Gender politics of social media: A case study of Megan Rapinoe (original) (raw)
2022, The Routledge Handbook of Gender Politics in Sport and Physical Activity
Throughout history, a small number of athletes have used their sporting status to engage in some form of social and political activism. Although this was often carried out by black male athletes protesting about racial injustice, women have also contributed to political and social activism, albeit with less coverage. In the twenty-first century, this activism has been aided by the introduction of social media, which provides athletes with a personal platform to control how they communicate with the wider public and media. In this chapter, we explore how social media platforms are being used for political and social activism through the case study of American soccer player Megan Rapinoe. The chapter discusses the paradoxes and privileges associated with her identity as a successful white woman actively engaging on social media platforms. It outlines the success of Rapinoe’s activism in propagating messages into the wider public discourse, aided through coverage from the mainstream media. Conversely, it also highlights that while much of her activism has been welcomed and encouraged, a contingent of responses found on her social media platforms contains a backlash, with some personal attacks targeted at her identity as an openly lesbian woman. The chapter concludes by acknowledging how high-profile athletes like Rapinoe are using social media as a space for political and social activism and, in doing so, help contribute towards rendering some form of progressive change in society.
Related papers
Social Media + Society, 2023
This article explores the role of social media in athlete activism and sport commodification through the case studies of two elite multiracial athletes who represent Japan, professional tennis player Naomi Osaka and professional basketball player Rui Hachimura. Osaka’s mother is Japanese and her father is Haitian-American, whereas Hachimura’s mother is Japanese and his father is Beninese. Employing critical discourse analysis of Twitter and Instagram, we ask: How do they use social media to amplify their voices and advocacy for race and ethnicity? How do their athlete activism and multiracial identity appeal to fans and sponsors? We argue that social media lend them various ways for resistance through defying monoracial labeling and racialized sport stereotypes, manifesting their multiracial identity, speaking up against social justice issues, and affiliating with certain sponsors. We demonstrate how their “silent activism” is subtle, situated in everyday life, and not antithetical to the commodification of their (athlete-activist) image.
This article examines current professional basketball player, Brittney Griner, and the ways in which her personal and athletic lives are represented on social media. In particular, her visibility and posts on her public Instagram account allow for a consideration of the digital possibilities for social change by lesbian sporting celebrities. This analysis interrogates these possibilities through a close reading of several Instagram posts regarding Griner’s romantic relationship with fellow basketball star, Glory Johnson. This article ultimately argues that Griner’s Instagram profile helps challenge the intersectional invisibility of Black lesbian sporting celebrities and discusses the implications of this visibility for similarly positioned LGB youth.
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.
In 2011 CeCe McDonald, an African-American transgender woman, was charged with murder for killing her attacker during a racist and transphobic assault in Minneapolis. After McDonald’s arrest, local queer communities organized an astounding level of support. This article examines the CeCe Support Committee as a case study for effective grassroots organizing that is fueled by and increasingly reliant upon social media for advancing social justice. An ethnographic approach reveals how the success of the Committee’s social media activism largely depended on traditional activist strategies. Because the group’s activism was based on unpaid labor and supported by numerous physical protests, the use of social media platforms enabled the Support Committee to challenge news media’s racialized framing of McDonald’s gender non-conformity as deceiving and threatening and exposed the state-sanctioned violence enacted against her. Therefore, I contend that the transformative political potential of social media activism is only possible when sustained by coordinated, “on-the-ground” activism offline. Moreover, this case study illustrates that intersecting oppressions do not simply disappear in online activism, but that those oppressions—particularly the centrality of whiteness in organizing—continue to constrain the actual material achievements of social media activism. For the CeCe Support Committee the convergence of on- and offline activism resulted in a raised public consciousness about the disposability of transgender lives, turning a national spotlight on the violence transgender people face.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.