Exploring new media and sport through a gendered lens : enabling possibilities and/or reproducing inequities for women?

The research undertaken for this chapter illuminates the complexities associated with new media's liberating effects. New media platforms provide sportswomen with a powerful context in which they can construct themselves as empowered subjects. By creating and controlling their public image, female athletes are challenging gendered, heterosexual and other entrenched norms. It is also the case that sport media gatekeepers, including mainstream sports journalists, exhibiting exclusionary gendered practices are increasingly circumvented. Critical case studies have illuminated how women sports journalists and fans are navigating sport media norms through building digital communities in ways which construct women's sport in more inclusive, nuanced and empowering ways. However, it is also the case that new media platforms are digital spaces through which gendered, racial, heteronormative and other normative discourses are strengthened and reproduced. Virtual maltreatment is thriving, in part enabled through the ubiquity of new media. Female athletes and sports journalists continue to bear the brunt of these negative effects. Accordingly, future scholarship should further illuminate and explore new media's complex and nuanced effects across a range of new and developing social media platforms. Policy, advocacy and formalised practices redressing these negative effects should be prioritised with examples of good practice supported.