Since the 1990s, the image of the naked female body has become an increasingly important and common cultural motif that has engendered much scholarship. Focusing on the Powerade advertisement, which featured a now celebrated image of the naked Rebecca Romero, astride her racing bicycle, this article seeks to explore the cultural significance of this image for contemporary concepts of femininity. The analysis explores how overtly the Romero image seems to suggest the liberation and empowerment of women, in line with other representations of many other sporting females. However, while celebrating female empowerment, the image seems also to qualify and even to deny it through the re-sexualisation of Romero. The article examines how this re-sexualisation is achieved.
