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Browsing by Author "Streeter, Rayanne Connie"

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    Are All Bodies Good Bodies?: Redefining Femininity Through Discourses of Health, Beauty, and Gender in Body Positivity
    Streeter, Rayanne Connie (Virginia Tech, 2019-06-06)
    Previous research has explored the ways in which health, beauty, and gender discourses are used to promote and regulate an ideal of thinness. Further, research has explored how the fat acceptance movement and fitspiration has fought to resist such narratives. However, in the age of hashtag feminism a new group on social media, body positivity, has become the buzzword among celebrities, news conglomerates, and fashion companies. This study draws on interviews with body positive influencers and Instagram posts tagged #bodypositive and #fitspiration to examine the extent to which body positive influencers and users modify understandings of normative feminine body ideals and to what extent they resist and accommodate traditional discourses of gender, health, and beauty. In doing so, I explore which bodies are newly included and who is left out.
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    Gender and Bodily Transformation in Women's Flat Track Roller Derby
    Streeter, Rayanne Connie (Virginia Tech, 2014-05-29)
    Sports as a social institution reflects and reshapes social values and power relations in broader society, including gender relations. For instance, the ways in which bodies are used in sports produces gender; as such sport has been shown to reaffirm men's power over women and ritualize and embed aggression, strength, and violence into the male body. Roller derby, which is a full-contact, highly physical sport, offers women the opportunity to renegotiate these stereotypical gendered and embodied ideas of gender. Drawing on bodily theory, contact sport, and self-defense literatures this study explores how female roller derby players undergo such negotiations of femininity and womanhood and how one's body plays a role in this. This was done through the analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews with female flat track roller derby players in the United States. Findings show similarities to self-defense where skaters' notions of womanhood and femininity are transformed through a variety of ways and these are related to experiencing bodies in new and transgressive ways. One key finding demonstrates how these transformations are complicated by biological narratives and understandings of violence. These results speak to larger implications of gender, embodiment, and women's physical liberation.