Skating on White ice: the US media’s representation of Asian/American and Asian female skaters from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s

Abstract

This article examines how some in the American media covered the emergence of Asian and Asian American athletes in the historically White-dominated sport of figure skating. Utilizing McDonald and Birrell’s Reading Sport Critically approach, we analyzed a variety of major national newspapers, news magazines, sports magazines and periodicals to determine what narratives and beliefs were conveyed to explain the successes of Asian and Asian/American skaters, and the subsequent decline of American skaters. Our results show that some American media members struggled in describing this phenomenon, in that they utilized an essentialist racial lens and viewed the sport as a White space that was experiencing an ‘Asian Invasion’. The findings of this paper add to the race and gender discrimination in sport literature by describing the process that a historically dominant power group (Whites) employed as Asian and Asian American figure skaters started to dominate their White space.

Keywords:

• Figure ­skating
• Whiteness
• sexism
• Yellow/oriental profiling
• multiculturalism

Acknowledgement

This article contains modified sections from Jae Chul Seo’s dissertation work. The full dissertation, entitled ‘Yellow Pacific on White ice: Transnational, postcolonial and genealogical reading of Asian American and Asian female figure skaters in the US media’, is available through The University of Iowa’s Institutional Repository – Iowa Research Online.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.