Comments on: 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

By: melissa.kemble

melissa.kemble — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 23:48:02 +0000

Thank you for the great conference, it was great to meet you all! Please feel free to contact me with any additional questions, comments, etc:

Email: mkem9723@uni.sydney.edu.au
Twitter: @MelKemble

Cheers,
Mel

By: melissa.kemble

melissa.kemble — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 00:19:26 +0000

In reply to Michael Henshaw.

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.

By: Michael Henshaw

Michael Henshaw — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 16:00:19 +0000

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.

By: melissa.kemble

melissa.kemble — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 07:02:55 +0000

In reply to ishikawa.yuka. 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.

By: melissa.kemble

melissa.kemble — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 06:52:35 +0000

In reply to Yukie Kondo. 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.

By: ishikawa.yuka

ishikawa.yuka — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 05:27:39 +0000

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?

By: Yukie Kondo

Yukie Kondo — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 05:12:05 +0000

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.

By: Joe Geluso

Joe Geluso — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 13:35:42 +0000

This looks like a very engaging presentation! I look forward to discussing it.