ABSTRACT
Despite the exponential growth in girls’ and women’s sports participation after the passage of Title IX in 1972, along with a shifting cultural landscape that has become accommodating to the notion of female athleticism, sport media are still a space where girls and women in sports, and femininity and feminine values in general, are not valued in relation to athleticism. This chapter considers sport media’s role in contributing to a process by which sporting spaces are normalized as male spaces. In doing so, it outlines production techniques and discursive strategies occurring in sport media which contribute to wider cultural narratives that delegitimize female athletes. The chapter concludes by considering the contemporary girl power phenomenon and what such seemingly liberating rhetoric, often observed in sport media discourses, might mean for how we understand the status of girls and women in sport and where future directions in research might head to engage with related questions.
