“No wrong way to be a woman”: media coverage of Serena Williams as a mother

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study interrogates media representations of tennis player Serena Williams during the five-month period between her first official match and her first Grand Slam tournament after giving birth. Grounded in literature on coverage of Black athletes, athlete mothers, and Black mothers, a qualitative critical discourse analysis of news articles (n = 61) between December 17 and June 2018 shows that Williams received mostly positive media coverage upon her return to the professional tour. In contrast to previous representations of Williams as “Other” in tennis on account of her position as a Black woman, journalists afforded Williams some of the framing benefits usually exclusive to white athletes and mothers. This study advances academic literature on the intersections of race and gender in sport and (Black) athlete motherhood by demonstrating how motherhood has altered representations of Serena Williams’s race and gender in media coverage, subverting traditional representations of her Black female body but emphasizing hegemonic ideals of (white) motherhood.