Women, sport and globalisation : competing discourses of sexuality and nation

Both sport and the associated images of sporting bodies that are routinely packaged for the consumption of international audiences are heavily gendered. However, academic analyses of the trend to global sport have rarely considered the situation of women, and their relationships as participants or consumers to sport and its imagery. Women’s sporting contests almost never receive the media coverage required to enter the national, let alone the global, sporting marketplaces; consequently, women and their sports are rendered marginal. But women occupy complex, often contradictory, positions in the global media–sport nexus that require investigation in relation to the sports they play and the dominant images of the media. It is some of these issues that this article investigates. Using the media coverage of the Australian Tennis Open as a touchstone, the article explores the contradictory ways in which women players were represented and “packaged” for the consumption of the Australian audiences.