Representing sporting female discourse in social media – Taiwan women’s basketball Facebook page ‘Double Pump’ as an example

ABSTRACT

This study is focus on the construction of sporting female discourse through social media platform, which is exclusive for women’s basketball, and to explore the meaning and practices of resisting or reproducing the gendered discourse through this social media platform. The media texts include ‘Double Pump’ posts from March 2014 to December 2016, and the interviewees were the four operators of ‘Double Pump’. The posts mostly emphasized on athletic performance and the training process the players had been through. Moreover, it was found the content of posts rarely contained terms with gender stereotype, but demonstrate the aggressive and masculine of female players. In conclusion, DP utilizes the social media and personal gender ideologies to produce reports without gender stereotype and practice the resistance towards gendered discourse that pervasive in media and sport cultural.

KEYWORDS:

• Empowerment
• social media
• gender awareness
• masculine
• women’s sports

Acknowledgement

This project received funding from Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST 105-2628-H-002-005-).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.