Constructions of Australia’s sportswomen: ‘Race’, ‘whiteness’ and contemporary media

ABSTRACT

Sports media are significant to the construction and representation of sports cultures and sporting bodies. They function as public pedagogies that frame knowledge and learning negotiated within and beyond physical education (PE) lessons. In this capacity public pedagogies of sports media inform young people’s understandings of themselves and others, including in terms of the intersectionality of gender, ‘whiteness’, and race amongst other social/cultural relationships. Within the (post)-colonial Australian context, we are interested in ways online sports media construct understandings about females, ‘race’ and ‘whiteness’. ‘White’ male athletes occupy under-examined positions of privilege within discourses of sport. As the norm ‘white’ male athletes require no definition, whilst female and/or non-white athletes are constituted through discourses of sport. In this paper we draw on intersectionality and Foucault’s theorisation of subjectivity together with multimodal analysis to explore media coverage of three women’s sporting phenomena. Our cases include Australia’s Matildas football team, Australian Football League Women (AFLW) and Suncorp Super Netball. Our specific focus is how discourses together with visual images do pedagogical work. We conclude in challenging PE educators to work with their students in critically exploring public pedagogies of sports media.

KEYWORDS:

• Public pedagogies
• sports media
• intersectionality
• race
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Matildas are Australia’s national female football (soccer) team, AFLW is the newly initiated elite Australian Rules football league for females, and Suncorp Super Netball is the new elite Australian netball competition.