Menu Close
anthony 8 Comments

Paper 023: As Good as the Men? A Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis of Media Representations of Athletes Competing in the New Women’s Australian Football League

KEMBLE, Melissa (The University of Sydney, Australia)

Keywords: gender bias, sports news, discourse analysis, Australian Rules Football (AFL), evaluation, corpus linguistics

Abstract

This study investigates how players in the newly established women’s Australian Football League (AFLW) are represented in the print news media, with respect to patriarchal discourses. Australian Football not only has one of the largest sporting communities across the country, but also boasts the fourth highest live crowd attendance globally (Gullen, 2015). As with many other physical contact sports, the professional league originated exclusively as a male sport, until the new women’s league officially commenced in 2017. This research is based on a 87,500 word corpus of AFLW news articles published in the Herald Sun newspaper, one of the most widely-read papers across Australia. The data are taken for the 12-month period commencing June 2016, excluding articles published during the nine-week season. A reference corpus is also used. Combining corpus linguistics with text analysis of appraisal (i.e. evaluative language), I analyse the AFLW corpus to identify whether there is evidence of patriarchal discourses (i.e. othering, objectification, trivialisation, stereotyping). I also compare the media coverage before the season to the coverage after the season in order to identify whether there are any significant differences in the way players are represented. The keyword analysis reveals a potentially positive shift away from previously documented patriarchal discourses; however, the text analysis reveals a disproportionate focus on gender stereotypes and othering. The (female) athletes are frequently negatively appraised in direct comparison to their male counterparts, which thus positions the professional Australian Football sporting domain as preferably male. This research contributes to existing linguistic research on gender bias by exploring how female athletes entering a male-dominated ‘masculine’ sport (Koivula, 2001) are portrayed in the media, with respect to patriarchal discourses. It provides a foundation for future linguistic research into representations of athletes in sports reporting using a mixed-method approach combing corpus-linguistics with CDA.

References
Gullen, S. (2015). Footy punches high as crowd pleaser. Herald Sun. [Factiva]. Last accessed March 2020.
Koivula, N. (2001). Perceived characteristics of sports categorized as gender-neutral, feminine and masculine. Journal of Sports Behaviour 24(4), 377-393.

Presentation video

Supplementary Information

None

Q&A live (Zoom) session

No longer available.

8 Comments

  2. Yukie Kondo

    Thank you for your enlightening presentation of the AFLW corpus. I learned that some articles that praise women also implicitly show that men are superior in the first place. I wonder if this is because the AFLW became a professional league only recently. It will be interesting to see how the results alternate in the future, after some time has passed since it became a professional league.

    • melissa.kemble

      Thanks Yukie, you raise a really good point about the comparisons to men. The women playing in 2017 are effectively the pioneers for this new league, so they don’t have any (female) predecessors to be compared to. It will be interesting to see if this changes after a few years when current players retire and new ones come in.

  3. ishikawa.yuka

    Thank you for your wonderful presentation. I’m very interested in the topic. My question is: don’t we need a comparative corpus, say AMFC, to analyse the AWFC?

    • melissa.kemble

      Thank you, this is a very good question. Because the AFLW is a new league entering a very male-dominated sporting space, I was specifically interested to see if discourses that had been identified in media reporting on other women’s sports were evident for this sport. I am now working on a bigger study which will compare the reporting on the women’s league to that of the men’s league over a longer period of time.

  4. Michael Henshaw

    This was a great investigation into media covering a newly emerging women’s sport. Thank you for your insights.
    I wanted to enquire more on two issues.
    1) page 9, at 6:20. Even though I’m a life-long soccer player, I don’t quite understand the references to ‘good & clean’ hands in the concordance. I mean, if they were keepers, sure, I get it. But that wasn’t the case, right? So what are the coaches and supporters complimenting here?
    2) page 11, at around 8:10. 1) some women players: it’s somehow weird that the author needs to say ‘women’, right? Just ‘some players’ might seem normal, as it’s a new league and recognition needs time to develop. For 2) the girls, and 3) boys, I may need more convincing about the underlying bias here. It’s easy to say ‘ladies and gentlemen’, ‘boys and girls’, or ‘women and men’ when trying to describe these differences. It’s hard to prove the speaker’s intent when they choose one from these bunches. I may be more convinced if I saw how writing on the men’s league contrasts significantly with writing on the women’s, even though keywords on page 14 indicate that girls and boys both correlate to their respective corpora. Page 15 (5) displays a glaring distinction between ‘girls’ and ‘men’, but I think you told us during the Q n A that these kind of quotes came from readers or interviewees, and may not be representative of the writing staff of the newspaper.

    Overall, this was fascinating insight into a topic I hadn’t thought much about, and I look forward to future research.

    • melissa.kemble

      Hi Mike, was nice to meet you in the session yesterday and thanks for your questions! I’ll try my best to answer here…

      1) Australian Football is probably most like rugby or Gaelic football, rather than say football/soccer, with all players catching & passing the ball. (just to make things more confusing, soccer, AFL and rugby are all colloquially referred to as ‘footy’ here in Aus!) The ‘good hands’, is a bit ambiguous but we know is positive and ‘clean hands’ is using a non-literal sense meaning effectively free from awkwardness, dexterous, etc. But we need the context of how the game is played to understand that these instances evaluate how the player catch the ball as this isn’t directly mentioned in the texts.

      2) Good question, there is a lot of explore here which I didn’t have time to address in this presentation. In general, ‘girls’ can either be infantilising or an in-group marker, depending on who uses it, how, situational context etc. In my corpus ‘girls’ referring adults is largely used in quotes player, so could be an in-group identifier. But there are cases where it is used alongside negative evaluation e.g. (2) and in comparison to adult ‘men’ e.g. (5). So there is some imbalance in referring to female adults as children and male adults as adults. We also need to consider why certain quotes, editorials or letters were published over others. There is a lot to explore here and much more research needed — including bigger corpora, comparison to reporting on men’s & better understanding of news production processes — which I’m working on now.

Comments are closed.