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Sportswomen and Social Media: Bringing Third-Wave Feminism, Postfeminism, and Neoliberal Feminism Into Conversation

journal contribution
posted on 2017-10-01, 00:00 authored by H Thorpe, Kim ToffolettiKim Toffoletti, T Bruce
In this article, we take seriously the challenges of making sense of a sporting (and media) context that increasingly engages female athletes as active, visible, and autonomous, while inequalities pertaining to gender, sexuality, race, and class remain stubbornly persistent across sport institutions and practices. We do so by engaging with three recent feminist critiques that have sought to respond to the changing operations of gender relations and the articulation of gendered subjectivities, namely, third-wave feminism, postfeminism, and neoliberal feminism, and applying each to the same concrete setting—the social media self-representation of Hawaiian professional surfer Alana Blanchard. In aiming to conceptually illustrate the utility of these three feminist critiques, we are not advocating for any single approach. Rather, we critically demonstrate what each offers for explaining how current discourses are being internalized, embodied, and practiced by young (sports)women, as they make meaning of, and respond to, the conditions of their lives.

History

Journal

Journal of Sport and Social Issues

Volume

41

Pagination

359-383

Location

Thousand Oaks, Calif.

ISSN

0193-7235

eISSN

1552-7638

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2017, The Authors

Issue

5

Publisher

SAGE Publications