Female Athlete Memoirs as Postfeminist Fairy Tales

Athlete memoirs are a popular sports genre. They are often marketed as tales of fidelity that candidly detail an athlete’s journey to success. This paper conducts a narrative analysis of athlete memoirs to uncover how white female athletes talk about themselves and their experiences. The memoirs under analysis are “Letters To A Young Gymnast” by Nadia Comaneci, “In the Water They Can’t See You Cry” by Amanda Beard, and “Brave Enough” by Jessie Diggins. Postfeminism and feminist standpoint theory serve as theoretical frameworks to support the interpretation of the data. Female athletes employ postfeminist tropes such as individuality, empowerment, and self-governance in the articulation of their athletic success. Moreover, they complete their narrative by disclosing details from their heterosexual romances. The research question this paper answers is: how do white female athletes use the genre of memoir to talk about themselves and their experiences? This paper identifies a prevalence of hypermasculinity and heterosexism in female athlete memoirs.