Cheryl Cooky

Silence, Sports Bras, And Wrestling Porn Women in Televised Sports News and Highlights Shows

This study of televised sports news on three network affiliates and ESPN’s SportsCenter extends and expands on earlier studies in 1990 and 1994 to examine the quality and quantity of televised coverage of women’s sports.The dominant finding over the decade spanned by the three studies is the lack of change. Women’s sports are still “missing in action” on the nightly news, and are even less visible on SportsCenter. Textual analysis revealed some change over the decade, but mostly showed continued gender asymmetries in televised sports news and highlight shows: (a) the choice to devote a considerable proportion of the already-thin coverage of women’s sports to humorous feature stories on nonserious women’s sports, and (b) the (often humorous) sexual objectification of athlete women and nonathlete women. The authors conclude with a discussion of how and why television has continued to cautiously follow, rather than lead or promote, the growth in girls’ and women’s sports.

Women Play Sport, But Not on TV A Longitudinal Study of Televised News Media

One of the long-standing trends in research on gender in sports media is the lack of coverage of women’s sport and the lack of respectful, serious coverage of women’s sport. In this article, we critically interrogate the assumption that the media simply provide fans with what they “want to see” (i.e., men’s sports). Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, we examine 6 weeks of the televised news media coverage on the local news affiliates in Los Angeles (KABC, KNBC, and KCBS) and on a nationally broadcast sports news and highlight show, ESPN’s SportsCenter. Part of an ongoing longitudinal study, the findings demonstrate that the coverage of women’s sport is the lowest ever. We argue that the amount of coverage of women’s sports and the quality of that coverage illustrates the ways in which the news media build audiences for men’s sport while silencing and marginalizing women’s sport. Moreover, the overall lack of coverage of women’s sport, despite the tremendous increased participation of girls and women in sport at the high school, collegiate, and professional level, conveys a message to audiences that sport continues to be by, for, and about men.

“It’s Dude Time!” A Quarter Century of Excluding Women’s Sports in Televised News and Highlight Shows

The last quarter century has seen a dramatic movement of girls and women into sport, but this social change is reflected unevenly in sports media. This study, a 5-year update to a 25-year longitudinal study, indicates that the quantity of coverage of women’s sports in televised sports news and highlights shows remains dismally low. Even more so than in past iterations of this study, the lion’s share of coverage is given to the “big three” of men’s pro and college football, basketball, and baseball. The study reveals some qualitative changes over time, including a decline in the once-common tendency to present women as sexualized objects of humor replaced by a tendency to view women athletes in their roles as mothers. The analysis highlights a stark contrast between the exciting, amplified delivery of stories about men’s sports, and the often dull, matter-of-fact delivery of women’s sports stories. The article ends with suggestions for three policy changes that would move TV sports news and highlights shows toward greater gender equity and fairness.

“Girls Just Aren't Interested”: The Social Construction of Interest in Girls' Sport:

Given the significant increase in the number of women and girls participating in sport, it is now a commonly held belief that girls have ample opportunities to participate in sport and, consequently, that girls who do not participate choose to do so because they simply lack interest in sport. Using qualitative methodologies and the sociology of accounts, the author examines a recreational sport program for low-income minority girls in the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Applying Giddenss theory of structuration to emergent themes from participant observations and interviews, the findings illustrate how structures, as they are embodied through the everyday interactions of their participants, simultaneously constrain certain forms of agency while enabling other forms. This study advances sociologys disciplinary understanding of social construction by illustrating how social structure and cultural discourses interact in shaping everyday social interactions.

“What Makes a Woman a Woman?” Versus “Our First Lady of Sport”: A Comparative Analysis of the United States and the South African Media Coverage of Caster Semenya

Caster Semenya, a South African female track and field star from rural Limpopo South Africa, won the IAAF 2009 World Championships in the 800-meter event. She was then subjected to “gender-verification” testing. Media reports, especially in the United States, underscored that Semenya underwent gender-verification testing because of her “deep voice, muscular build, and rapid improvement in times.” Combining content and textual analysis, we conducted a comparative media analysis of the Caster Semenya controversy in the United States and the South African print news media. Results demonstrated that the United States print media coverage framed the controversy in terms of Semenya’s “true” sex, “medicalized” debates about sex testing, and discussed the limitations of medical assessment of male and female bodies in sport. In comparison, South African print media sources focused on human rights, nationalism, and “strategic essentialism” to frame Semenya as a “true” woman defending the nation against a perceived racist assault. We conclude the article with transformative visions of sport rooted in postcolonial feminism and critical feminist studies.

Sport, Sex Segregation, and Sex Testing: Critical Reflections on This Unjust Marriage

We extend appreciation to Karkazis, Jordan-Young, Davis, and Camporesi for their outstanding article. They argue that the legitimacy of the new policies on hyperandrogenism in elite female athletes can be questioned on several fronts, and we wholeheartedly agree. Here, we address several unexamined points in Karkazis and colleagues’ important and rigorous article. One major point is in reference to the authors’ statement that they disagree with the practice of sex testing, yet agree with the “continued division of athletics into male and female categories” (3). In this commentary, we reveal how sex testing cannot be disentangled from sex segregation. After all, arguments for sex segregation have historically justified the need to verify the sex of participants in female athletic competitions. In addition, sex segregation in sport is upheld and maintained through sex testing policies, which reinforce sex and gender injustice. (Cooky, Dycus, and Dworkin 2012). The authors therefore inadvertently reinforce gender injustice in sport. Sex testing is only one example of sex/gender discrimination in sport, and it is critical to contextualize the unjust nature of sex testing within the broader sociohistorical context of gender inequality in sport. One of the most central and coveted beliefs in sport is that of male physical superiority and female physical inferiority. Shoring up this categorical belief system in fact informed the institutional formation of sport at the turn of the 19th century (Burstyn 1999). Under rapidly shifting gender relations at the end of the 1800s, there were numerous changes in work and family relations for both women and men. That is, as more women entered the professional world, and as increasing numbers of women entered into college, medicine, and law schools, and given that women began to teach male children in the educational sphere, gender roles were in a state of rapid flux (Burstyn 1999; Messner 1997). Scholars point to how

Media Frames and Displacement of Blame in the Don Imus/Rutgers Women's Basketball Team Incident: Sincere Fictions and Frenetic Inactivity

Shock jock radio by its very nature involves the creation of spectacle through outrageous utterances that simultaneously reinforce and resist dominant norms (Nylund, 2007). Self-proclaimed media “bad boy” Don Imus referred to the Rutgers University Scarlett Knights, National Collegiate Athletic Association (N.C.A.A.) womens basketball championship runner-ups as “nappy headed hos” during an April 4, 2007, broadcast of his “Imus in the Morning” radio show, simulcast on MSNBC. Applying Foucaults concepts of sin and redemption to this media event, we explore dominant media frames of the Don Imus incident. We ask, “what do dominant media frames reveal about agendas of privilege and oppression in media discourse?” Textual and content analysis of national and regional U.S. newspapers explicates dominant media framings of the narratives of Imuss apology and his subsequent dismissal from radio and television. We discuss what these narratives reveal about media frames of the displacement of blame, sin, and redemption. We conclude that the Imus event and the subsequent assignation of blame operate to maintain “sincere fictions” that minimize racism in the larger culture, while amounting to what we call “frenetic inaction” around structural sources of social inequalities.

Success Without Honor Cultures of Silence and the Penn State Scandal

On November 5, 2011, Jerry Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator for football at Penn State University, was arrested on charges of abusing 8 boys over a 15-year period. In this paper, I strategically deploy feminist methodological considerations to “give voice” to marginalized groups, Foucault’s concept of discourse and discursive silences, and media framing analysis to interrogate silence as a means by which various forms of power and privilege operate in the scandal. I extend the discussion of silence to engage the critical sport studies’ critique of the “institutional center of sport” and examine what was left outside of the frame in the mainstream news media coverage. These silences within media frames rendered invisible an important critique of the contemporary culture of big time athletic programs. In this way, silence operated to simultaneously reaffirm the institutional power of big time athletic programs and the culture of sport wherein violence is normalized.

“From Fizzle to Sizzle!” Televised Sports News and the Production of Gender-Bland Sexism

This article draws upon data collected as part of a 25-year longitudinal analysis of televised coverage of women’s sports to provide a window into how sexism operates during a postfeminist sociohistorical moment. As the gender order has shifted to incorporate girls’ and women’s movement into the masculine realm of sports, coverage of women’s sports has shifted away from overtly denigrating coverage in 1989 to ostensibly respectful but lackluster coverage in 2014. To theorize this shift, we introduce the concept of “gender-bland sexism,” a contemporary gender framework that superficially extends the principles of merit to women in sports. Televised news and highlight shows frame women in uninspired ways, making women’s athletic accomplishments appear lackluster compared to those of men’s. Because this “bland” language normalizes a hierarchy between men’s and women’s sports while simultaneously avoiding charges of overt sexism, this article contributes to gender theory by illuminating how women can be marginalized in male-dominated, male-controlled settings via individualized merit-based assessments of talent.

Making Sports More Sporting

Sport may seem like a meritocracy, but scholars debunk, debate, and diagnose the boundaries that keep some on the sidelines, off the air, and out of the game all together.