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Community is a powerful construct in the discourses of both feminism and sport, and so it is not surprising that it is a preeminent virtue in attempts to speak about, to, or for female athletes. In its popular conceptions, community is desired and celebrated as individuals coming together based on a solidarity, harmony, or agreement around an essence. In sport scholarship, the specific meanings, implications, contradictions, and effects that govern this particular understanding of community have remained unexplored. Thus, the aim of this article is to use the work of poststructural theorist Jacques Derrida to deconstruct this notion of community in an attempt to open up the concept of community to new theorizations and political uses. It will involve the introduction of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the Whatever singularity, or in this case the Whatever athlete and its place in new possibilities for community in feminist sport contexts.

Stereotypes have the power to dynamically structure African American female athletes’ oppression (Buysse & Embser-Herbert, 2004; Kane, 1996), for example, by trivializing their athletic efforts (Douglas, 2002). The purpose of this paper was to examine how African American women athletes experience such stereotypes. Drawing from Collins (1990) and Crenshaw’s (1991) work on intersectionality, data were gathered from eight African American female athletes regarding their sport experiences. Qualitative analyses revealed two major themes: Gendered Stereotypes and Racial Stereotypes. Findings suggested that complex intersections of these stereotypes significantly impacted African American female athletes’ sport experiences. It is concluded that future research should explore in greater depth the sexist, racist, and classist incidences of African American female athletes’ experiences at all levels of sport participation.

This article examines television’s portrayal of female athletes during the 1992 winter Games. Although women are depicted in physically challenging events that defy stereotypical notions of femininity, such as mogul skiing, luge, and the biathlon, rhetorical analysis suggests that the sports media reinforce a masculine sports hegemony through strategies of marginalization. These include the application of condescending descriptors, the use of compensatory rhetoric, the construction of female athletes according to an adolescent ideal, and the presentation of female athletes as driven by cooperation rather than competition.

This article aims to update the discourse on female Korean athletes by illuminating the radical change of their imagery and reality over the last three decades, from sexless victims of patriarchy to sportswomen asserting their strength, femininity, and even “queerness.” Insofar as sports films provide a felicitous site through which to examine popular and evolving representations of gender and sport, the article analyzes a variety of Korean sports films which reproduce, or pose a challenge to, conventional portrayals of female athletes. Due to the paucity of scholarly work undertaken in Korean in this field, the authors draw upon a wide array of mainly American sources and, in so doing, hope to enlarge the small but growing body of work on gender and sport in Korea written in English.

This study analyzed the treatment of female athletes in Finnish women’s magazines. The purpose was to examine how media representations constructed hierarchic relations between women. Furthermore, the aim was to examine how the construction and legitimation of the hierarchy between women and the gender hierarchy are interwoven with each other. Finally, the study discussed the possibilities to challenge, resist, and transform the ideological construction of these hierarchic relations. Briefly, the study demonstrated the ways in which media texts may both construct disempowering positions and also offer recourses of empowering positions for women.

The media coverage of sport events in relation to athletes’ sex has been extensively analyzed in the scientific literature. Apart from sports mega-events such as the Olympic Games, the findings of these studies seem consistent in that female participants are systematically underrepresented in sports media coverage. However, much of the research in this area relates to North America. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine sex equity in the coverage of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics by French, British and Spanish newspapers to provide new insights in this research field from a different cultural perspective. A content analysis was carried out and mixed results were found. French coverage shows significant discrimination of female athletes on most of the variables analyzed. Conversely, British coverage shows significant discrimination of male athletes on most of the variables studied. Finally, Spanish coverage is fair. These mixed results show the value of conducting such studies in geographical areas outside North America.