Sexism Re-Loaded … or Sexism Re-Presented?

Abstract

If part of the project of a feminist media studies is to explore the various ways in which sexism operates through the media, then how might this be achieved? Any answer to this question will depend upon how the concept of “sexism” is understood. Much existing research has tended to approach sexism as an etic, analyst-driven phenomenon; that is, as something to be defined by the analyst during the study of media representations that may be sexist, but that are very rarely about sexism. In this article, however, attention is given to the hitherto largely unexplored idea of sexism as an emic, participant-driven phenomenon that gets defined within media representations that are, very directly, about incidents of sexism. Newspaper reports of an incident of sexist behaviour in the world of English Premier League football are analysed for the ways in which they re-presented complaints about that behaviour. Developing the concept of “irrelevant precision,” this article shows that and how those re-presentations worked to undermine the legitimacy of the complaints and, by implication, the idea that anything sexist had taken place. The article concludes with a discussion of how this concept contributes to the project of a feminist media studies.

Keywords:

• media
• press
• sexism
• representations
• irrelevant precision

Notes

1. In a twist to this, a story that could, with the appropriate political underpinnings, be read as something of a “deserved-decline-and-fall,” it is interesting to note just days after losing their jobs with Sky Sports, Gray and Keys were signed to TalkSport radio, as the co-hosts of a new football show. As TalkSport programme director Moz Dee noted at the time, the signing of these “two iconic broadcasters who have a wealth of experience in the world of sport” represented “a sensational coup.” As this article unfolds, it will be for the reader to judge whether or not this “twist” still seems at all “twist-like.”

2. This approach to discourse treats the “factual-ness” of something like a “complaint” as a practical rhetorical accomplishment. It has developed out of various perspectives, including ethnomethodology (see Frederick Attenborough 2011a, 2011b), and discursive psychology (see Katie MacMillan & Derek Edwards 1999). Instead of presuming that formal linguistic categories and structures (syntax, morphology, etc.) provide the essential framework for explicating what people are seeking to do with their words, it starts by looking at what those words are and the rhetorical context in which they are deployed. The rationale here is that most performative, constructive discourse phenomena cut across formal, well-defined grammatical categories. The approach is also indifferent to questions of why journalists write in the ways they do. This is not to deny the importance of the world outside the text, simply to accept the importance of explicating how texts “do” representing the world outside the text. Big-picture-explanatory-factors—like “sexism”—only become relevant insofar as they are invoked within a text.