CRITICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA COMMUNICATION

2023, VOL. 40, NOS. 2–3, 77–91

https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2023.2228382

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Caster Semenya as a “can-do” hero for “at-risk” girls:

analyzing Nike’s neoliberal postfeminist advertisements
Anna Posbergha, Samuel M. Clevengerb and Caitlin E. Kanec
a
School of Kinesiology, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA; bDepartment of
Kinesiology, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA; cDepartment of Kinesiology, University of Maryland-
College Park, College Park, MD, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

To solidify itself as a socially progressive global brand, the U.S.- Received 26 September 2022
based sports apparel corporation Nike produces and distributes Accepted 15 June 2023
advertisements featuring women from around the world as
KEYWORDS
empowered, independently motivated athletes, capable of Nike; media analysis;
transcending all boundaries through their pursuit of athletic neoliberalism; postfeminism;
excellence. Some advertisements feature celebrity non-Western Caster Semenya; the girl
athletes such as South African track and field star Caster Semenya effect
as part of an overall marketing message founded on the
purportedly universal ideal of “girl power.” This article argues that
Nike’s global pro-women advertising can be understood as a
Western-centric, neoliberal, postfeminist branding strategy that
reinforces existing social inequalities and reproduces the
economic exploitation endemic to contemporary capitalism. The
article analyzes three of Nike’s advertisements from 2018
featuring Caster Semenya, focusing on how each universalize and
normalize particularly Western, neoliberal, postfeminist ideals.
Attention is given to the advertisements’ reliance on the specific
neoliberal postfeminist themes of individual empowerment and
Western-centered gender norms.

Introduction
Since the late twentieth century, the global sports apparel corporation Nike has increas-
ingly incorporated celebrity women athletes within its “Just Do It” marketing campaigns,
featuring well-known amateur and professional athletes such as Bo Jackson, Kobe Bryant,
Shalane Flanagan, Chris Mosier, and Naomi Osaka. Building on an advertising strategy
launched in 1988 by Nike’s corporate advertising partner Wieden & Kennedy (W + K
since 2001), the “Just Do It” campaigns showcase prominent athletes’ stories to
connect with Nike consumers under the premise that, “if they can do it, so can you”
(Cole & Hribar, 1995). This marketing method of “storytelling,” which aims to
develop emotional relationships between Nike athlete and consumer, soon extended
into the company’s pursuit of women as a core customer base (Grow, 2008, 2016;
Lucas, 2000). Despite the campaign’s early failures, Nike assembled a team of about 40

CONTACT Anna Posbergh [email protected] School of Kinesiology, School of Kinesiology, University of

Minnesota-Twin Cities, 1900 University Avenue SE, Cooke Hall 111, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
© 2023 National Communication Association
78 A. POSBERGH ET AL.

women employees from both Nike and W + K to create new women-centered “dialogue”
advertisements focusing on personal growth and emotional connection, rather than
physical prowess and competitive glory (Katz, 1994; Lucas, 2000). The resulting
revenue generation and acclaim were overwhelmingly positive: the company saw a 205
yearly growth in sales between 1989 and 1992, while W + K received multiple advertise-
ment awards (Lucas, 2000). Since then, Nike’s identity has been solidified as a global pro-
women corporation that encourages girls and women to engage in sport and physical
activity. Today, Nike routinely and strategically relies on advertising campaigns that
present the empowered, independently motivated woman athlete, seeking to transcend
sociocultural, economic, and geopolitical boundaries in the pursuit of athletic excellence,
as a seemingly universal cultural signifier (Posbergh et al., 2022).
There are important issues to consider in Nike’s ongoing global advertisements, which
are based on (supposedly) ubiquitously applicable and appealing representations of
female athletic empowerment. With its success and dominance in the women’s
market, Nike has sought to establish and maintain its international presence by increas-
ingly including athletes from multiple geopolitical contexts in its advertisements, often
featuring them in their home countries and cities, in traditional attire, and, in some
cases, native languages. Despite the apparent diversity in representation, Nike’s advertise-
ments, by design, project a common message: that individual women can empower
themselves through sport and physical activity regardless of circumstance, as they
share similar cultural, interpersonal, and internalized challenges, and the same desires
to achieve access and success in physically active spaces (Posbergh et al., 2022).
There are important issues within Nike’s seemingly multicultural, pro-women mar-
keting strategies that warrant further investigation. Namely, we contend that the com-
pany’s women-centered advertisements depict an individualizing, Western-centered
form of feminist empowerment, obfuscating how “successful” Nike women “are impli-
cated in an international system of racial, gender, and class exploitation of women
workers in less developed nations” (Dworkin & Messner, 2002, p. 22). For example,
and as a continuation of its “Just Do It” marketing campaigns, Nike released a series
of advertisements in 2018 featuring South African 800-meter runner Caster Semenya,
who has been the subject of gender controversy and vitriol since her decisive win in
the 2009 Berlin World Championships (Cooky & Dworkin, 2013; Karkazis et al., 2012;
Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018; Pieper, 2016; Schultz, 2011). While the advertisements,
individually and collectively, indirectly reference Semenya’s specific challenges, they also
concurrently encode and reinforce a neoliberal postfeminist message by focusing exclu-
sively on Semenya’s willpower and determination, thereby silencing the gendered, sexual,
racialized, colonial, and geopolitical dimensions that have shaped her experience(s) and
public biography (Posbergh & Clevenger, 2022). Consequently, there is a need to decon-
struct Nike’s pro-women advertising to illuminate how it circulates particular Western-
centric neoliberal postfeminist subjectivities around the world, thereby limiting the
expression of de-Westernized, de-colonized subjectivities in the sports media ecosystem.
In this article, we contribute to existing scholarship on Nike’s messaging and market-
ing strategies by analyzing three of the company’s Caster Semenya-centered advertise-
ments, viewing them as case studies on the intersections of Western-centrism and
neoliberal postfeminism in a global corporation’s deliberate presentation of a celebrity
Global South athlete.1 As Capon and Helstein (2005) note, such corporate advertisements
 CRITICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA COMMUNICATION 79

serve as “rich, interesting and significant texts that can and need to be explored for their
representational politics” (p. 39). Following scholarship in decolonial thinking (Mignolo
& Walsh, 2018), we seek to de-universalize and deconstruct Nike’s marketing messaging
by exposing the Western-centered, neoliberal values encoded within the advertisements.
The analysis is also inspired by the growing research in transnational feminism and the
ways in which white, middle-class, neoliberal constructs of individual female empower-
ment can conceal the persisting effects of the history of Western colonialism on public
and marketed depictions of non-Western women and women of color (Kaplan &
Grewal, 1999; McLaren, 2017; Tambe, 2010; Tambe & Thayer, 2021). We argue that,
despite Nike’s attempts to engage with local politics and culture in its increasing
global advertisements, their advertisements ultimately illustrate how corporate market-
ing strategies can reinforce the hierarchies and ideologies of Western colonialism and
neoliberal capitalism, even when their messaging purports to be uplifting and politically
progressive. As part of their capital accumulation pursuit, the advertisements obscure the
systemic social inequalities that elucidate the differentiating experiences of women
around the world and, instead, superficially engage with sport’s deeply entrenched insti-
tutional and cultural norms.

Neoliberal postfeminism, global Nike, and the girl effect

As part of the company’s broader effort to establish itself as a “socially progressive
company” (de Oca et al., 2020), Nike also uses its advertisements to emphatically indicate
support for socially-progressive ideals and athletes committed to social justice causes,
such as equal treatment for women (e.g. Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan) and anti-
racism (e.g. Colin Kaepernick). This effort contributes to what Koffman and Gill
(2013) describe as “The Girl Effect” (TGE), an “assemblage of transnational policy dis-
courses, novel corporate investment priorities, biopolitical interventions, branding and
marketing campaigns, charitable events” in the twenty-first century that were “designed
to produce a social movement for change, and … to express pride in ‘being a girl’” (p. 84).
TGE can be seen as a corporatized, neoliberal investment effort wherein multinational
organizations such as Nike seek to lift girls from developing countries out of poverty
through promoting the purportedly universal ideal of “girl power” (Calkin, 2015;
Koffman & Gill, 2013). Despite discourses of “gender equality” and “women’s empower-
ment,” researchers have highlighted how TGE “reinforce[es] gender inequality on both
the micro and macro levels,” prompting a “second wave of neoliberal exploitation” by valor-
izing individual empowerment at the expense of systemic inequalities (Boyd, 2016, p. 146).
In turn, this runs the risk of “crystalliz[ing] Western-patriarchal-capitalism even more
deeply in an unyielding global glass ceiling” (Boyd, 2016, p. 146). Such is the case when con-
sidering Nike’s history of poor labor practices, reliance on exploitative “sweat shops,” and
chronic harassment, which contradict its self-publicized commitments to politically-pro-
gressive efforts (Cole & Hribar, 1995; Knight & Greenberg, 2002; Lafrance, 1998).
By the 1990s, Nike’s identity as a pro-women company had been established through
both its extensive array of women-centered advertisements and dominance in the women
consumer market (Lucas, 2000). Its pro-women marketing messaging entailed a particu-
lar discursive circulation of “neoliberal postfeminism”: an emphasis on an individual’s
responsibility to overcome institutional or systemic barriers (Rottenberg, 2018; Thorpe
80 A. POSBERGH ET AL.

et al., 2017). Following Gill (2017), postfeminism in popular media has a distinctive neo-
liberal sensibility in its emphasis on commodification while having “little in common
with activist feminisms concerned with protesting budget cuts or deportations”
(p. 611). It is a particular kind of neoliberal feminism that, echoing Dosekun (2020),
replaces politicizing and critiquing enduring systemic forms of gendered injustice to
instead offer “the rationalities and vocabularies of personal empowerment, personal
choice, personal responsibility, and, it follows, personal failure” (p. 16). Such tactics
are evident in Nike’s pro-women advertising, which typically underscore neoliberal
values such as responsibilitization, competitive individualism, and empowerment (Pos-
bergh et al., 2022).
The global diversification of Nike’s women-centered advertisements reflected the
company’s production relocation from the U.S.A. to China, Taiwan, and Korea through-
out the 1980s (Lafrance, 1998), revealing important contradictions within its empower-
ment-focused marketing. Enticed by the prospect of capitalizing on cheap labor and
lackadaisical labor laws in these countries (and others), Nike maintained that relocating
its production facilities was to give “jobs to those who would otherwise have nothing”
(Lafrance, 1998, p. 131). Importantly, and as Lafrance (1998) stresses, a majority of
jobs in foreign-owned factories (85%) were given to women where “[they] are repeatedly
(if not constantly) exposed to toxic chemicals, dangerous outdated machinery and poorly
ventilated spaces,” and are the targets of sexual and physical intimidation (Kirschen-
baum, 1996, p. 23; as cited in Lafrance, 1998, p. 132). Such business practices are at
odds with Nike’s “progressive” and “pro-women” consumer messaging and concurrently
frames “basic rights and human dignity for poor women in the global South” through a
colonialist emphasis on underdevelopment and economic aid (Hickel, 2014, p. 1362).
As Stabile (2000) has argued, Nike continues to “sell their products on the basis of
social responsibility, decent family values, and other nonsense, while at the same time
engaging in labor practices that give the lie to their public propaganda” (pp. 199–200;
see also Greenberg & Knight, 2004). Moreover, the advertisements present a diversity
of athletic women’s bodies through a Western-centered neoliberal postfeminist
message of individual responsibility and empowerment through sport, as illustrated in
previous global Nike advertisements such as India (“Da Da Ding”), Turkey (“This Is
Us”), and Mexico (“Juntas Imparables”). Assuring the consumer that this message trans-
gresses geopolitical and sociocultural borders, the advertisements de-territorialize and
depoliticize the experiences of Global South women through imposing enticing narra-
tives of self-motivated women.

Nike and the girl effect

In 2005, to build on its growing global identity as an “engaged global corporate citizen”
and reinforce its status as a key player in the fight for women’s rights, Nike created the
Nike Foundation: a non-profit organization to support, improve, and invest in the well-
being of Global South girls (Nike, 2005). Three years later, the Nike Foundation, in
tandem with the NoVo Foundation, coined the phrase “the girl effect” to describe the
“ability of adolescent girls in developing countries to bring unprecedented social and
economic change to their families, communities and countries” (Boyd, 2016; Koffman
& Gill, 2014; Moeller, 2013; Nike, 2008, para. 5). TGE reflected a movement to invest
 CRITICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA COMMUNICATION 81

in the education of girls, especially in Global South countries (Koffman & Gill, 2013,
2014; Moeller, 2013, 2018). Doing so, the Nike Foundation argued, would give rise to
more educated and empowered girls, thereby stabilizing family life, creating healthier
communities, and establishing stronger economics (Nike, 2005).
The collaboration between the Nike Foundation and the NoVo Foundation reflected a
broader worldwide turn towards investing in educational opportunities for Global South
girls. To address inequality and poverty, organizations (e.g. the World Health Organiz-
ation, the United Nations Children’s Fund, World Bank), partnerships (e.g. Adolescent
Girls Initiative, UN Interagency Task Force on adolescent girls), and global forums (e.g.
the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative) joined forces to increase
opportunities for underrepresented girls and women (Hickel, 2014). The proposed
result was educating and empowering young girls, which would reimagine (global) econ-
omies and transform cultural norms for themselves, their families, and their
communities.
However, these efforts also served as strategic investment opportunities for organiz-
ations without critiquing broader forms of systemic injustice (Calkin, 2015; Hayhurst,
2011; Hickel, 2014; Koffman & Gill, 2013; Moeller, 2013). By redirecting economic
(and societal) responsibility onto girls, organizations disarticulated impenetrable struc-
tural conditions and enjoyed widespread cultural and financial benefits without substan-
tial, if any, institutional reformations. Concurrently, some have criticized the
commodification of Global South and working-class women to benefit corporate econ-
omic outcomes (see Hickel, 2014), an idea that Uma Narayan (2010) has characterized
as “insane utilitarianism.” Similarly, Kathryn Moeller (2014) has argued that TGE “func-
tions through a gendered and racialized logic of neoliberalism” (p. 74).
Yet, TGE remains a complex entity, especially in relation to race, nationality, and
social class (Harris, 2004; Koffman & Gill, 2013; Moeller, 2013). For instance, girls are
illustrated as resilient, confident, and empowered “can-do girls” who are the “ideal late
modern subject” (Harris, 2004, p. 16). Outspoken, ambitious, and educated, can-do
girls rely on girl power to smash patriarchal oppression, revitalize the (global)
economy, and achieve their own individual success (McRobbie, 2009, 2015; Ringrose,
2007). This purported (untapped) girl power is what TGE-focused organizations aim
to maximize and project, as expressly illustrated in the Nike Foundation’s “revolution”
poster: “THE REVOLUTION WILL BE LED BY A 12-YEAR-OLD GIRL” (Koffman &
Gill, 2013). Conversely, girls can also be characterized as “at-risk,” particularly those
from the Global South, limited by an oppressive culture (Mohanty, 1984). “Can-do”
and “at-risk” girls are geographically specific: while girls in the U.S.A. are viewed as
“active, empowered free agents,” girls in the Global South are portrayed as “inhabiting
a patriarchal order, where their freedoms … are constrained” (Koffman & Gill, 2013,
pp. 87–88).
In the context of advertisements and post-humanitarian appeals, Thorpe et al. (2018)
have discussed “positive” representations of physically active Global South girls and
women. However, they (and others) simultaneously argue that this recent turn is
“fraught with tensions and unintended consequences,” such as “selfie” or narcissistic
humanitarianism, a neo-colonial and neoliberal postfeminist articulation of girl
“power,” and “poverty porn” (see also Calkin, 2015; Darnell, 2010; Koffman et al.,
2015, p. 159; Wilson, 2011). The result is a complex swirl of geographic, economic,
82 A. POSBERGH ET AL.

political, and cultural power relations that reproduces dual discourses of Global South
girls and women as both disenfranchised and empowered. As we will later show, the con-
tentious balance of empowered/oppressed, neoliberalism, Western norms, and agency
holds true throughout Nike’s Caster Semenya advertisements.

Materials and methods

We limited our data to three Nike advertisements that featured Caster Semenya: “Just Do
It: Caster Semenya,” “Birthplace of Dreams,” and “Athlete in Progress.” We specifically
chose these three given the well-documented gendered, racial, cultural, and geopolitical
controversies that span Semenya’s running career and are especially underlined by colo-
nial and Western discourses (see Cooky & Dworkin, 2013; Henne & Pape, 2018; Karkazis
& Jordan-Young, 2018; Posbergh & Clevenger, 2022; Schultz, 2011). Concurrently, there
is a substantial body of literature that demonstrates Nike’s universalization of neoliberal
postfeminist sensibilities within its “glocal” sport brand and marketing (Brice &
Andrews, 2019; Cole & Hribar, 1995; Giardina & Metz, 2005; Lafrance, 1998; Posbergh
et al., 2022; Stabile, 2000), as well as its engagement in “progressive capitalism” and phi-
lanthropic efforts (namely TGE) amidst questionable labor practices. As such, our goal
was to better understand how Nike incorporates postfeminist neoliberal discourses in
the representations of a popular Global South athlete under the backdrop of its progress-
ive commitments and TGE efforts.
We conducted a textual analysis to interpret the advertisements’ content, visuals,
music, and other processes that collectively construct representations of Semenya,
South Africa, and Global South girls and women (Wallace & Andrews, 2021). We note
that our interpretations reflect one particular reading of the advertisements, which are
shaped by our methodological positionalities and experiences with Nike’s marketing
campaign as researchers located in the Global North. From Markula and Silk (2011),
we understood textual analysis as an analytic method that interprets the meaning of
“texts” as located and contextualized within cultural, political, and/or social power for-
mations and relations (Markula & Silk, 2011). We sought to examine how Nike subtly
and overtly incorporates Western neoliberal ideologies relating to gender, race, and geo-
politics into its advertisements, ultimately articulating Semenya into the idealized post-
feminist neoliberal “Nike female athlete” (Cole & Hribar, 1995; Lafrance, 1998). While
iteratively watching the advertisements, we systematically coded each’s contents into sep-
arate codebooks, including visual or audio elements such as transcribed relevant dialo-
gue, visual cues, music choices or changes, and lighting. From our developed codes,
we then drew connections across the advertisements to generate three broad themes,
which we discuss in the following sections.

Results
“That’s too bad, because I was born to do this”: individualism and neoliberal
postfeminism
Rather than reimagine cultural or societal norms, Nike instead focuses on the individual’s
(specifically, Semenya’s) ability to overcome cultural, social, and political barriers
 CRITICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA COMMUNICATION 83

through spoken and visual representations of willpower. To do so, Nike draws from
elements of neoliberalism and postfeminism, which are closely related across three
levels (Gill & Scharff, 2013): (1) the focus on the individual as independent from cultural,
political, and social pressures; (2) self-regulation and agency; and (3) the centrality of
women within calls of self-management, self-discipline, and self-reinvention. Taken
together, and considering the deep entrenchment of patriarchal expectations in sport
and society, “could it be that neoliberalism is always gendered, and that women are con-
structed as its ideal subjects?” (Gill & Scharff, 2013, p. 7).
Consider Nike’s “Just Do It: Caster Semenya.” Initially, a young girl is shown running
outside in the early morning before quickly transitioning to Semenya competing on a
track in a white Nike t-shirt with a “SEMENYA” racing bib. Over the cheering crowd,
an announcer cries, “And here’s Semenya … she’s breaking away, she’s going for some-
thing special!” The camera zooms in on Semenya’s Nike running spikes as the video
slows down, before moving in reverse. This reversal “undoes” Semenya’s achievements
through removing a medal from her neck and the darkening of flashing cameras sur-
rounding Semenya, then moves backwards through her life: a teenage girl, running at
sunrise; a young girl with a wide smile on her face, initially running ahead of her
friends, but falling farther behind until she is in the crowd and no longer smiling; a
baby, walking backwards from her grandmother’s arms, until she falls on the ground.
Semenya’s voice is heard over these slow-motion clips asking a series of rhetorical ques-
tions relating to publicized criticisms of her body and competitive performances: “would
it be easier if I wasn’t fast enough?”, “will you be more comfortable if I was less proud?”,
and “would you prefer I hadn’t worked so hard, or just didn’t run, or chose a different
sport?” The advertisement goes dark as Semenya’s voice is heard, stating, “that’s too
bad because I was born to do this.” Suddenly, light shines on a young girl’s face as she
points her head upwards, smiling, and eyes closed. Overlaying this image, the announcer
from the beginning of the advertisement is heard yelling, “Semenya takes the win!” The
advertisement then closes with “When you’re born to do it … Just do it” in white font
over a black background.
While the multiple criticisms surrounding and shaping Semenya’s career, body and
identity are briefly included, once the light shines on the young girl’s face, all challenges
seem to disappear. Semenya was born to do this and, at every life stage, Semenya’s resi-
lience drives her success and allows her to overcome all (institutional, cultural) barriers.
By focusing on individual characteristics such as willpower and determination, Nike
suggests that systemic barriers are conquerable, so long as the empowered individual
is devoted, evoking the possibility of becoming a TGE “can-do” girl (Mohanty, 1984).
Indeed, the linguistic structure of each rhetorical question (“would it be easier if I
hadn’t worked so hard?”) and statement (“that’s too bad, because I was born to do
this”) reifies the centrality of individualism as “I” is consistently the clear, primary
subject, in contrast to an unspecific audience.
Likewise, neoliberal postfeminist discourses persist throughout “Birthplace of
Dreams,” which was released exclusively in South Africa and is characterized as a
short film, given its longer length and more biographical script. Filmed in Ga-Masehlong,
a small village outside of Polokwane in South Africa, one of the poorest parts of Africa
and Semenya’s hometown, images of the town’s dirt roads, broken and tattered buildings,
and rusty chain-link fences are shown throughout the video’s beginning. Semenya soon
84 A. POSBERGH ET AL.

appears and walks through the town as the camera follows her. She begins to describe her
experiences growing up in this “dusty place,” commenting, “even if you’re coming from a
dusty place like this, you can be whoever you want.” After expressing her gratitude for
“growing up in this village,” she remarks, “I knew that I loved sports and I knew that
sport will get me where I wanted.” Looking at the empty buildings, Semenya notes, “I
didn’t know how I am going to get there, but I knew that by following my heart, I’ll
get there.”
The sharp contrast between the images of Ga-Masehlong and Semenya’s descriptions
of her tenacity reflect Koffman et al.’s (2015) remarks around the power of TGE imagery
as they note, “the contrast between girls’ powerlessness and their potential is highlighted
and used as a rhetorical device across policy documents, campaign materials, and media
texts” (p. 160). While the village surrounding Semenya reflects and represents poverty
(thereby bearing hints of “poverty porn”), Semenya continues to smile and underscore
how her resilience and talents carried her to success. The triumph of Semenya’s will-
power is made clear, as she later remarks, “you may have all those resources, but what
I have is that power within me to defeat.” This subsequently reinforces the idea that
women–regardless of their circumstances–have the agency and control over determining
their (sporting) success.

“When I grow up, I want to be like Caster”: imposing white, Western gender
norms
To add authenticity in its “storytelling” method, Nike incorporates elements of South
African culture (e.g. language, dress) and geography throughout its three advertise-
ments. Their engagement, however, remains largely surface-level amidst the predomi-
nant focus on neoliberal, Western values such as responsibilitization, competitive
individualism, and empowerment (Posbergh et al., 2022). The superficiality of Nike’s
depictions of Semenya also persists into the circulated representations of Western fem-
ininity and norms in subtle, multiple ways throughout its advertisements (e.g. apparel,
behaviors, values). In effect, its advertisements reflect a glocalized neoliberal and com-
modified “feminism à la Nike” that deracializes and de-contextualizes the represented
women by framing them according to white postfeminist signifiers rooted in the geo-
political context of the U.S. corporate marketing (Cole & Hribar, 1995, p. 349). Mélisse
Lafrance (1998) has described the development of Nike’s women-focused advertise-
ments as “colonizing the female body” (p. 117). This description is particularly apt
in Nike’s Semenya-focused advertisements as the embodiment of these white,
Western norms on, in, and through the featured South African women, including
Semenya, reflect Nike’s broader reinforcement of neoliberal postfeminist ideals. In
other words, Nike repackages and retains the characterization of (Nike) women as
both in control of their own destiny and having a “fit, disciplined, and contained
body” (Giardina & Metz, 2005, p. 74). Correspondingly, there lacks a challenging of
the institutional and cultural norms that especially affect Global South women and,
in Caster Semenya’s case, prevent acceptance or even inclusion in the women’s category
(Cooky & Dworkin, 2013; Schultz, 2011).
As Nike molds Semenya and other South African women to fit their universal (body)
ideal for women, the company ultimately fails to account for the “unique struggles of
 CRITICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA COMMUNICATION 85

non-white, non-U.S., and non-middle-class women” (Posbergh et al., 2022, p. 3).

Through its attempts to universalize “Nike women,” Nike overlooks the sociocultural
and regional differences that inhibit such a ubiquitous reality to instead, create an
ideal “Nike woman” who is based upon Western, middle-class, and white norms (Giar-
dina & Metz, 2005). Although Semenya adheres to this female caricature in these adver-
tisements, she is concurrently presented as a role model for future and current (South
African) women athletes. Put differently, the white, Western, and neoliberal values
that shape Semenya are depicted as desirable for Global South girls and young
women. The advertisements inculcate Western (gendered) ideologies onto a Global
South athlete to ostensibly create a “can-do” girl and, effectively, deracialize and erase
the more complex realities that constitute their experiences.2
Consider, for example, the advertisement “Athlete in Progress.” With high energy
electronic music in the background, the advertisement centers primarily on
Semenya, who is shown running around a track in her bright blue Nike “OFF-
WHITE” long-sleeve and leggings. A timer infrequently flashes across the screen
throughout the advertisement, starting at 00:00:00 and ending at 1:54:25.3 Inter-
spersed with Semenya’s run around the track are short clips of other South
African women engaging in physical activity in the city. At 1:21:67, Semenya is
shown leaving the track to join the other South African women as they run
through the streets before returning to the track. During the transition from track
to streets, brief clips show a woman–possibly Semenya–twirling around in a long
white skirt over her bright blue leggings: an image seen multiple times, albeit very
briefly, throughout the advertisement.
While much of the advertisement shows Semenya and other South African women
running and engaging in physical activity, the brief clips of them in skirts stand out
amidst other depictions of athleticism. As in the case of the woman (potentially
Semenya) twirling in the long white skirt, Nike invokes a juxtaposed message of athletic
female empowerment and adherence to traditional (i.e. white and Western-centered)
femininity standards. The skirt itself, which projects an image of Western femininity,
is also white: a color that is both representative of purity and traditionally a woman’s
wedding dress color in Western culture (Stewart, 2011). More specifically, this white
skirt is representative of white femininity norms constitutive of U.S. societal gender
ideologies (Krane, 2001; Schultz, 2014). As with previous efforts to publicly feminize
Semenya (see Magubane, 2014; Nyong’o, 2010), Nike both “position[s] itself such that
it can rewrite the young woman’s history, as well as that of her entire culture” and “effec-
tively marks her as … a tolerated Other, an individual who will finally be taken into the
arms of America because she is finally playing by white America’s rules” (Lafrance, 1998,
p. 13). Put differently, rather than overtly remaking Semenya as “a new American,” Nike
inserts neoliberal, white American rules into South African culture to create a Wester-
nized representation of South Africa.
The intersections of the color white/whiteness, Global North ideologies, and rep-
resentations of South Africa also appear in “Birthplace of Dreams.” Near the end of
the advertisement, Semenya is seen coaching several young girls at a track, all of
which are shown wearing white t-shirts or tank-tops, emblazoned with Nike swooshes.
Their outfits are mirrored by Semenya’s outfit, all of which sharply contrast with the
dirt track and dusty surroundings. This visual distinction between clean, white Nike
86 A. POSBERGH ET AL.

clothes and dirty, dusty surroundings subtly reinforce racial, colonial, geopolitical
stereotypes and hierarchies, ultimately manifesting in a veneration of Western
norms. While there remain superficial inclusions of South African culture, these
facets merely operate to maintain Nike’s glocal sport brand (Andrews, 2008; Silk &
Andrews, 2001).

“You may be poor, but you’re not poor up here”: a “can do” hero for “at-risk”
girls
Repeated clips of Semenya engaging with or leading young South African girls and
women underlines Nike’s primary message: through willpower and by embracing
Western (neoliberal postfeminist) characteristics, you too can be like Semenya. This
combined focus on individual characteristics and imposition of Western values in
Nike’s advertisements ultimately manifests in the creation and maintenance of a
“hero” narrative, which Capon and Helstein (2005) have described within Nike’s politics
of representation of female athletes as a way to idolize Western traits such as individual
agency, empowerment, and determination. In the context of sport, the construction of
the “hero,” particularly in advertising narratives, reinforces dominant notions of white,
Western-based masculinity and femininity (Butterworth, 2007).
Indeed, this has been a Nike strategy for its sponsored athletes who do not ascribe
to normative (white, Western, male) social identities as they are distanced from nega-
tive stereotypes to fit within the dominant racial, geographic, and gendered expec-
tations (Andrews et al., 1996; Capon & Helstein, 2005; Mocarski & Billings, 2014).
Consequently, Nike creates a narrative that both rewrites history and rewrites the
future. In Semenya, Nike repackages and globalizes Western forms of femininity
and individualism to create and commodify the story of a Global South woman
who excels because of her willpower despite multiple cultural and institutional
barriers.
For example, at the beginning of “Birthplace of Dreams,” the camera spans over a
dried-up field as Semenya’s voice states, “all dreams come from here: they come from
the dust.” The camera quickly shifts to two brief clips of Ga-Maselong—a bird flying
over trees at sunset and worn-down stadium seats at an empty track—before showing
Semenya walking in the dried-up field. During these short clips, Semenya remarks,
“You dream it, and then you do it. There are a lot of opportunities out there.” The
camera then quickly to Semenya in a Nike polo during the day, looking at a different
camera and pointing towards her head as she comments, “You may be poor, but you
are not poor up here even if you’re coming from a dusty place.”
The specific geopolitical challenges faced by South African girls and women are vital to
legitimizing Nike’s “hero” narrative for Semenya. Under the backdrop of Semenya’s
Global South hometown, the juxtaposed framing of her as a “hero” with the oppressed
status of the girls and women supports the narrative of a (Westernized) Global South
“hero.” Importantly, these dual characterizations echo TGE efforts by reinforcing the
representation of Global South girls and women as both disenfranchised and empowered.
Put differently, given that Semenya is able to overcome these barriers and find inter-
national success through individual strength and empowerment, all girls and women
can triumph, regardless of race, class, or geopolitics.
 CRITICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA COMMUNICATION 87

Discussion and concluding remarks

By framing Global South athletes of color using particular Western-centric discourses of
neoliberal feminist empowerment, these three Nike advertisements do little to reimagine
the cultural, systemic, and “increasingly exclusive and inaccessible nature of sports” that
help explain the different sporting experiences of women around the world (Lafrance,
1998, p. 125). The problem is not only that the advertisements impose Western-
centric gender ideals onto the featured non-Western women: they neoliberalize their sub-
jectivities, decontextualize their culturally- and geopolitically-specific experiences, and
present neoliberal ideals of feminine empowerment in ways that buttress Eurocentric
capitalist production. Through their use of Semenya and other South African women
as universal signifiers of individual empowerment, “history is replaced by surrogate-
ideology” and “Nike’s historical revisionism ostensibly erase[s] the oppression and the
multitudinous concrete systemic violences” (Lafrance, 1998, p. 130). In this sense,
such corporate marketing strategies serve to “colonize local cultures,” and imbue the
bodies and images of those cultures with Western neoliberal attributes, in this case
under the backdrop of TGE (Thompson & Arsel, 2004, p. 631). As Nike’s framing and
sponsoring of Semenya has become one key aspect of its broader corporate goal of pre-
senting itself as a purveyor of progressivism and globality (considering Semenya’s global
celebrity status and familiarity with consumers around the world), the result is another
example of the continued colonization and objectification of a non-Western athlete of
color for the purposes of circulating a Western corporation’s carefully crafted and
superficially progressive messaging.
By exposing and critiquing the ways in which one corporate marketing strategy colo-
nized and coopted non-Western and Global South subjectivities for the purposes of max-
imizing the corporation’s global consumer reach, the article points to the need for
research and strategies on how representations of non-Western and Global South celeb-
rity figures such as Caster Semenya can be, to use the terms of decolonial thinking, “de-
linked” from the rhetoric of Western, capitalist modernity (Mignolo, 2007). More specifi-
cally, our aim was to deconstruct the supposed universality of the neoliberal postfeminist
messages that Nike strategically encoded and deployed within their Semenya advertise-
ments, exposing what decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo (2002) terms the “geopolitics of
knowledge” in the advertisement’s messaging. In other words, the advertisements relied
on and reproduced ideals that are not universal, but always geographically, culturally,
politically, and economically situated and contingent. To present those ideals as universal
is to hide their contextually specificities, their necessarily inapplicability when related to
the different contexts of diverse groups of women, and their deployment by the corpor-
ation as tools to maintain and expand their profitable consumer reach.
Therefore, and given the global mutability and resilience of neoliberal postfeminist
ideals in the twenty-first century, there remains a need to better understand how
researchers, especially those studying sporting contexts, can highlight how figures such
as Semenya can or already are presenting themselves in ways that complicate or partially
disconnect their subjectivities from the limiting categories and naturalized rhetoric of
Western, capitalist modernity. It means that there are multiple, interrelated fronts that
sport researchers should continue to vigilantly study, namely, the ways in which corpor-
ations such as Nike mis-appropriate and exploit the identities of women around the
88 A. POSBERGH ET AL.

world, and how meaning and presentation of those groups can be de-linked from the cor-
poration’s intensifying pursuit of capital through the expansion of global consumerism.

Notes
1. In using the terms “Global North/South,” we echo Koffman and Gill (2013) in that these
binary characterizations “serve only to attempt to speak of a world characterised by
massive geographically patterned injustice and inequality,” rather than as a reductive
description (p. 85).
2. For a more robust explanation of our theory of colonialism and power, see Posbergh & Cle-
venger, 2022.
3. 1:54:25 is Semenya’s personal best in the 800-meter run.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the reviewers and editors for strengthening this article through their con-
structive and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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