Lindsey J. Meân

“I Would Just Like to be Known as an Athlete”: Managing Hegemony, Femininity, and Heterosexuality in Female Sport

The community of sport is a powerful site for the construction of masculinity, male identities, and heterosexuality. Consequently, the increased entry of women into the sporting arena has been actively resisted, with women athletes either excluded or framed within traditional, sexualized discourses of femininity and heterosexuality. Yet Title IX and increased female participation have been used to suggest that women have achieved sporting empowerment. Thus, elite, professional female athletes provide an interesting position from which to explore the discourses available for womens construction of athletic identities. Using critical discourse analysis with an emphasis on rhetorical and discursive analysis (Potter, 1996), we analyzed 20 interviews with professional female athletes with a particular interest in exploring the problematic nature of performing female identities given the limited hegemonic forms and resources offered by a predominant and powerful male discourse. Analysis revealed limited ways to construct female athleticism that involved complex and contradictory gender work, including the problematic construction of female athleticism through the deployment of hegemonic discourses that framed ordinary women as nonsporting. Our findings suggest that women athletes remain at the peripheries of the community of sport.

‘I don't think I can catch it’: women, confidence and responsibility in football coach education

Whilst womens participation in sport continues to increase, their presence remains ideologically challenging given the significance of sport for the construction of gendered identities. As a hegmonically masculine institution, leadership roles across sport remain male‐dominated and the entry of women into positions of authority (such as coaching) routinely contested. But in powerful male‐typed sports, like football, womens participation remains particularly challenging. Consequently, constructions of gender inequity in coaching were explored at a regional division of the English Football Association through unstructured interviews and coaching course observation. Using critical discourse analysis we identified the consistent re/production of women as unconfident in their own skills and abilities, and the framing of women themselves as responsible for the gendered inequities in football coaching. Women were thereby strategically positioned as deservedly on the periphery of the football category, whilst the organization was positioned as progressive and liberal.

Sport, Language, and Culture: Issues and Intersections

This article introduces a special issue on sport, language, and culture.We briefly outline the individual, social, and cultural significance of sport, asserting it as an important site for scholarly theory and research. But sport is a dynamic site that occurs across multiple levels (individuals, teams, organizations, locales, cultures, and nations). We argue that language, representations, and other discursive practices are pivotal for the construction and enactment of sport across these multiple levels. Of the many interconnections and intersections of sport, language, and culture, we further contend that identities and media are crucial; and it is these that provide a resonating link between the articles that comprise the special issue.

The Making of an Epic (American) Hero Fighting for Justice: Commodification, Consumption, and Intertextuality in the Floyd Landis Defense Campaign:

This article considers how American cyclist Floyd Landis is commodified, or produced and reproduced (hereafter “re/produced”), for consumption through the multiple texts of his mediated campaign to fight doping allegations, a campaign that emphasized digital media. Critical discourse analysis revealed several intertextually related narratives deployed for consumption by fans and supporters, narratives that commodified Landis in a variety of complex and interrelated ways. The overriding self-referential narrative across the defense campaign texts commodified Landis as the epic (American) hero fighting for justice against insurmountable odds, institutional forces, and foreign conspiracies, yet remaining grounded, accessible, and available for consumption by fans and supporters. It is suggested here that the effective consumption of Landis’s campaign is partly due to features of digital media that render it a powerful site for guiding interpretations and for performing identities in ways that directly re/ produce users and fans as part of the promotional cycle. Equally, using digital media simultaneously enacted other key discourses (such as justice and democratization) mobilized in the campaign.

The 99ers: Celebrating the Mythological

In this paper, The 99ers from the espn Nine for IX series is analyzed as a sport documentary. The 99ers focuses on the highly mythologized US women’s team victory at the 1999 fifa Women’s World Cup. Celebrating the “cultural touchstone” that “irrevocably changed the face of women’s athletics,” the documentary also claims to question the “legacy” of the team and to examine “how women’s soccer, and women’s sport as a whole, has changed” (“Nine for IX,” 2013). The celebratory motif is explicit in the documentary, (re)producing the mythology of this event as a great American achievement that changed the face of women’s sport. Yet the film (re)presents the players within familiar narratives and framings of heteronormative femininity, (re)producing their success within an overarching narrative of feminized team heroic accounted for through exceptionality. Ultimately The 99ers fails to examine the mythology or the ways in which women’s sport has progressed, but it also fails to change the way women in sport media are examined.

Situating Sport, Language, and Culture as a Site for Intellectual Discussion

The articles in this special issue provide an opportunity to illustrate how the domain of “sport, language, and culture” can become a burgeoning site for future intellectual discussion. We extend this discussion by offering frameworks that (a) suggestively characterize how these articles collectively speak to issues of sport, language, and culture and (b) provide a template for the future development of transdisciplinary theory and research. The special issue provides a unique opportunity to appropriately illustrate how diversity in intellectual perspective and disciplinary approach is necessary for productively creating a unified domain of scholarly interest.

Discourses, discursive processes, intertextuality, and identities

The focus on the shared processes of racialization presented by Van Sterkenburg and Knoppers is timely. Given the nature of power and the prevalence of sport, a focus on the shared and intersected processes of discursive action across levels and contexts offers a functional way to move beyond data that is otherwise situated and contextbound. Discourses rely on the subtle and not so subtle deployment of other intersected discourses that together function to construct and deploy (or put into action) an intricate and integrated pattern of meanings and narratives that, in turn, produce and reproduce knowledge and social categories (a cyclical process hereafter termed re/production). Similarly, these re/produce local and wider forms of power and privilege related to the identities embedded in the discursive formations enacted. But a focus on process requires a more thorough consideration of what is involved and that it is action and achievement-oriented; that is, process involves the invoking, deployment, and achievement of discourses as they are put into discursive action. Two elements overlooked by Van Sterkenburg and Knoppers are central to this process of discursive action and usefully account for the interconnectivity across the levels of analysis: identities and intertextuality. However, it is also important to realize that sport can be usefully viewed as a powerful ideological site, as an intersected formation that is comprised of multiple intersected locations and contexts that deploy many shared, intertextually connected discursive formations. Thus sport comprises both a broad site and many sites, across and within which identities and intertextual referents for meaningmaking are powerfully constructed (Meân 2001; Messner 1987, 1988; Shapiro 1989; Wenner 1991, 1994). Sport’s wider formation as an intersected site effectively facilitates analysis across levels and despite different contexts, remembering that these are not structures per se but discursive formations achieved by people as they enact or perform their identities (Cameron 1998; Potter 1996). This is significant because these inextricably intersected discursive formations of sport simultaneously construct and are constructed by prominent fundamental and naturalized social identities or categories and their definitions, such as race, gender, and hetero/ sexuality.

Gendered Nations: Media Representations of the Men’s and Women’s US–Mexico Soccer Rivalry

This chapter explores and compares mainstream news and sport media constructions of the men’s and women’s US–Mexico soccer rivalry. Sport is a powerful site for the construction of nation and gender. But as a prominently masculine site there are substantive differences in the ways men’s and women’s sport gets taken up “as nation”, (re)produced as rivals, and framed within the mediated narratives of sport as they intersect with the wider and longstanding geopolitical history of US–Mexico relations.

Bicultural Stress, Soccer, and Rivalry: How Mexican–Americans Experience the Soccer Competition Between Their Two Countries

This chapter considers the influence and effects of acculturation, bicultural stress and identity issues among US-born Mexican–Americans in regards to soccer. Sports are often a major reason people take pride in their culture. But what happens when someone identifies with two cultures that are rivals in the world’s most popular sport? Using in-depth interviews of US-born Mexican–Americans, and informed by social identity theory, related processes of social categorization and the more recent emphasis on the discursive construction of identities and categories, this chapter addresses how Mexican-Americans may be positioned to choose one identity or allegiance over another and how they mitigate the attendant bicultural stress that accompanies such decisions.