Abstract:
Women’s participation in perceived masculine sports can be understood as a continual process of negotiating and redefining notions of femininity and female bodies. This thesis employed a theoretical framework combining third-wave feminism, cultural studies, Lefebvre’s spatial theory, and Butler’s gender performativity to analyse how women’s rugby in New Zealand and women’s taekwondo and poomsae in Taiwan were mediated in two international sporting contexts. Content analysis and textual analysis were employed to examine the online print media text and reader’s comments in New Zealand and Taiwan during the 2016 Rio Olympics, the 2017 Taipei Universiade, the 2016-17 World Rugby Sevens Series [men’s], and World Rugby Women’s Sevens Series.
The findings revealed that during major international sporting events, the discourse of nationalism temporarily created a more inclusive mediated space for sportswomen and their gender performances. Sportswomen received similar or more media coverage than men when they participated in the events strongly aligned with nationalism. Sportswomen were also integrated within the construction of national identity and mediated as ‘sheroes’. Three different but acceptable types of sporting femininity were identified in the findings, including traditional femininity, female masculinity, and pretty and powerful sportswomen. A complex multiplicity of sporting femininities were mediated, shifted, contested, or combined with each other, which enabled a wider range of athletic female bodies, embodiments, and physicalities to emerge as valued. The findings indicate that cultural boundaries of femininity are expanding within particular national sporting contexts. The innovative application of spatial theory to the analysis of mediated sport demonstrated its value for understanding both empowering and oppressive meanings of women’s sport. The spatial concept connects sport practice and media representation, exemplifying the dynamic nature of sport space. On this basis, spatial theory reveals how sportswomen’s actions in physical space can influence their representations in mediated space, providing researchers a way to understand the negotiation and contestation over, and expansion of, contemporary sporting femininities.