Women's sport and media : a call to critical arms

David Rowe, Kelen Katia Prates Silva

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)729-733
Number of pages5
JournalFeminist Media Studies
Volume23
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Open Access - Access Right Statement

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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