Toward a typology for negotiating layered identities: An oppositional discourse analysis of girls’ youth sport

ABSTRACT

This study documents how participants in an all-female youth sport organization negotiate oppositional discourses of identity. Employing Fairhurst and Putnam’s (2019) integrative method of organizational discourse analysis, the findings revealed hegemonic and alternative discourses related to gender (i.e., boys and girls are different; boys and girls are the same), which influenced how participants negotiated a nested feminine-athletic identity and nested identity discourses. Finally, this study offers a typology for how members negotiated oppositional nested and higher-order identities through (a) fleeing, (b) challenging, (c) constricting, and (d) expanding. Practical implications for how these oppositional discourses affect participation in life enrichment groups are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Nested identity
• oppositional discourse analysis
• identity management
• paradox

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Alaina C. Zanin (Ph.D., University of Oklahoma) is an assistant professor of organizational and health communication at Arizona State University.

Emilee T. Shearer (M.A., Minnesota State University, Mankato) is a doctoral student in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.

Laura V. Martinez (M.A., California State University, Fullerton) is a doctoral student in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.

Notes

1 Historically, these stereotypical characteristics have been associated with white femininity (McIntosh, 2019), whereas other research has established that women of color may experience different gender stereotypes and a layering of stereotypes associated with gender, race, and ethnicity (e.g., Lopez, 2019). For example, Jerald, Ward, Moss, Thomas, and Fletcher (2017) found that Black college students reproduced traditional gender ideologies (i.e., white femininity) and stereotypes associated with Black women (i.e., sexualized, aggressive, angry, strong) with increased media exposure.

2 Throughout the data collection, we found that the youth and parent participants did not articulate an awareness of gender plurality and/or transidentities, even though we allowed participants space to articulate and describe their own and other’s gender in these ways. Therefore, the data collected pertaining to sex and gender often reified binary sex-gender ideologies (Lorber, 1993). We presented these ideologies in the findings section to reveal the participants’ pre-existing beliefs, values, and knowledge.

3 Although there is a linguistic difference between sex terms (i.e., male, female, intersex, etc.) and gender terms (i.e., man, woman, boy, girl, trans, etc.; Lorber, 1993), participants of the study conflated the varying terms within their talk of the similarities and differences of boys and girls in sport. Therefore, we presented the findings in a manner consistent with the discourse of the participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by ASU Global Sport Institute (Internal Seed Grant).