ABSTRACT
Introduction In 1999, Brandi Chastain ripped her shirt off to celebrate her successful shoot-out penalty kick, which secured the World Cup championship for her team, brought 90,000 fans in California’s Rose Bowl (and the 40 million watching at home) to their feet, and sent home a powerful Chinese squad. Chastain’s form of celebration is common on the pitch, so the response came as a surprise. She made the covers of Sports Illustrated (“YES!”) and Newsweek (“Girls Rule!”) and, more recently, of Jane Gottesman’s book Game Face: What Does a Female Athlete Look Like? and Jaime Schultz’s Qualifying Times.1 “It was a crowning moment for women everywhere, a moment of freedom, of liberation,” observed Marlene Bjornsrud, then general manager of Chastain’s professional team, the San Jose CyberRays. “It was casting off the burden of everything that kept us down and said, ‘You can’t do that because you are a woman.’ It was a moment that screamed, ‘Yes, I can.’ ”2
Not everyone saw the empowerment in Chastain’s action. Some saw inappropriate titillation, whereas others conspired it was a marketing ploy by the bra’s manufacturer, Nike. Sportswriter Jere Longman described it as “a sort of Rorschach test,” and scholar Mary Jo Kane rued how “it immediately got turned into ‘Brandi Chastain took her shirt off,’ rather than ‘what fabulous athletes these women are!’ ” Sales of sports bras skyrocketed and, according to one fashion analyst, the trend began of women wearing underwear as outerwear.3
