Be who you are and be proud: Brittney Griner, intersectional invisibility and digital possibilities for lesbian sporting celebrity

Abstract

This article examines current professional basketball player, Brittney Griner, and the ways in which her personal and athletic lives are represented on social media. In particular, her visibility and posts on her public Instagram account allow for a consideration of the digital possibilities for social change by lesbian sporting celebrities. This analysis interrogates these possibilities through a close reading of several Instagram posts regarding Griner’s romantic relationship with fellow basketball star, Glory Johnson. This article ultimately argues that Griner’s Instagram profile helps challenge the intersectional invisibility of Black lesbian sporting celebrities and discusses the implications of this visibility for similarly positioned LGB youth.

Keywords:

• Lesbian
• black
• celebrity
• sport
• Instagram
• digital culture

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Olu Jenzen, Lakesia Johnson, Anne Michelle Mitchell and the two anonymous reviewers for important feedback and support on the preparation of this manuscript. Any errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Megan Chawansky is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton in the School of Sport and Service Management. Her academic work has appeared in the following journals: Sociology of Sport, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, Sport in Society and International Review for the Sociology of Sport.

Notes

1. Since the first draft of this manuscript was submitted for review (16 May 2015), the romantic relationship between Griner and Johnson has ended. The two were married in Arizona on 8 May 2015, and their wedding was featured in a New York Times article shortly thereafter (see Reinhart, 2015). Reinhart (2015) chronicles their relationship, discusses their recent arrests for domestic violence and includes references to their future aspirations, which involved having children. On 5 June 2015, Johnson took to Instagram to announce that she was pregnant and supplied the tag: #WelcomeToTheJohnsonGrinerFamily, effectively implying that this news would be greeted positively by Griner and Johnson. On 6 June 2015, it was reported that Griner had filed for an annulment of their marriage, effectively seeking to document their marriage as null and void. This annulment request was denied, and the case is proceeding as a ‘dissolution of the marriage with minor children’ with the next court date set for 23 September 2015 (Voepel, 2015). The break-up of the Johnson–Griner marriage invariably led to the erasure (from their personal accounts) of many Instagram photos featuring the two women together as a couple. Nevertheless, screenshots of many images of the two still exist online and can be accessed through a basic search on google of ‘Griner and Johnson images’. I suggest that the current status of their relationship invariably impacts, but it does not negate, the central argument of this paper which is that this imagery can be read as a form of digital activism in that it challenges the invisibility of Black lesbian athletes.

2. The use of the term ‘lesbian’ within this article is contentious insofar as Johnson has stated that she is not a lesbian (Reinhart, 2015). Therefore, I avoid using this term when referring to Johnson, but I do refer to her relationship with Griner as being a lesbian relationship. In using this term, I mean to suggest that they are two women involved in an intimate relationship. While this tension around identification and categories is worthy of further analysis, and does reference questions about lesbian identify for Black women in particular, a thorough discussion of the politics and tensions of LGB identification and terminology is beyond the scope of this essay. See Bowleg et al., 2004, 2008 .

3. I use the term troll to refer to someone who seeks to instigate conflict on social media platforms. This is sometimes equated with online harassment or abuse.

4. A term adopted by some Black lesbians who embrace a more masculine or gender-neutral aesthetic. I have used this term and did not locate it among the terminology utilised by Griner to define herself. See Lane-Steele (2011) for more on black female lesbian masculinity and Moore (2006) for discussions of gender expression in Black lesbian communities.

5. I put ‘publicly’ in quotations to indicate the tensions around the publication declaration assigned to Griner. Griner asserted that she did not feel a formal announcement about her sexuality was warranted as she has been open about her lesbian sexuality. However, SI.com released a video wherein Griner speaks of coming out, and this generated a separate news story. For more analysis of this, see Fagan (2013).

6. GLAAD is a US NGO that works on issues related to LGBT rights, mainly as they relate to media. Originally, GLAAD was an acronym that stood for ‘Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation’, though now, the organisation seeks to be more inclusive in its work.