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Nike, a US-headquartered transnational corporation lauded for its putatively empowering women-centered advertisements, frequently releases nationally/regionally focused advertisements depicting women determinedly engaging in physical activity and, in doing so, overcoming gendered barriers and stigmas. Indeed, the global ubiquity of the empowered (Nike-clad) woman illustrates Nike’s role in advancing women’s empowerment, both in the US and globally. Universalizing “just do it” beyond geographical borders, Nike’s form of transnational feminism centers on a carefully manufactured, Western-centered image of empowered female athleticism. However, this notably contradicts transnational feminist efforts to reject the universalization of Western-centered representations of women. Using a critical cultural studies approach in concert with a transnational feminist framework, we analyze six recent Nike advertisements (the United States, Mexico, the Middle East, Turkey, India, and Russia) and critique the corporation’s universalization of neoliberal postfeminist messaging within its global marketing strategies. We find that Nike utilizes three thematics to extend their caricature of the (Nike-powered) female athlete beyond the spatial and symbolic borders of the US market: responsibilitization, competitive individualism, and empowerment. We conclude that Nike normalizes a white, Western-centered neoliberal postfeminism, undermining the structural and sporting realities of the non-white/non-Western women their promotional campaigning seeks to embolden.

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This commentary highlights a recent trend of anthropocentrism (a focus on human-centered interests and activities) in the media coverage in the United States and Europe on the disruption of the contemporary sports industry caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors argued that the coverage promotes anthropocentric narratives by framing the pandemic as an external force causing a temporary and unforeseen “hiatus” in the sports industry. As a result, media consumers learn about human interest stories associated with consumer demand and industry adaptation: stories that renormalize, rather than question, the sports industry in its current and hegemonic form. Such media discourses bypass an opportunity to consider the longstanding entanglements of human and nonhuman actors in sporting contexts, rethink sport through environmental and nonhuman perspectives, and, ultimately, advance more progressive, democratic politics. The commentary employs a posthumanist lens to critique the recent anthropocentric media coverage, highlighting the ways in which it reproduces the dualist logic of neoliberal capitalism and deflects attention to the human and nonhuman relations that have always existed in contexts of sport and human physicality.

Recent renewed discussions of the garden city as a "developmental model for the present and foreseeable future" (Stern, Fishman, & Tilove, 2013) have prompted us to reflect upon its endurance as an agent of spatial and urban reform. Looking to extend the established garden city literature, we argue the history of Ebenezer Howard's community model should be reexamined as a cultural history of body and environmental politics. In this commentary, we explicate how Howard's garden city model served as a spatial vehicle for installing the biopolitical agendas of Victorian reformers keen to "civilize" working class bodies in the service of British industrial and imperial power. This entails a brief examination of the biopolitical dimensions of garden city history, keying on the prescribed restructuring of urban life and the concomitant "regeneration" of working class bodies within and through garden city designs. Our aim is to challenge scholars, planners, and policymakers of the garden city present, to consider the ways the garden city was historically planned to reproduce the cultural, spatial, and biopolitical relations of Western capitalism.

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