‘He is my strength and my shield’: the antinomies of Katie Taylor as female sporting celebrity in twenty-first-century Ireland

Abstract

This article examines various antinomic currents in Irish print and broadcast media representations of boxer Katie Taylor, Ireland's only London 2012 Olympic gold medallist. Despite her visibly combative physicality she was persistently constructed as a figure of cultural and gendered conservatism through repeated emphasis on her Christian faith and her relationship with and dependence on her coach/father Pete Taylor. The personal characteristics and cultural significance ascribed to her in Irish media also intersected intertextually with pervasive neoliberal themes of personal-as-corporeal discipline and individual responsibility in the context of severe economic austerity following the collapse of Ireland's ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom in 2008. It is argued that, despite her potential troubling or transgression of binary constructions of gender, the mediatized Taylor that emerged was neither an iconic embodiment of women's boxing as an assertion of female power and agency nor, as some Irish commentators claimed, an icon of Irish cultural conservatism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. However, the first death of a female boxer, Becky Zerlentes, in an officially sanctioned amateur match on 3 April 2005, was a reminder of the sport's potentially lethal outcomes.

^2. An Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) survey reported in 2004 that only 34% of female respondents had any sports involvement (Tony, Layte, and Gannon 2004, 16). While a more recent longitudinal study indicated that ‘the assertion that girls lose interest in sport as teenagers is only half-true. They lose interest in playing team sports’ (Lunn and Layte 2008, 38), the research revealed a notable antipathy to team, and particularly contact sports among girls.

^3. Other such instances include an interview with a player entitled ‘Confessions of a rugby star: I always put on make-up, fake tan and nail polish before a game’ (Irish Independent, March 22, 2013).

^4. Philip Nolan, for example, described her as the ‘poster girl for the sport's inclusion in the Games’ (Irish Daily Mail, March 9, 2013).

^5. See also Marie Crowe, ‘Success stories help to bridge the gender gap’, Sunday Independent, April 14, 2013; Gabrielle Monaghan, ‘I've been competing against boys since I was 8 years old …’, Irish Independent, February 13, 2013.

^6. For example, John O’ Brien, ‘A sacrifice shared in her drive to be the best she can be’, Sunday Independent, August 5, 2012; Vincent Hogan, ‘It's tough on a father, watching their daughter in there, getting punched’, Irish Independent, December 19, 2012.

^7. The Irish Independent, for example, opined that ‘Sofya now definitely deserved a thorough thumping after her trash-talk’ (August 10, 2012).

^8. Vincent Hogan referred to Taylor's semi-final opponent Mavzuna Chorieva's physical taunting as ‘physical trash talk’ (Belfast Telegraph, August 9, 2012).

^9. In 2009, an Irish Government Commission established that widespread abuse had taken place in, and been inadequately dealt with by various institutions run by Roman Catholic religious orders. See http://www.childabusecommission.com/rpt/.

^10. The King James Bible translation of the psalm is available to view at http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Psalms-Chapter-18/.

^11. In his quantitative survey of a range of national newspaper titles Julien Mercille (2015, 176) found that only 5–15% of articles opposed ‘fiscal consolidation’.

^12. In 2010, 15 politicians from various parties participated in the programme (Irish Independent, January 4, 2010). This discourse of ‘fat’ in the public sector intersected with the framing of obesity as an ‘epidemic’ in Irish medical and media discourse. See, for example, Health Service Executive (2008, 4).

^13. Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny's remark that ‘what happened in our country was that people simply went mad borrowing’ illustrates the shifting of blame from the financial sector to citizens cast as consumers (Irish Independent, January 26, 2012).

^14. Noting the criticism of the alleged ‘entitlement culture’ in Irish sport in a report on funding commissioned by the Irish Sports Council, Watterson later posited that it ‘spells out’ the ‘need to move […] towards a system of less fat and more medals’ (Irish Times, November 17, 2012).