Feminist Sport Research Articles

Sport pedagogy and feminism: what is known and what is missing? Findings from a scoping review

ABSTRACT Background Worldwide, to play sports is proclaimed a right. Yet its sexist practices insist on cultivating a hegemonic gender culture to keep ‘others’ away and deprive them from its potential educational benefits. Sport feminisms have been vocal on the gender oppressions operated in the field and have claimed pedagogy has a role to play in social transformation through a liberating education. Purpose We aimed at analyzing the academic production about sport pedagogy and feminism published in articles globally, to answer when, where how and by whom the studies were developed; what is known and what is missing. Method We conducted a scoping review searching for sport pedagogy and feminism and their related terms combined. Selection was delimited by studies informed by feminist approaches discussing sport pedagogy from recreational to elite level. Findings Our review covered 46 studies from the last three decades when Global North English-speaking countries have dominated the scene, both as investigation settings and authorship. Studies presented two main trends. The most substantial were investigations reporting gender inequalities, especially with women coaches; followed by others exploring pedagogical alternatives for more equitable sport experiences. Together, studies have demonstrated that the ‘patriarchal gender game’ is still on and the ‘deviants’ from the cis-hetero-white-able-bodied-male ideal continue to suffer systematic prejudice and discrimination in sport, inclusive through sexist coaching. But they also showed ‘the tactics of the equity gender game’ is counterattacking with pedagogical strategies to welcome girls, women and gender-diverse people in sport. Discussion Undoubtedly, the dialogues between sport pedagogy and feminisms have contributed greatly to challenge sexism through education, but the game is not over. The invisibility of black women, women with disabilities and queer people in studies evidenced the need for more intersectional approaches. Coach development initiatives should be critically examined and rethought. The predominance of studies and researchers from Global North English-speaking countries denoted that voices and knowledges from Global South are missing. More than empathizing with gender inequalities, we long to see feminist sport pedagogy engaging in the reinvention of the ways we learn, practice, teach and coach sport. More democratic, diverse and audacious research designs grounded in the commitment to guarantee sport as an educational experience for everyone seem promising ways to be explored.

‘Reimagining’ gender equality in media coverage?: feminist frameworks in European and Olympic portrayal guidelines

European entities (such as the European Union, European Commission, Council of Europe, and the European Broadcasting Union) published several reports between 2019 and 2022 that addressed gender representation in sports media. Drawing on multiple types of sources, including peer-reviewed research, the reports make recommendations for gender balance and gender equality in media coverage pertaining to national-level and international sports. This study analyzes four such documents to identify how research informs recommendations. First, the study examines citation practices in terms of authors’ location and data scope to observe that the guidelines draw primarily on research based in the United States, while omitting data from several regions of Europe. Then, guided by feminist storytelling as a framework, we analyse which feminist concepts circulate in media guidelines. The guidelines use systematic reviews to address gender inequalities in coverage, draw on intersectionality without specific references to theory, and recommend a gender-mainstreaming approach in production practice. We highlight studies that would address asymmetrical citation practices and epistemological gaps in portrayal guidelines and propose future directions for feminist sport media studies and sociology of sport research. A transnational feminist approach would be useful in avoiding universal recommendations while making connections between local particularities and global patterns.

Girl Power and Brand Power: Postfeminist Sensibility in News Coverage of Tokyo’s Girl “Prodigy” Skateboarders

This paper analyses news media coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic skateboarding competition, which paid significant and celebratory attention to the extraordinary youth of the medallists in the women’s disciplines. The coverage was marked by a postfeminist sensibility that constituted the girl-child skater via a ubiquitous and enduring girl power discourse, and idealised them as sites of extraordinary feminine capacity. These narratives located girls’ success in their exceptional youth, market potential, and personal agency, reinforcing neoliberal norms which privilege individualism, entrepreneurialism and choice. However, while offering the girl athletes as testaments to feminist progress in a historically male sport and culture, news narratives tended to render girls’ athletic labour virtually invisible and to elide larger issues that may impact women skaters and girl-aged elite athletes. This paper addresses a call for further attention to postfeminist sensibility as it manifests in contemporary media coverage of women’s sport in order to understand the kind of contradictions that can manifest in media narratives that simultaneously celebrate women’s achievements while denying the existence of larger structural issues affecting them. Additionally, it addresses a gap in feminist sport media research that has largely overlooked the girl-child elite athlete.

‘The Cheering Was Loud and Long’: Practical Feminism and the England Women’s Hockey Tour of Australia in 1927

Australian women’s hockey was the first women’s team sport to establish itself nationally in Australia and the first to play an international match – 1914 against England. In 1925, the All Australia Women’s Hockey Association (AAWHA) invited England to send a team to tour Australia. On October 26, 1926, Mysie Davy, the AAWHA’s international secretary, announced England’s acceptance to tour in 1927 to Sydney’s field hockey community at a fête at the Sydney Town Hall. After Davy’s announcement, it was reported that ‘the cheering was loud and long’. The 1927 English team toured Australia for nine weeks and played 19 matches, including three Test matches against Australia. In studying this tour, there is engagement with the concept of practical feminism introduced by feminist sport scholar Jean Williams in her analysis of the experiences of England’s national women’s field hockey touring teams during the inter-war years. Further, building upon Williams’ work by expanding the practical feminism analysis to cover the opportunities experienced by the English team and a cross-section of Australian women’s field hockey participants, the concept’s application to all levels of field hockey is broadened.

Feminist Sport Media Studies in SSJ: Mapping Theoretical Frameworks and Geographies of Knowledge Production

This conceptual review identifies the contributions of the Sociology of Sport Journal to the subfield of feminist sport media studies. Since the first issue of Sociology of Sport Journal, over 60 articles addressed primarily the media representations research area of feminist sport media studies, using a range of theoretical frameworks that mirrored theoretical shifts in the field. An empirical analysis of geographies of knowledge production indicates that the scholarship in Sociology of Sport Journal in this subfield is primarily based in the United States and focuses on Western contexts. The article concludes with a reflection on the importance of special issues and interdisciplinary collaborations in feminist sport media studies.

Advancing feminist innovation in sport studies: A transdisciplinary dialogue on gender, health and wellbeing.

Athlete health and wellbeing requires a holistic, multidimensional approach to understanding, supporting, and treating individual athletes. Building more supportive, inclusive, and equitable environments for the health and wellbeing of women and gender expansive people further requires gender-responsive approaches that promote broader cultural change. Feminist sport and exercise medicine practitioners, sports scientists, and social science researchers are increasingly coming together in their efforts to do this work. However, working across disciplines inevitably includes an array of ontological, epistemological, and political challenges. In this paper, we offer a curated 'dialogue' with a group of feminist scholars engaged in research and practice across disciplines, bringing them together to discuss some of the most pressing gendered issues in sport today (i.e., ACL injury, concussion, menstruation in sport, mental health, gender categories). In so doing, we amplify the voices of those working (empirically and clinically) at the disciplinary intersections of gender, sport and health, and learn about some of the current and future possibilities for transdisciplinary innovations and strategies for building (responsiveness to) cultural change.

Speaking Up, Speaking Out, and Speaking Back to Feminism in Sport History

Abstract Looking through the gateway of Title IX and second-wave feminism to NASSH meetings in the mid-1980s, one could see it might take a while for gender politics to gather steam in North American sport history. Though the field rang largely with the voices of male historians and stories of men's sport, challenges were growing from feminist sport historians who were ready and able to speak up and speak out about gender relations in sport history. With this momentum, feminist sport history moved into the twenty-first century primed to gain a growing presence in NASSH. I describe the growing maturity of scholarship in feminist history and highlight insightful studies which “helped rip sports history out of its overly masculine nature.” Finally, I point to a new generation of young sport history feminist scholars renewing and reinventing feminism in their work, while illuminating how they have built their scholarship on the roots and shoots of earlier generations of feminist sport historians.

An Introduction to Reading the Past Critically

An Introduction to Reading the Past Critically

Women and Managing Life with Optimism- Sport for Health

This study tries to address the issue of optimism among women, as the pillar of the project of life and civilization together. Optimism is capable of transforming women from impotence to capacity and effectiveness, by their ability to prepare a self-program in managing their lives despite the contradictions and conflicts of life in order to enable them to adapt to problems and conform to circumstances and situations We approach this issue with an Islamic, intellectual, and contemporary scientific perspective that guides women to life, the desire for it, and the real desire to live it, as our choice of feminist sport was the starting point for that.

Muslim women's sporting spatialities: navigating culture, religion and moving bodies in Aotearoa New Zealand

Working at the intersection of feminist sport and leisure studies and Muslim geographies, this paper reveals gendered Islamophobia as a spatialized process occurring at different scales in sport: fields of play, indoor facilities, organizational policy, discourse, moving bodies and emotion. Drawing upon focus groups and interviews with 38 Muslim women (aged 16-63 years old) living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we explore the embodied experiences and socio-spatial practices of Muslim women across a range of sports and physical activities. In so doing, we highlight the agency of Muslim women in finding and creating ‘safe’ sporting spaces that allow them to maintain their ‘embodied respectability’ while also accessing the physical, social and psychological benefits of sport and active recreation. We then illustrate how the three hijabs—visual, spatial, ethical—operate as ‘genderizing discourse’ that is enacted and enforced by some within the sports sector, the public and the Muslim community, thus challenging Muslim women’s ‘right’ to sport. Finally, we reveal Muslim women’s active participation and refusal to be made ‘invisible’ in sport, thus offering an important example of the complex relationship between gender, culture, and religion, and the political reimaginings of Muslim moving bodies in public sporting spaces. Ultimately, focusing on the everyday and embodied sporting experiences of Muslim women, this paper offers an examination of gendered Islamophobia as it is lived and felt by Muslim women in everyday sporting spaces in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Doing feminist physical cultural research in digital spaces: reflections, learnings and ways forward

ABSTRACT In this article we draw on our varied experiences of conducting feminist sport and leisure scholarship in digital spaces to offer some reflections, learnings and ways forward for navigating the challenges of digital and social media research. The paper outlines our methodological and ethical relationships to doing feminist research with and about women and girls, taking Margaret McClaren’s activist lens as a starting point to consider issues of positionality and reflexivity when researching lived experiences of gender in digital spaces. We then analyse our own actions across four dimensions of the research process: (1) connecting with communities and participants, (2) conceptualising and managing data, (3) navigating the ethics of representation and (4) vulnerabilities and self-care. In sharing our learnings from a range of projects, this paper offers insights into the methodological implications of conducting digital research on the moving body, as well as practical considerations for those doing feminist research on sporting and physical cultures in digital spaces. This article contributes to emerging conversations amongst qualitative sport and physical activity researchers about the challenges of digitisation for feminist engagements with power, context and situated knowledges.

Open Categories in Sport: One Way to Decrease Discrimination

ABSTRACT Jane English, a pioneer in feminist sport philosophy, mentioned one simple idea that has received insufficient attention, but its consequences are of great importance for decreasing discrimination in sport. English suggested that female athletes should be allowed to ‘move up’ to the male category and compete against male athletes if they wished to. She drew this strategy from boxing, in which boxers in lower weight categories can choose to ‘move up’—to compete in a higher category (although this is not permitted in reverse—boxers cannot ‘move down’). This strategy could be used in other sports and for other categories, but it is not often chosen. It would suggest that talented athletes do not always need ‘category protection’—they do not need to be protected more than necessary, which raises the question of the justification of the category in the first place. On investigation, some justifications may have less to do with sport-rationality, than with reasons such as paternalism, ableism, ageism or sexism, or organizational reasons. I shall clarify the notion of ‘categories’ in sport, and distinguish four types of categories with respect to their openness: ‘open’ category, ‘semi-open’ category, ‘closed’ category, and ‘overlapping’ categories. This paper advocates the wider use of open and semi-open or at least overlapping categories (where possible), and it argues against the excessive use of closed categories—those made by prescribing set limits. The benefit is clear: athletes who are skilled enough to compete in the higher category should be allowed to ‘move up’, if they wish. With respect to sex/gender, this strategy would partly help to diminish the strength of the binary distinction, and so it can be considered a first and easy step towards a more integrated sport.

“Powerful Lessons” in Women’s Sport: ESPN’s Nine for IX Series

In 2013, ESPN launched a series of documentaries to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Title IX. The Nine for IX documentaries tell stories of successful women in sport and tackle pertinent gender- and sex-related issues, promising to teach popular audiences about the untold histories of women’s sport. Because of the series’ place in ESPN’s marketing efforts to reach women, we consider the series as ideological work through which women’s sport history is constructed. Drawing on feminist sport scholarship, we argue that the Nine for IX films fall short of their promised socially conscious and educational potential. Instead of interrogating broader webs of power, the series overwhelmingly relies upon individualized, depoliticized, and postfeminist narratives that relegate efforts toward gender equality to the past. The series is, thus, a reflection of ESPN’s larger problems with representations of women’s sport.

“From Beach Nymph to Gridiron Amazon”: Media Coverage of Women in American Football, 1934–1979

Although American football has primarily been a sport populated by boys and men, girls and women have participated for over 100 years. The media have covered these stories since the turn of the 20th century. Informed by feminist sport studies literature, this research examines media coverage of women footballers in the United States by conducting a textual analysis of over 100 articles from 1934 to 1979. Journalists who covered women encroaching on conventional men’s space (i.e., American gridirons) simultaneously attempted to demonstrate women’s athleticism and reified dichotomies between feminine and masculine norms and values in U.S. society. Our research suggests that representations of women in football align with gendered hierarchies of sport cultures.

Sexy women sports fans: femininity, sexuality, and the global sport spectacle

In recent years the relationship between women and sport fandom has undergone significant shifts. The rapidly changing sphere of global sport is seen to offer women newly visible roles in the global sport economy as fans, broadcasters, celebrity athletes, and media personalities. In light of calls for greater inclusivity and diversity in sport, this paper examines the emergence of new forms of “sexually empowered” female fandom, which situate women as active participants in the sporting spectacle. Whereas sexy women who followed men’s sport or male athletes were once derided as “groupies,” thus socially marginalised and excluded from identification with sport fan communities, I argue that the sexy sport fan has emerged in the context of post-feminism as a visible and necessary type of feminine fan identity to meet the needs of the global sport economy. This study extends feminist sport media analysis beyond its focus on how female athletes are represented whilst also contributing new insights to sport fan research by analysing how female supporters are constructed through mediated accounts in terms of gender, sexuality, and nation.

Tracing tears and triple axels: Media representations of Japan’s women figure skaters

Anticipating the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, this article uses the triple axel jump, one of the most challenging moves in women’s figure skating, as a heuristic device to track representations of Japanese skaters Ito Midori and Asada Mao in the New York Times and Asahi Shimbun. Ito and Asada are two of only six women to have landed triple axels at international figure skating competitions. Employing affect and feminist theories, I argue that constructions of the skaters’ bodies are not just gendered and heteronormative, but also sexed, raced, and affective. Using discourse analysis, I trace how media representations of Ito and Asada redraw global color lines and national boundaries in sport and negotiate different femininities, underscoring excessive feelings and physical appearance. Contributing to feminist sport studies and transnational feminist cultural studies, this comparative analysis offers new perspectives on women’s sports in Japan and athleticism’s relation to race, femininities, and national identity.

Sport, Gender and Power: The Rise of Roller Derby

Contents: Preface Introduction Theory, practice and affect: feminist approaches to sport and sport management Writing/researching roller derby: methods for feminist physical cultural studies 'Roller derby saved my soul': belonging and becoming The 'dark side' of belonging: power and exclusion in roller derby Feminist sport management: affects and governance in roller derby Conclusion: a 'new' derby ethos? Appendix References Index.

New Rules for New Times: Sportswomen and Media Representation in the Third Wave

Leading up to the early 2000s, feminist researchers identified numerous representational practices through which the sports media ignored, trivialized and sexualized sportswomen. At that time, a distillation of the research into a set of six unwritten media ‘rules’ concluded that, at best, the traditional media approached women’s sport ambivalently within an either/or discourse of pretty or powerful that constructed femininity and athleticism as incompatible. In the past decade, the rise of Internet-based news and social media has dramatically changed the field of representation, including an explosion in public voice and information sharing on social networking sites. In this changed media landscape, I synthesize U.S. and global research into 15 historical and emerging rules of media representation, in order to extend researchers’ understandings of the current status and range of representational practices. In addition, I employ the theoretical lenses of third-wave feminism and cultural studies to advance the ways in which feminist researchers can conceptualize and understand historical and emerging trends in how sportswomen are imagined in popular culture. In particular, I consider the implications of third wave feminism for understanding the emergence of a pretty and powerful discourse in the U.S. that challenges dominant interpretations of sports media coverage and points to the value for feminist sport media researchers of expanding their interpretive frameworks for making sense of media coverage.

A Sound Citizen in a Sound Body: Sport and the Issue of Women’s Emancipation in 1920s Sweden

This article focuses on a rare phenomenon: a feminist sport federation active in Sweden during the 1920s. The analysis of rhetoric and ideas on women’s sport show how the association wanted to both politicize sport and enter the sport arena. Women’s sport was regarded as part of an ongoing modernization process, where women needed to develop physical strength and stamina. Through practicing sport, women would be “fit for society,” the Swedish Women’s Federation for Physical Culture (SKCFK) emphatically presented their vision of the female body as productive and capable, with strengths that should be further developed through exercise. Representatives of the federation spoke against biologizing statements about women’s fragile physique. When the activities of SKCFK faded out in the beginning of the 1930s, it meant the end of separate women’s sport in Sweden. It was not until the influence of the feminist second wave during the 1970s that gender equality was put on the agenda of the Swedish Sport movement.

“Where are Your Women?” The Challenge to Care in the Future of Sport

In this paper, a vision for the future of U.S. NCAA Division I university sport is presented. It is argued that this context could serve as the place where performance “excellence” is rooted in caring. However, U.S. sport at this level must become purposefully structured to include educational components related to moral thinking, feeling, and behaving. Otherwise, it will continue to foster a type of disconnected or “game reasoning” mentality, building “characters” vs. character (Shields & Bredemeier, 1995). Using U.S.-focused feminism as the necessary first intervention, the paper is situated within a care moral orientation (e.g., Gilligan 1979, 1982) as well as sport psychology moral development scholarship (e.g., Bredemeier 1992; Fisher 1993; Kavussanu 2008; Oglesby 1990; Solomon 1993; Stephens 1993). A brief review of the current state of affairs in U.S. NCAA Division I university sport is presented first. Next, selected literature related to a care moral orientation and moral disconnection in U.S. psychology and sport psychology is highlighted. Finally, one vision of what a model of conscious, caring and connected U.S. NCAA Division I sport research and practice could look like is offered. Specifically, those who have the power to influence sport would develop character and the related skills of moral consciousness, caring, and connection, undergirded by feminist moral principles and reflective practice. Feminist (and all) sport psychology professionals are in a prime position to engage with sport constituents to enhance athletes’ overall experience, where character does matter, and, so, too, does performance.