After the Northern Lights: Florence Griffith Joyner and the Making of Contemporary Women’s Sports

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 menbe 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 naïve 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.