199 Journal of Sport & Social Issues Volume 32 Number 2 May 2008 199-229 © 2008 Sage Publications 10.1177/0193723508315206 http://jss.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Foucault, Technologies of Self, and the Media Discourses of Femininity in Snowboarding Culture Holly Thorpe University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand This article draws on Foucault’s concepts of discourse and technologies of self to ana- lyze the relationship between young women and the media. More specifically, it sheds light on the various discursive constructions of femininity in the snowboarding media and examines the conditions under which female snowboarders learn to recognize and distinguish between different types of media discourses. It also examines the different ways in which women act on this knowledge, including the production of their own media forms. The article evaluates sexist discourses in the media and their effects on women’s snowboarding experiences and considers women-only media forms as a foun- dation for wider social transformation. Ultimately, Foucault’s unique conceptualization of power enables an account of the mundane and daily ways in which power is enacted and contested in snowboarding culture and allows an analysis that focuses on the female snowboarder as both an object and a subject of media power relations. Keywords: Foucault; media; female youth culture; snowboarding M ichel Foucault has had a major influence on the reconceptualization of power in the social sciences and humanities, including sports studies. Since the early 1990s, scholars have engaged in fruitful analyses of the “discourses of discipline and pleasure” that relate to the sporting body (Whitson, 1989, cited in Andrews, 1993, p. 149; see Chapman, 1997; Cole, 1993; Duncan, 1994; Markula, 2003); some have used a Foucauldian perspective to analyze the media and, in particular, how they function as part of the “apparatus of technologies of domination” (Markula & Pringle, 2006, p. 73; also see Duncan, 1994; Markula, 1995). Yet scholars have begun to express concern that research focusing on “technologies of dominance” results in “pessimistic representations of sport and exercise practices” (Markula & Pringle, 2006, p. 48). Gruneau (1993), for example, proclaimed that such a focus can “too easily deflect attention from analyzing the creative possibilities, freedoms, Author’s Note. I thank Douglas Booth, Richard Pringle, Toni Bruce, CL Cole, Pirkko Markula, Susan Birrell, and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and suggestions in developing this article or the research on which it is based. Please address correspondence to Holly Thorpe, Department of Sport and Leisure Studies, School of Education, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand; e-mail: hthorpe@waikato.ac.nz.