Representing the Boarding Body: Discourse, Power, and the Snowboarding Media

Abstract

The media has always played a decisive role in the lives of snowboarders, by confirming, spreading and consolidating cultural perceptions. While the heavily circulated image of the teenage male snowboarder with spiky hair, multiple piercings, tattoos and wearing over- sized clothing continues to loom large in the public imagination, representations of snowboarding bodies are in fact diverse and dynamic. In the first part of this chapter I offer a brief discussion of the processes through which snowboarding bodies are represented and consumed differently across the mass, niche, and micro media. Here I argue that new approaches are required to make meaning of the dynamic power relations between various agents involved in the production and consumption of snowboarding media. In this chapter I consider the potential of Michel Foucault’s unique conceptualization of power to reveal some of the multiple, variegated, and dialectical relations between snowboarders and the media.¹ The second part of the chapter consists of two main sections. The first draws on Foucault’s concepts of power and discourse to examine some of the discursive constructions of snowboarding bodies in the media. The second explores these ideas further with an examination of the discourses of femininity and (hetero)sexuality in the snowboarding media. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘technologies of self’, I also examine how women (and men) make sense of the multiple and contradictory mediated discourses of femininity in snowboarding culture. The resulting discussion critically evaluates the sexualized images of women in the snowboarding media and the discursive effects these have on women’s snowboarding experiences. Taking inspiration from Foucault’s unique approach to knowledge and power, the later part of this chapter voices a long ignored question: are sexualized images of women really at the heart of gender problems in contemporary society?

After a few runs, I was hiking back up the pipe when a guy who looked almost as dorky as me approached. He was skinny and pimple- faced, and he had a camera around his neck. ‘Hi, I’m Trevor Graves with International Snowboard Magazine. You’re ripping’, he said, holding up his camera to convey the point. At that moment, I thought I was part of something huge. After all, here was this guy from ‘International’ Snowboard Magazine taking photos of me.… That little bit of Kodak motivation got me riding harder than I ever had. (Todd Richards recalls an early half- pipe competition in February 1988 in New Hampshire; Richards, 2003, pp. 57–58)

Snowboard videos were always playing in [my] house [in Whistler]. The early videos were like primers: how to board, how to look, how to be. The design was gritty and the soundtrack raucous; this rawness, of course, was in keeping with the snowboard ethic. The fact that these videos were so difficult to come by made them even cooler; watching them felt like being a member of an exclusive little club. [We would] watch the same videos over, and over, and over.… We even made our own videos, and those were in rotation at the chalet as well. (Ross Rebagliati reflects on the use of early snowboard videos during the late 1980s; Rebagliati, 2009, p. 46)