Olympic Women and the Media

Olympic Women and the Media

Global Culture and Sport Series Editors: Stephen Wagg and David Andrews Titles include: Roger Levermore and Aaron Beacom (editors) SPORT AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT Pirkko Markula (editor) OLYMPIC WOMEN AND THE MEDIA International Perspectives Global Culture and Sport Series Standing Order ISBN 978 0 230 57818 0 hardback 978 0 230 57819 7 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Olympic Women and the Media International Perspectives Edited By Pirkko Markula University of Alberta, Canada

Selection and editorial matter Pirkko Markula 2009 Individual chapters their respective authors 2009 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-22284-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-30845-3 ISBN 978-0-230-23394-2 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230233942 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors vii viii 1 Introduction 1 Pirkko Markula 2 Reading Media Texts in Women s Sport: Critical Discourse Analysis and Foucauldian Discourse Analysis 30 Judy Liao and Pirkko Markula 3 Opening up the Gendered Gaze: Sport Media Representations of Women, National Identity and Racialised Gaze in Canada 50 Margaret MacNeill 4 From Iron Girl to Sexy Goddess : An Analysis of the Chinese Media 70 Ping Wu 5 Acceptable Bodies : Deconstructing the Finnish Media Coverage of the 2004 Olympic Games 87 Pirkko Markula 6 Double Trouble: Kelly Holmes, Intersectionality and Unstable Narratives of Olympic Heroism in the British Media 112 Laura Hills and Eileen Kennedy 7 Different Shades of Orange? Media Representations of Dutch Women Medallists 132 Agnes Elling and Roelien Luijt 8 Winning Space in Sport: The Olympics in the New Zealand Sports Media 150 Toni Bruce v

vi Contents 9 Heroes, Sisters and Beauties: Korean Printed Media Representation of Sport Women in the 2004 Olympics 168 Eunha Koh 10 An Analysis of Amaya Valdemoro s Portrayal in a Spanish Newspaper during Athens 2004 185 Montserrat Martin 11 The Media as an Authorising Practice of Femininity: Swiss Newspaper Coverage of Karin Thürig s Bronze Medal Performance in Road Cycling 214 Natalie Barker-Ruchti 12 Reproducing Olympic Authenticity: Representations of 2004 Olympic Portraits of US Athletes to Watch 232 Nancy Spencer Index 257

Acknowledgements I would like to warmly thank all the contributors whose work has made publishing this book possible. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the Department of Education at the University of Bath as well as the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta, for providing the necessary academic support for me to edit this book. I would also like to thank Nancy Spencer for providing invaluable professional advice and support during the process of completing this book and Judy Liao for her substantial help in the final editing. Finally, I would like extend special thanks to Jim Denison without whose personal and intellectual support it would have been impossible to complete this book. vii

Notes on the Contributors Natalie Barker-Ruchti is a researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Exercise and Health Sciences at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her research interests include the coach-female athlete relationship, athlete experiences and identity, and women as sport coaches. She has used Michel Foucault s work along with feminist theories and concepts to investigate these themes. Natalie is currently working on two projects: one examines social integration and sport; the other explores the experiences of sports coaches in Switzerland. Toni Bruce is a senior lecturer in Sport and Leisure Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research interests focus on gender, national identity, race and ethnicity, particularly as these are expressed in the sports media and thought about by sports journalists. A former news and sports reporter, her PhD research (1995, University of Illinois) investigated women sports writers experiences reporting on male sport. She has co-edited the Waikato Journal of Education for six years and is on the editorial board for the International Review for the Sociology of Sport. She has published in a wide range of sport and communication journals and is co-editor of Outstanding: Research about New Zealand Women in Sport (2008), with Camilla Obel and Shona Thompson. Agnes Elling is senior researcher at the W. J. H. Mulier Institute, centre for research on sports in society in the Netherlands. She conducted several studies into in/exclusionary mechanisms in (media) sports with respect to gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Her theoretical and methodological perspectives and approaches are rather eclectic, ranging from discourse analyses to large quantitative studies, though mainly with a social critical touch. Laura Hills is a lecturer in youth sport/sociology of sport at Brunel University. She came to Brunel from University of Durham, where she was the course leader for their Sport, Health and Exercise degree. Her research and teaching centres on gender, physicality, community sport, sports culture and social identities. Her recent publications have focused on social and embodied aspects of girls physical education experiences viii

Notes on the Contributors ix and gender, class, ethnicity and body in mediated sport. She co-authored Sport, Media, and Society (Berg) with Eileen Kennedy and, as a US citizen living in the UK, sustains an interest in cross-cultural comparisons of mediated sport. She is also working on a project investigating mixed gender sport with the Football Association. Eileen Kennedy is Director of the Centre for Scientific and Cultural Research in Sport in the School of Human and Life Sciences at Roehampton University, London. She has a background in Philosophy (BA, University of Essex) and Women s Studies (MA, University of Kent) and gained her PhD in Sociology of Sport from De Montfort University for her thesis, Gender in Televised Sport. Since then, her research and publications have focused on the intersections of nation, class and race in the discursive construction of masculinities and femininities in the sport and exercise media. Eileen is interested in the significance of the body and the senses in the consumption of media sport, and has begun to focus on the mediation of sport through sporting spaces and digital sportscapes. She is co-author, with Laura Hills, of Sport, Media and Society (published by Berg, in press). Eunha Koh is a senior researcher at the Department of Policy Research and Development, Korea Institute of Sport Science, South Korea. Her research interests include nationalism and globalisation in sport, gender and sport, and national/international sport policies/politics. She is an Extended Board Member of the International Sociology of Sport Association and serving on government advisory boards in South Korea, including Gender Equality Board (Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism) and the Advisory Board for Human Rights in Sport (National Human Rights Commission). Judy Liao is currently a PhD student in the sociocultural studies of sport and physical activity at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include poststructuralist analysis of women s sport, specifically women s basketball, cultural analysis of media and psychoanalytical theories. Roelien Luijt is a sports researcher and a sports journalist. She worked as a researcher at the W. J. H. Mulier Institute Institute for Social Scientific Research in Sports before she started her own company, ZEAL Sport & Media. Her research interests include mediated sports, women s

x Notes on the Contributors sports, elite sports and lifestyle sports. During the Olympic Games in Beijing (2008), she worked as a copy editor. She edited the Olympic news special of nu.nl, the largest news website in The Netherlands. Recently she established SHEsports.nl, a Dutch news website about, for and by sportswomen. Margaret MacNeill is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Physical Education and Health at the University of Toronto, is cross-appointed to the Faculty of Medicine and is a Fellow of the American Association of Kinesiology and PE. She is affiliated with the Canadian Centre for Sport Policy Studies, serves as a research advisor to the Ontario PE and Health Education Association, and is the former Director of the Centre for Girls and Women s Health and Physical Activity Research. Key areas of research include sport media studies, Olympic ethnographies, youth and physical activity, gender and health mediacy, health risk communication, and communication for social change. Currently, she is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her work has been published in the Journal of International Communication, International Journal of Sport History, Olympika, Journal of Urban Health, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Studies in Physical Culture and Tourism, Sociology of Sport Journal, Brazilian Journal of Sport Sciences, and Media and Culture Reviews. Pirkko Markula is Professor of Socio-cultural Studies of Sport and Physical Activity at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include poststructuralist feminist analysis of dance, exercise and sport, ethnography, autoethnography and performance ethnography. She is the co-author, with Richard Pringle, of Foucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self (2006), editor of Feminist Sport Studies: Sharing Joy, Sharing Pain (2005), co-editor, with Sarah Riley, Maree Burns, Hannah Frith and Sally Wiggins, of Critical Bodies: Representations, Identities and Practices of Weight and Body Management (2007) and co-editor, with Jim Denison, of Moving Writing: Crafting Movement in Sport Research (2003). Montserrat Martin is currently a lecturer of Sociology of Sport in Physical Activity and Sport Sciences degree at Vic University, Catalonia. Her main research interests include writing narratives and performance texts of women s experiences in team-contact sport, specifically rugby

Notes on the Contributors xi and basketball. She follows sexual difference feminism, which is grounded in poststructuralist feminist theories. Nancy E. Spencer is an Associate Professor in the School of Human Movement, Sport and Leisure Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Her research interests include autoethnography, critical race theories, feminist and poststructuralist analyses in the making of celebrity in professional women s tennis. She has published research articles in the Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Sociology of Sport Journal, Journal of Sport Management and Sport Marketing Quarterly. She also published a chapter about Venus Williams in D. L. Andrews and S. J. Jackson Sport Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity (2001). Spencer is Past-President of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS), and served on the editorial board for the Sociology of Sport Journal. Ping Wu is a senior lecturer in sports journalism and media at the University of Bedfordshire. She was a professional sports journalist in China between 1997 and 2003 and covered many international sports events, including the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, the 2002 Men s Soccer World Cup and the 2002 Pusan Asian Games. In July 2007, Ping was awarded a PhD for her research on the complex relationship between the news media and sports administrative organisations in contemporary China. Her research interest is sport and media, specifically the sociology of mediated sports production. She has published in a range of books and journals on the interdependence between sport and the media, media treatment of women s sport and female athletes, the media build-up to the Beijing Olympic Games and the Chinese elite sports system.