Abstract
Sport media professionals and scholars need to open up the concept of gaze in order to understand media representations of women, race and national identity. Racialised minority groups have historically been depicted as a threat to the status quo by Canadian media (Fleras and Kunz, 2001) except in coverage of male athletic champions. Female athletes of colour are often considered an historic double threat to the hegemonic masculine order of the sport media, who rarely cover women’s sport outside of Olympiads. The racialised figures of female athletes of colour are often portrayed outside of hegemonic notions of womanhood (Douglas, 2002). While past Canadian sport media studies have offered particular understandings of gendered codes and/or racialised codes (e.g. Abdel-Shehid, 2005; Crossman, Douglas, 2002; Lee, 1992; MacNeill, 1988; Sparks, 1992; Theberge and Cronk, 1991) the constitutive power of particular gaze is often ignored. Stuart Hall’s examination of the representation of difference in the sporting ‘spectacle of the Other’ is one of the few exceptions to deploy a critical theory of gaze informed by cultural studies and postcolonial theory (1997; also see L. Davis’s work on the ideal and colonising subject position constructed in Sport Illustrated, 1997).
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© 2009 Margaret MacNeill
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MacNeill, M. (2009). Opening up the Gendered Gaze: Sport Media Representations of Women, National Identity and the Racialised Gaze in Canada. In: Markula, P. (eds) Olympic Women and the Media. Global Culture and Sport. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230233942_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230233942_3
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