Introduction: women in sports media: new scholarly engagements

Feminist scholarship on sports media has long examined how women negotiate femininity and athleticism, how they contend with sexism in their professions, and how sports media trivializes, sexualizes, and underrepresents women athletes (Toni Bruce 2015; Cheryl Cooky, Michael Messner, and Michela Musto 2015; Mary Jo Kane 2013). This important research retains its relevance because sports media industries have accomplished little in improving these realities, which is why scholars should continue to provide empirical evidence to argue for change in the sporting world. Yet, scholarship that focuses on how sports media objectifies women athletes or how patriarchy marginalizes women in various sporting contexts doesn’t often tell us anything new. As we monitor the conditions women in sports navigate, we must also push scholarly boundaries to examine other discourses that impact women athletes and women working in sports media. In my introduction to this edition of Commentary and Criticism, I forefront some key research trajectories for feminist sports media studies: 1) the resurgence of feminism, 2) sports media industries studies, and 3) a focus beyond (white) femininity. Collectively, this research agenda can generate replicable models for ameliorating inequalities for women in sports media, anticipate areas for critical caution should forward momentum indeed take flight, and examine the experiences of women in sports media that fall outside the well-documented trends. Popular culture has witnessed a resurgence of feminism in recent years marking a discursive move away from a previous post-feminist trend of negating the movement’s continued relevance (Sarah Banet-Weiser and Laura Portwood-Stacer 2017; Sarah BanetWeiser 2015). Yet, as Kim Toffoletti, Jessica Francombe-Webb and Holly Thorpe (2018) point out, feminist sports scholarship has been a bit slower to analyze post-feminist discourses circulating in sports media beyond the assertion that feminism is redundant. What then happens when sports media popularizes rhetorics of feminism? This themed issue of Commentary and Criticism engages this question by presenting two essays addressing the contemporary circulation of feminist discourses in two unique sporting spaces. Cheryl Cooky and Dunja Antunovic scrutinize feminist discourse covering the most recent Olympic Games and make a call to examine what happens when women’s sporting bodies become productive as a means of generating profit for networks and advertisers. Amanda Cullen then considers a woman gamer in South Korea who manages her status as a reluctant feminist icon in esports. Cullen interrogates what is at stake when individual women are symbolically flattened to serve feminist causes. Together, these two essays complicate what happens when feminism becomes popular. FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 2018, VOL. 18, NO. 5, 942–955 https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1498088