Dr Erin Whiteside
Associate professor of Journalism & Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee. Her research examines sports media practices and texts including how industry norms shape the coverage of women’s sports as well as the experiences of women in sports media.
Twitter: @erinwhiteside
Section 2: Media Coverage & Representation
- Twitter conversations on Indian female athletes in Tokyo
- ”Unity in Diversity” – The varying media representations of female Olympic athletes
- The Olympic Channel: insights on its distinctive role in Tokyo 2020
- How do we truly interpret the Tokyo Olympic ratings?
- Between sexualization and de-sexualization: the representation of female athletes in Tokyo 2020
- Reshaping the Olympics media coverage through innovation
- An Olympic utopia: separating politics and sport. Primary notes after analyzing the opening ceremony media coverage of mainstream Spanish sport newspapers
- What place is this? Tokyo’s made-for-television Olympics
- The paradox of the parade of nations: A South Korean network’s coverage of the opening ceremony at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
- Tokyo 2021: the TV Olympics
- “The gender-equal games” vs “The IOC is failing black women”: narratives of progress and failure of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
- Ghana: Poor local organizing, and absence of football team dampens interest
- Megan Rapinoe: The scary Bear for many Americans?
- ‘A Games like no other’: The demise of FTA live Olympic sport?
- Temporality of emotionalizing athletes
- Fandom and digital media during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games: A Brazilian perspective using @TimeBrasil Twitter data
- Media wins medal for coverage of athletes as people, instead of entertainers
- Media frames and the ‘humanity’ of athletes
- Reporting at a distance. Stricter working conditions and demands on sports journalists during the Olympics
- New Olympic sports: the mediatization of action sports through the Olympic Games 2020 Tokyo
- Simone Biles, journalistic authority, and the ideology of sports news
- Representations of gender in the live broadcast of the Tokyo Olympics
- Americans on ideological left more engaged in Summer Olympics
- Nigeria: Olympic Games a mystery for rural dwellers in Lagos
- National hierarchy in Israeli Olympic discourses
- Equestrian sports in media through hundred Olympic years. A roundtrip from focus to shade and back again?
- Reshaping the superhuman to the super ordinary: The Tokyo Paralympics in Australian broadcasting media
- Is the Paralympic Games a second-class event?
- The fleeting nature of an Olympic meme: Virality and IOC TV rights
- Tokyo 2020: A look through the screen of Brazilian television
- Is the Paralympic Games a second-class event?
- How digital content creators are shaping meanings about world class para-athletes
- How digital content creators are shaping meanings about world class para-athletes
- The male and female sports journalists divide on the Twittersphere during Tokyo 2020
- Super heroes among us: A brief discussion of using the superhero genre to promote Paralympic Games and athletes
- “Everything seemed very complicated”: Journalist experiences of covering the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games
- Representing high performance: Brazilian sports journalists and mass communication professionals discuss their philosophies on producing progressive Paralympic coverage
- Representations of gender in media coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games
Publicly demonstrating support for women has become increasingly prominent in a variety of contexts, with sports serving as one of the most visible platforms for those declarations. Indeed, prior to the Games, the International Olympic Committee updated its portrayal guidelines for broadcasters, urging them to “steer all Olympic sports and their rights holders toward ‘gender-equal and fair’ broadcasts of their events.” And then there was NBC’s promotion of the Olympics, which revolved heavily around Simone Biles — holding her up not just as a great female athlete, but as one spot dramatically announced: “the greatest of all time.” During NBC’s broadcast, there were countless examples of the type of coverage long called for by feminist sports scholars. When track phenom Athing Mu hit the final straightaway during the women’s 800m final and separated from her competitors in a feat of speed and strength, announcers did the race justice, injecting further excitement into the broadcast, when one shouted into the mic, “[N}ow the superstar is the best in the world!”
These examples, and the overall visible presence of women in much of the United States’ coverage during the Olympics beg the question: Is sports media taking a feminist turn? What are we to make of what appears to be positives steps forward?
Feminist media scholar Rosalind Gill has noted the rise of seemingly feminist discourses in the media, and has documented how such discourses are “uneven,” and marked by an “entanglement” of both feminist and anti-feminist narratives that define what she calls a postfeminist media culture. Among the postfeminist patterns she has observed over the past decade is the way that meeting a normative feminine aesthetic is now situated as “fun,” and a form of “self care,” while the actual labor enacted by women through these forms of self-surveillance is, importantly, “never disclosed.” By keeping that labor hidden, the disciplining process also remains out of view, and the maintenance of normative gender norms thus remain obscured by the seemingly feminist narratives of empowerment.
Returning to the Olympics coverage, the Games include a number of sports that have the potential to enact forms of normative femininity, including gymnastics, beach volleyball, diving, and artistic swimming. They are non-contact, showcase athletic traits associated with femininity such as flexibility, balance and precision, and importantly, include uniforms that are understood in the context of women’s sexualization. In order to break the boundaries of a postfeminist media culture, we must be allowed to see the athleticism of these particular sports in ways that depart from their perceived “beauty” and the related effortless, fun context in which these sports are often cast. Which brings me to an example that I believe accomplished that call. Writing for The New York Times, author Gillian Brassil took on the topic of artistic swimming in a piece accompanied by an array of images depicting what many typically think of when it comes to artistic swimming. Among them was a Twitter post by @usaartisticswimming that included an image of a swimmer soaring above her teammates while completing a perfect split in a shimmering silver swimsuit with text calling it “the most difficult lift in history.” Brassil’s accompanying writing makes visible the work that goes into executing such a lift by showing how the “beauty” of the swimmers smiling and having fun above the water, appearing to effortlessly complete their maneuvers, is only accomplished through an “ugly” kind of athletic labor below it. In doing so, she recasts the sport as “brutal” by describing the furious kicking and dangerous landing techniques that happen out of view, all of which contribute to a high rate of concussions in the sport. She shows the danger of artistic swimming, ultimately calling on health officials to include the sport along with football and sliding sports in their research addressing head injuries.
I call her descriptions “ugly” not as pejorative, but because of their sharp departure from the visible “beauty” of the sport that is so often showcased in coverage. Ultimately, that ugliness is beautiful in that is an important and necessary component for the continual feminist progress of women’s sports coverage. Declarations from NBC and other prominent sports media personalities about the accomplishments of women athletes are a significant step forward. The next is to understand their athleticism in ways this disrupt commonsense understandings of gender. Coverage like Brassil’s story, which destabilizes the narratives of “beauty” that are produced through coverage of this so-called feminine sport, is one such way to accomplish that task.
