TY - JOUR
T1 - Women's sport and media : a call to critical arms
AU - Rowe, David
AU - Prates Silva, Kelen Katia
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - After many years of struggle, women's sport is experiencing an upsurge around the world. This advance means, given the co-dependent relationship between sport and media, greater coverage of women's sport. These are positive developments regarding gender equality, especially given the socio-cultural power of the "media sports cultural complex". It is important, though, not to exaggerate the institutional success of women's sport and media that has begun from a low base and encounters continued resistance. Improvements are also globally uneven, being more evident among relatively affluent, culturally advantaged communities, especially in the West, with compounding intersectional disadvantage for women in poorer, racialized and religiously oppressive contexts. Where successes have been achieved, they should be subject to the same kind of critical scepticism applying to wider sport and media-related issues such as the environment, "sportswashing", sport diplomacy, capitalist exploitation, and challenges to sport's traditional binary gender order. This article, while noting an increase in feminist media research and scholarship applied to sport, argues that it is still under-represented in communication and media studies. It constitutes a call to this field for greater analytically reflexive attention to an area of popular culture that consumes enormous media space in a critical cultural-political moment.
AB - After many years of struggle, women's sport is experiencing an upsurge around the world. This advance means, given the co-dependent relationship between sport and media, greater coverage of women's sport. These are positive developments regarding gender equality, especially given the socio-cultural power of the "media sports cultural complex". It is important, though, not to exaggerate the institutional success of women's sport and media that has begun from a low base and encounters continued resistance. Improvements are also globally uneven, being more evident among relatively affluent, culturally advantaged communities, especially in the West, with compounding intersectional disadvantage for women in poorer, racialized and religiously oppressive contexts. Where successes have been achieved, they should be subject to the same kind of critical scepticism applying to wider sport and media-related issues such as the environment, "sportswashing", sport diplomacy, capitalist exploitation, and challenges to sport's traditional binary gender order. This article, while noting an increase in feminist media research and scholarship applied to sport, argues that it is still under-represented in communication and media studies. It constitutes a call to this field for greater analytically reflexive attention to an area of popular culture that consumes enormous media space in a critical cultural-political moment.
UR - https://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:70302
U2 - 10.1080/14680777.2023.2201663
DO - 10.1080/14680777.2023.2201663
M3 - Article
SN - 1471-5902
SN - 1468-0777
VL - 23
SP - 729
EP - 733
JO - Feminist Media Studies
JF - Feminist Media Studies
IS - 2
ER -