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Description
The term “female sportscaster” elicits a broad range of feelings among the sports media consumer base. Many of the women who fall into the category of “female sportscaster” appear to be greatly admired while many others evoke considerable scorn, making the electronic sports media industry a seemingly dangerous and often vitriolic environment for women. The gendered mistreatment of women sportscasters is not unfamiliar to sports media scholars. Indeed, phenomena such as sex biases, double standards, and harassment have been documented, primarily through positivistic or quantitative research. What has not been investigated, however, is how these phenomena persist and evolve despite the extant research.
This dissertation employs Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge paradigm to take a discursive analytic approach to understand how the “female sportscaster” subjectivity, or imagined idea, is constructed through statements, images, and practices. That is, this dissertation investigates the way society “talks about” the “female sportscaster” and how those discussions affect the experiences of women sportscasters. Using one-on-one interviews with 10 women sportscasters, focus groups with sports media consumers, netnography, and textual analysis under the umbrella of a feminist methodological approach, this dissertation finds that the American female subjectivity is constructed through postfeminist and neoliberal discourses. These discourses “empower” women sportscasters to be responsible for their own success but, in doing so, normalize the obstacles women in sportscasting endure.
As a result of this normalization, the electronic sports media industry is seemingly justified in taking little to no meaningful action toward improving conditions for women sportscasters. Specific manifestations of these discourses are traced across phenomena such as double standards, bias in hiring and development, harassment, and the expectation of affective labor. Suggestions are made for improving conditions for women sportscasters.
This dissertation employs Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge paradigm to take a discursive analytic approach to understand how the “female sportscaster” subjectivity, or imagined idea, is constructed through statements, images, and practices. That is, this dissertation investigates the way society “talks about” the “female sportscaster” and how those discussions affect the experiences of women sportscasters. Using one-on-one interviews with 10 women sportscasters, focus groups with sports media consumers, netnography, and textual analysis under the umbrella of a feminist methodological approach, this dissertation finds that the American female subjectivity is constructed through postfeminist and neoliberal discourses. These discourses “empower” women sportscasters to be responsible for their own success but, in doing so, normalize the obstacles women in sportscasting endure.
As a result of this normalization, the electronic sports media industry is seemingly justified in taking little to no meaningful action toward improving conditions for women sportscasters. Specific manifestations of these discourses are traced across phenomena such as double standards, bias in hiring and development, harassment, and the expectation of affective labor. Suggestions are made for improving conditions for women sportscasters.
ContributorsHarrison, Guy (Author) / Russomanno, Joseph (Thesis advisor) / Switzer, Heather (Thesis advisor) / Reed, Sada (Committee member) / Anderson, Douglas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This thesis in partial fulfillment of my degree from Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University delves into the career and viewpoints of Elizabeth Banks, a nineteenth-century American journalist who traveled to London in the 1890s to write about differences between American and British culture and lifestyles. Her three books include Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London (1894), The Autobiography of a "Newspaper Girl" (1902), and The Remaking of an American (1928). Banks asked that all of her personal documents be destroyed after her death, so these published books serve as the only remnant of her transatlantic life. With that in mind, I approached the documents with the idea that Banks chose what to include, what to exclude, and how to present her persona as opposed to giving a complete, unbiased picture. Banks used these books to formulate a public identity that served her purposes, which makes sense considering she needed the approval of her readership in order to subsist financially. The contradictions among the three works, and even within each individual work, allowed Banks to appear nonthreatening to the status quo, but still interesting enough to deserve attention. While the context of her environment experienced changes, so did her public "performance." She altered her image in conjunction with what she identified as important to her readers. I rely on a careful reading of her three published books, contextualized with secondary sources to understand how Elizabeth Banks constructed a public identity during a time characterized by social shifts, especially due to the rise of the women's movement, an interest in access to rights previously reserved for men, and reevaluation of the relationship between the social classes. This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach that utilizes concepts from women and gender studies to better analyze Banks and her lived experiences. While other research on Elizabeth Banks reaches the same conclusions I do, and while other historians have identified Banks's public character as complex and contradictory, this work focuses specifically on how these contradictions operated. By placing portions of her works directly alongside one another, and by analyzing exactly how she incorporated differing ideologies into her pieces, her public identity can be more fully understood as multifaceted and existing in relation to society's changing demands. Also, this thesis considers the importance of the social constructs of class and gender to Banks's identity. The first chapter focuses on gender and her experience as a woman journalist. The second chapter deals with class politics as they impacted her work. Even though I address these social identities in separate chapters, I approached Banks with intersectionality in mind, as Banks's experience of gender is related to class, and vice versa. Elizabeth Banks crafted her public identity in conjunction to public opinion. She knew that she required the approval of her readers. By policing boundaries created by gender and class, she appears as an outsider looking in. She blurs the lines between masculine and feminine and middle class and working class. She does not firmly set herself in any one group, which allowed her to expand her appeal. This analysis of Banks illuminates how a woman could effectively navigate the public arena in nineteenth-century England.
ContributorsColes, Alexandra Patricia (Author) / Fuchs, Rachel (Thesis director) / Hopkins, Richard (Committee member) / Switzer, Heather (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor)
Created2013-05