Confronting the female athlete paradox with humor and irony: a thematic analysis of SoccerGrlProbs YouTube video content (original) (raw)
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Women, Sport and New Media Technologies
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" You Go Girl! " : Twitter and Conversations About Sport Culture and Gender
On August 5, 2014, the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association (NBA) made history by hiring Becky Hammon as the first full-time, paid assistant coach in mainstream North American sport. Ham-mon's hiring provided an impetus to examine how Twitter opened avenues for discussions around gender in sport culture to generate and permeate. Using Radian6 social media extraction software a sample of 1,434 tweets were obtained. A thematic analysis was conducted and revealed three themes: (a) opening the space for conversation; (b) offering evidence of sport cultural change; and (c) expressing resistance to sport cultural change. The results suggest that Twitter functions as a space where aspects of sport culture are disseminated and contested in ways that transcend traditional media's treatment of these topics. As people share content that is personally meaningful and relevant and participate in shared conversations about sport cultural issues, it invites them to engage in active citizenry through joining in these discussions.
Sportswowmen in the media - focus on football
The aim of this article is the presentation and interpretation of the coverage of female football players in the largest German Boulevard Paper during the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Main issues are the ways in which the players are portrayed and women’s football is “framed”. In addition, there will be a focus on the self-presentations of the players and on their reactions to the mediated messages and images. Drawing on constructivist approaches to gender, playing football is considered as a gender performance, staged by the players and presented as well as interpreted by the media. A content analysis of BILD showed that the game and the players were “gendered”, meaning that their femininity was emphasized. In addition, the paper published texts and images with a focus on erotic and sexuality. Some of the footballers complied with these strategies; others rejected any sexualisation with the argument: “We want to market our sport, not our looks”.
Speaking Up and Speaking Out: Collective Voice in Women’s Sports Media
Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), 2022
This qualitative textual analysis considers "voice" in a new sports media platform Just Women's Sports. Using communicative injustice and collective voice as its theoretical framework, this study considers whose voices are represented in women's sports media and how those voices are represented. The unique position of Just Women's Sports as a news outlet independent from mixed-gender sports media outlets and funded by venture capital investments makes it an interesting case study to consider new avenues in sports media production. The findings of this study indicate that Just Women's Sports's voice consists of diverse women who promote an inclusive and activist community. Furthermore, this study provides a theoretical intervention in the study of women's sports media by introducing communicative injustice as an informative theoretical lens.
Acta Universitatis Carolinae. Kinanthropologica, 2021
Social media platforms allow athletes to share information with the public. This opportunity is arguably more important for female athletes who traditionally receive less space in the mainstream media than their male counterparts. This article focuses on the social media self-presentation of six successful, internationally recognized, professional Czech female athletes and their fans' reactions. By using qualitative and quantitative content analyses, it was revealed that throughout the season, the selected athletes presented themselves as powerful professionals, while their off-season posting tended to be more personal and, for the most part, more feminine. Contrary to previous research, fans did not frequently respond with explicitly sexual or negative comments. Moreover, they supported and admired the athletes, and in most cases, reacted positively. A higher sensitivity was indicated in relation to the sportswomen's personal relationships and opinions. This leads us to the conclusion that social media enables professional female athletes to present themselves more freely than traditional media and be positively received by the public.
“Dribbling” the hegemonic media: alternative press in the propagation of women’s soccer
Intercom: Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação
This paper analyzes how alternative digital media proposes new ways of processing information and allows greater visibility to marginalized topics by the hegemonic press, rearranging meanings with mass media and consumers. The research is centered on women’s soccer, a subject that has historically received little attention from traditional Brazilian sports journalism, and its object study is the Dibradoras, a blog created in 2015 by a group of women whose aim is to expose gender inequalities in sports. The corpus is composed of 696 units published by Dibradoras on Twitter, between June 7 and July 7 of 2019, coinciding with the beginning and end of the Women’s World Cup in France. As a result, it is possible to suggest the empowering of an alternative media channel which amplifies the voice of the participants and promotes counter-hegemonic forms of visibility in women’s soccer.
Soccer & Society
2017 was a significant year for women's football in the Netherlands. The Dutch women's team won the Women's European Champions football (WEURO 2017) for the first time in history. The screenings of their matches attracted massive audiences. This article explores the meanings given to gender and sport and the impact of WEURO 2017 by turning to two women pioneers in the field of elite women's football and the sports media complex. We not only study how these women negotiate and experience the impact and meanings given to WEURO 2017 but we also explore how their narrativesprovide insights in the wider meanings given to (the development of) women's football in the Netherlands. Results show, amongst other things, how an increased popularity and attention for women's football from the part of the media goes together with a reproduction of hegemonic discourses that prioritize emphasized femininity and construct men's football as normative.
Social media and the construction of female athletes' identities online.
There are so many niche groups for one to focus on when looking at the development of a sense of self as an ongoing project, but this essay studies how two female athletes and one sports journalist use online spaces in their identity construction. First I will briefly outline the backgrounds of my participants, including how they make use of different kinds of media to inform the construction of their identities as well as their own experiences. Then I will make reference to theory and other forms of research to identify common themes amongst the participant’s responses, as well as provide an analysis of their use of online spaces. Finally, I will link their responses to a conclusion relating to their lives as sportspeople.
Internet Sport Bloggers: Who Are These People and Where Do They Come From?
Journal of Sport Administration & Supervision
Little is known of Internet sport bloggers, who increasingly are becoming important cogs in sport journalism. In this phenomenology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with highly prominent sport bloggers. All were recorded, transcribed, and coded. A total of five dominant themes emerged from the data that focused on the shared experiences and learned attitudes toward Internet sport journalism. Overall, these themes showed sport bloggers were highly educated and very happy with their jobs, had a wide array of past work experiences that often had little to no relation with blogging or sport journalism, consider their jobs too varied to fall under one title, primarily work from home, and rarely attend sporting events they write about.