that, along with legislation and
increasing attempts to enforce Title IX, the education act of 1972 that
made gender discrimination illegal in institutions receiving federal
funds, vastly expanded the horizons of possibility for the rest of us.
In terms of having this kind of cultural impact, the odds were
against Joyner. As the work of cultural critics such as bell hooks in
her pioneering work Black Looks: Race and Representation has
shown us, predominant codes of “femininity” in the popular
imagination have been conventionally associated with whiteness, and the
world of sport is no exception. Griffith Joyner’s popularity was
unprecedented, among other reasons, because a long historical tradition
had sanctioned only a white definition of femininity--the weak,
vulnerable, charming, sexy, incompetent “bimbo” model in which being
sexy was dependent upon seeming vulnerable and weak, and which--in the
popular cultural imagination--fit only women who had the choice to stay
at home and do “women’s work,” which was usually not black or
middle-class women.
As the research of sport historians such as Susan K. Cahn has shown,
the mid-century cultural turn against women’s participation in track
was related to these stereotypes, so that the African-American athletes
who had come to dominate track suffered a double censure from the point
of view of white culture. Yet they had an alternative tradition to draw
on. Cahn writes that “black women’s own conception of womanhood,
while it may not actively have encouraged sport, did not preclude it. A
heritage of resistance to racial and sexual oppression found African
American women occupying multiple roles as wageworkers, homemakers,
mothers, and community leaders . . . denied access to full-time
homemaking and sexual protection, African American women did not tie
femininity to a specific, limited set of activities and attributes
defined as separate and opposite from masculinity,” as did the white
tradition. We can only make sense of Griffith Joyner’s life and her
impact on women’s sports at the intersection of these competing
traditions, and the way those traditions interact with what is probably
the most powerful force shaping culture today--the cult of celebrity.
That Griffith Joyner would capture and maintain a high standard of
name recognition ten years after her Olympic wins was an unlikely
occurrence. Track and field has never been one of the more popular or
visible sports, and women’s sports in 1988, just fourteen years after
the passage of Title IX , were just beginning to catch on in the popular
imagination. Add to that the fact analyzed above that black female
athletes have historically suffered under a double burden of
discrimination due to widely accepted cultural stereotypes of
femininity, and we would seem to have a “three strikes and you’re
out” situation, a complex, interconnecting set of factors that by all
previous indications would have made Griffith Joyner’s popularity an
impossibility.
Griffith Joyner, or “Flo Jo,” as she came to be called once she
became a household name, was an unprecedented phenomenon, challenging
the ingrown codes of media culture in multiple ways. While in the early
days of women’s athletics in the 1920’s track and field had
generated great public excitement and media coverage, by mid-century the
sport had become stigmatized as “unfeminine” and unfit for female
competitors. Mid-century female track stars suffered the same fate that
female bodybuilders would suffer three decades later, seeing their
athletic prowess denigrated by the media and themselves caricatured as
strange hybrid creatures neither male nor female, “muscle molls”
whose gender identity was in question. Perhaps female track stars, like
bodybuilders later, too obviously challenged white stereotypes of
feminine passivity and incompetence, the “truly feminine” woman as
someone fragile and in need of male protection.
Due to a cultural trajectory for which Griffith Joyner was one of the
primary catalysts, late twentieth century television regularly spoofs
instead of perpetuating such retrograde stereotypes on popular programs
like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This cultural distance from such
stereotypes has everything to do with the current acceptance and
popularity of women’s sports, as does the popularity of this genre of
shows itself. Buffy’s Halloween episode, for instance, has its
heroine dress as a princess to try--for once--to be like the “real
girls” her vampire lover knew in his nineteenth century incarnation.
When the characters fall under a spell that turns everyone into whatever
their costume is, the viewer enjoys the comical effect of watching
Buffy, who usually takes down the gnarliest monsters with well-placed
punches and roundhouse kicks, turn into a simpering blonde girl clothed
in an elaborate red velvet gown who walks with her shoulders hunched in
and her eyes downcast and screams for male protection at every turn. The
disjunction between the Buffy we know and love and this pathetic
creature points to the insipidity and extreme limitation of the
traditional feminine role, but until very recently those stereotypes
flourished and had the effect of marginalizing female athletes, who,
since they were far from the stereotype, were not considered “real
women.” Until Florence Griffith Joyner sprang onto the scene with her
multiple world records and her in-your-face one-legged unitards,
becoming a catalyst for a reconsideration of both athleticism and
femininity, that is. It was Flo-Jo and her particular status as media
icon, her ability to attract and keep national attention, that made her
stand out from other athletes, doing the crucial cultural work that
paved the way for many of the icons of girl culture in the contemporary
scene, from the DIY ethos of Riot Grrrl and clubbing to the kick-ass
antics of Buffy and Xena that have redefined and empowered girl culture
today.
Unlike many other athletes, FloJo was known for flouting convention,
for not following the rules. In a world that still disconnected the idea
of female beauty from sports and which tended not to portray black women
as beautiful, her beauty got her attention, and paved the way for the
national attention centered on beautiful contemporary athletes like
Gabrielle Reece and Lisa Leslie. Mariah Burton Nelson writes, somewhat
critically, that “Florence Griffith Joyner, Gail Devers, and other
track stars of the modern era dedicate considerable attention to
portraying a feminine appearance.” She notes further that “this is
perhaps the most disturbing trend: the appropriation of women’s sports
images as sexy, as seductive. The richer and more powerful women
athletes as a group become, the more often they are made to resemble
prostitutes.”
In Nelson’s analysis, the sexualization of female athletes is a
strategy that helps contain their power: if they are seen as sex
objects, their athletic achievements will take second stage, and the
traditional gender power imbalance will be maintained. This often seemed
to be the case with Joyner, of whom it was written again and again that
she was “almost as famous for her flamboyant track outfits and
colorfully painted fingernails as for her blistering speed.”When
people say the name “Flo-Jo,” often the first thing that comes to
mind is the long, flowing hair and those white bikini bottoms over
one-legged tights, sprinting down the track way ahead of the pack, but
was most fundamentally remembered for the provocative running gear--her
appearance--nonetheless.
Is this remembrance trivializing, does it neutralize her
achievements? It’s a double-edged sword: Griffith Joyner’s
recombinant femininity, which marked a new “power aesthetic,” and
the ascension of the female athlete to a new beauty ideal for women,
helped get her so emphatically into the public eye in the first place.
But that still places the emphasis on physical appearance, which
reinforces the traditional basis of the philosophical cliche that men be
while women appear. Since the emphasis on appearance had
historically only applied to white women, Joyner’s appropriation of
this position was new, but, based as it is on the old active/passive,
male/female, subject/object divides, is it a position anyone would
really want? Did FloJo as spectacle mark a positive social development?
“Looking good is almost as important as running well,” Griffith
Joyner once said. “It’s part of feeling good about myself.” It was
also a big part of her popularity. But why, exactly, is looking good so
important for the female athlete? Why doesn’t John Elway, for
instance, who also looks good, ever talk about it? The relationship
between beauty and athletic achievement as those issues connected to
female identity and success, are more complicated in relation to the
position and potentials of young women in America today. Griffith Joyner
was perhaps the first female athlete in a sport outside of traditionally
feminine sports like gymnastics and figure skating to exemplify the “redefined
femininity” that so much current writing on female athletes claims.
Griffith Joyner’s story is a test case for the recent neologism that
female athletes can “have it all,” athletic success and beauty too.
It is a story that is impossible to analyze without taking her celebrity
status into account--how she got it, and the impact that this status had
on the public perception of female athletes. Rather than playing to
reactionary conventions that trivialize female athletes by sexualizing
them, Griffith Joyner made use of those conventions to redefine both
femininity and athleticism, bringing the female athlete an acceptance
and valuation that was very new.
The cultural production of the image of the female athlete, from
athletic industry advertisements to the marketing of women’s sports
like the WNBA, from “The Year of the Women” at the 1996 Olympics to
the revised athletic femininity of television icons like Xena Warrior
Princess and athletic movie heroines like Ashley Judd in “Kiss the
Girls” would not have been possible without FloJo. Her legacy leaves
us with definite improvements on old stereotypes, but also with
complicated questions: does the new athletic image that FloJo and others
made possible make the aggressive, self-contained girl more socially
acceptable? What cultural function does the athletic image--as distinct
from the experience of playing sports--serve? Does this image really
mark a changed gender paradigm, a “redefined femininity” in which a
girl can “kick butt” and be “girlie-girlie” simultaneously? What
does it mean to “have it both ways”? If participation in sports
changes a girl’s sense of power and entitlement for the better, are
there ways that the athletic image can work against that sense? Does the
new image help with self-esteem? Is the image really about the girls
themselves, and the athletic experience? Or is it just a more muscular
version of a girl having value as a pretty picture?
II. Joyner’s Biography, the Cult of Celebrity,
and Its Consequences
Florence Griffith Joyner was born in 1959, and her divorced mother
had to work several jobs to keep the family together. Florence was born
the seventh of eleven children and was raised in the Jordan housing
project in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Encouraged by her mother to
think of herself as independent and an achiever, Florence began running
in local AAU meets for track at the age of seven, her efforts supported
by the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation. She was in a community that
supported track, so when she won the Jesse Owens National Youth Games at
fourteen, she was hailed as a local hero. A student with a 4.0 grade
point average as well as one of the best runners in California, she was
offered scholarships in many of the nation’s top programs. She chose
to attend California State University so she could train with Bob Kersee
(Jackie Joyner Kersee’s husband and coach), who had a reputation as
one of the country’s best sprint coaches.
When Kersee moved to UCLA a couple years later, Griffith Joyner
followed him, and he coached her in her silver medal performance in the
200 meters at the 1984 Olympic games. In an unusual move given her
consequent success, she went into semiretirement after the `84 games,
not competing again until three years later, when she took second at the
World Championship Games in Rome. Rigorous training between `87 and her
still-standing world record performances in `88 led to her three Olympic
golds and her status as a household name--a status that was instrumental
in creating the widespread cultural acceptance of and support for female
athletes today.
For a generation of female athletes who came of age in the sport
gender wars that marked the post Title IX era, and for the generation
immediately afterward, for whom the right to participate in sports was
never a question, our conflicts found immediate expression in the
bravery and achievements of Griffith Joyner. She was our sports Madonna,
the woman whose flamboyance and decisive victories paved the way for our
own. Themes like the personal price of public triumph, the ambivalent
cultural attitude toward female athletes, and relationships between body
image, competition, and cultural standards for female beauty find
powerful expression in her life and death and the cultural reactions to
them.
After her triple performance in the Seoul Olympics, Griffith Joyner
was named top amateur athlete of the year when she received the Sullivan
Award. Soon after, she was named co-chair of the President’s Council
on Physical Fitness and Sports, the first woman to hold that position.
Paving the way for the advent of figures like Gabrielle Reece, she was
perhaps the first female athlete who was not a figure skater or gymnast,
the more traditionally “feminine” sports, to cross over and become a
media presence, a highly visible sports personality who wrote a regular
column for USA Today and was a popular and frequent public
speaker.
In some ways, Griffith Joyner’s story almost seems too American
fairy-tale cliche: a young girl who went from a life of childhood
poverty in the barrios of L.A. to being the “fastest woman in the
world”--a woman who won three gold medals at the 1988 Olympics who
then went on to become a successful entrepreneur and public presence.
Like her sister-in-law Jackie Joyner Kersee, the plotlines of Griffith
Joyner’s life are scripted like the classic story of the girl who
offers many others hope because she had enough individual will to follow
her dreams, overcome adversity, and achieve triumphant success.
Yet such stories are rarely so simple, and they are more than acts of
will. Though Griffith Joyner faced multiple hurdles as a beautiful
black, strong woman from a working class background both before and
after she grabbed national attention as much for her long, artistically
painted fingernails and her unconventional one-legged running gear as
for her world-record speed, hurdles that required her to blow apart
stereotypes that said a woman could not be beautiful if she was black,
could not be strong if she was a woman, and could not be a woman and
beautiful if she was a world-class athlete, that she was able to
negotiate those hurdles successfully is more complicated than just her
triumph as an individual. The “success story” has been told on a
superficial level too many times, and it feels stale. Her ascension to
the status of media icon draws attention to the cultural function of
celebrity itself.
American culture is typically schizophrenic in its treatment of its
heroes and heroines, what has come to be known as the cult of celebrity.
As the grinding crunch of tabloid journalism shows, we love them and
look up to them, but we also want to knock them down, see them fail,
drag them back down to our provincial level. Our ambivalence is related
to the way celebrity functions. In Celebrity and Power, P. David
Marshall writes that
The close scrutiny that is given to celebrities is to accentuate
the possibility and potential for individuals to shape themselves
unfettered by the constraints of hierarchical society. Celebrities
are icons of democracy and democratic will. Their wealth does not
signify their difference from the rest of society so much as it
articulates the possibility of everyone’s achieving the status of
individuality within the culture. As a system, celebrities provide a
spectacle of individuality in which will itself can produce change
and transformation. The spectacular quality of the code of
individuality that is enacted by public personalities works
ideologically to maintain the idea of continuity between wealth and
the disenfranchised rest of society. Celebrities reinforce the
conception that there are no barriers in contemporary culture that
the individual cannot overcome.
It is naive to think that Griffith Joyner’s life, as much as it
seemed to perfectly fit this narrative of an individual who through the
strength of her will overcame social obstacles that would hold the
ordinary woman back, should only be interpreted in these terms. She was
the fastest woman in the world and deserved her celebrity status, but
celebrity status itself has the function of pointing the finger at those
who don’t “make it”--since Griffith Joyner and others could
overcome such formidable obstacles, why can’t we all? Those who don’t
make it, the thinking goes, must not have tried hard enough or worked
hard enough. Celebrity status simultaneously blames those who don’t
make it for their lack of status, and stands as the perpetual
possibility for everyone to do so.
The ambiguity built into this structure--Griffith Joyner, for
instance was the fastest woman in the world, but why did she “make
it” when so many other gold-medal winners don’t?--shows how
celebrity is dependent upon conformity to certain kinds of cultural
stereotypes as well as to individuality.
Griffith Joyner was criticized for two things: conforming to cultural
codes of femininity and constructing herself as a sexualized spectacle
that detracted from her athleticism, and for suspicions of steroid use,
suspicions which were exacerbated by the first reports of her death.
Some feminist sport historians thought that the attention Joyner devoted
to her appearance played too much to the old conventions that sexualized
female athletes as a way of marginalizing their achievements, and
competitors in the track world labeled Joyner’s performances “too
good” to have been achieved without steroids. These are contradictory
criticisms, for the one accuses her of being too much a traditional “woman”
to be a progressive social sign and role model for aspiring young
athletes, and the other accuses her of being “too masculine” or
successful as an athlete. Her very conformity to and flamboyant
deployment of codes of femininity is what distinguished her from many of
her fellow athletes, since her astounding athletic achievements stood in
opposition to that femininity.
She was beautiful, she was muscular. She wore wild, bodyfitting
running gear, she broke world records. She combined contradictory
stereotypes in such a way as to destabilize them both, and it is
precisely this destabilization that led to her celebrity. Paradoxically,
the consequences of that celebrity were that suspicions were raised
about her “authenticity” even at her death. Yet it was this
combination--flamboyant femininity and spectacular athletic
success--which broke old stereotypes about female athletes and
facilitated the cultural turn toward them around the time of the 1996
Olympics. From Mia Hamm to Cynthia Cooper to Picabo Street, female
athletes are represented as more that just beauty spectacles today, and
the success of the WNBA and the growing popularity of women’s sports
like soccer show they are becoming a powerful cultural presence. This
presence changes everything for girls, who will feel themselves strong
and competent by playing sports even if the media representations
sometimes dwell on their looks. If it takes a little “feminine glamour”
to keep this possibility alive, that’s a concession I’m willing to
make.
III. Girls on Roids: How the Specter of Steroids
Is Used to Discredit Female Athletes
Old stereotypes die hard, however, and despite many positive cultural
changes, the old idea that female athletes cannot be truly successful
without artificial aid continued to dog Griffith Joyner and her
achievements. So powerful is the cultural tendency to denigrate female
athletes that when, in the early morning hours of a day in late
September 1998, FloJo died suddenly in her sleep at her southern
California home at age 38, ten years and three months after she set the
world record in the 100 and 200 meters in track, ten years and two
months after she brought home three Olympic golds, the first buzz about
her death returned to the allegations of steroid use.
Griffith Joyner had repeatedly tested negative for any such use.
A month later the autopsy revealed that she had suffered an epileptic
seizure and threw her head off to the side, the folds of her pillow
gently swallowing her mouth and choking off air to her lungs, but in the
days following her death the speculations her death was steroid-related
generated a barrage of news stories that pointed to just how alive the
old stereotype about successful female athletes still is.
I got the news via a broadcast on NPR, and the cause of death was
unknown then. My first thought was “it couldn’t be,” and then,
immediately after, “they’re going to say it was steroids. They’re
going to try to discredit her.” out. Sure enough, the speculations
surrounding Joyner’s early death got a great deal more press than the
disclosure, a month later, that she had suffered an epileptic seizure
and suffocated, since she was sleeping face-down. Initial reports
described the cause of death as a “heart seizure” (not a medical
term), and linked heart irregularities with possible steroid use in a
kind of macabre “I told you so” that resonated on many levels
nationwide: “Griffith Joyner’s unusually muscled physique and
startling times in Seoul raised speculation that she used
performance-enhancing drugs at the time--allegations she denied. Now
with her sudden death 10 years after she dazzled the track world, the
questions about the drugs are being raised again.”
As I have tried to demonstrate, Joyner combined two traits that
previously seemed incommensurate and opposed. She was beautiful and
feminine at the same time she was a muscular champion. This combination
of qualities led her to be criticized both by sport historians who
wanted to focus only on her achievements, and wished she would not “trivialize”
those achievements by dressing in track gear that called attention to
that beauty, and by athletes, coaches, and doctors, who did not want to
believe that a beautiful woman could set world records without the help
of performance-enhancing drugs.
While sport sociologists have frequently criticized the sexualized
representation of female athletes as a containment strategy that limits
their cultural power and keeps them from being taken seriously as
athletes and achievers, the accusations of steroid use mark a parallel
cultural strategy. Don’t get too big, don’t be too successful, such
accusations communicate to girls, or people will see you as a fraud. The
assumption that a successful female athlete has had artificial
assistance trivializes all women, because it defines femaleness and
success as incommensurable. It furthermore places limits on girls’ and
women’s potential and development, because it sets a low standard
beyond which athletes are no longer considered “real women.”
But to the generation of women whose lives and passions centered
around our participation in sports, a generation that came of age at the
same time as Joyner, and to the generation immediately after us, FloJo
was neither on steroids nor a traitor to the feminist cause that wanted
the focus to center on female athletic achievement rather than
appearance. To us, she was a symbol of everything we could hope to be,
the possibilities sports could bring us if we were athletes: that
feeling of flying in colors like the northern lights charged by
planetary friction across the polar sky, that sense of going beyond
ourselves, our ordinary lives, our limitations, that playing sports
brought us. We were, in the words of sports sociologist Shari Dworkin,
“post Title Ninies,” that group of women “who beat the shit out of
ourselves for the glory of saying girls CAN goddammit!”, and FloJo was
one of us, the one who made herself part of media culture, the one gave
us something to shoot for, possibilities to believe in. She helped us
all to integrate into that culture, gain acceptance within it as
athletes. She helped make us a viable and valuable part of things. She
brought us home.
Did she confirm certain cultural stereotypes about the sexualization
of female athletes even as she challenged racialized stereotypes of
beauty? Probably. But it was the way she played to media codes,
combining them in new ways, that put female athletes on the map in a
mainstream way and led them both to be more visible and taken more
seriously. FloJo taught us to dream of a world where female athletes
would be widely accepted; now, ten years after her gold medal
performances, we have that world. We can only be glad she lived to see
it, and that her daughter, should she choose to compete, will be
competing in a better world if we all keep working for it.
