‘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.