"Shredding" the Love: A Feminist Political Economy Critique of Gendered Lifestyle Branding

This manuscript takes the controversy over Burton's Love snowboard, which featured Playboy Playmates, as a case study for understanding contemporary practices of gendered lifestyle branding in alternative sport. I employ a feminist political economic critique of the Love as a form of gendered branding that constructs the Burton brand as a platform for action, inviting male riders to construct authentic and countercultural identities and female riders to construct empowered postfeminist identities. Drawing on scholarship on the sexual objectification of women in alternative sports media, I argue protests against the board focused only on the board's representations and failed to account for new branding strategies that relegitimate how sex sells at the present conjuncture and missed opportunities to build coalitions against sexism within the snowboarding industry.