“If Those Stats Make You Mad, Then You’ve Come to the Right Place”: Theorizing a Women’s Sports Media Counterpublic

Abstract

With over four decades of scholarship assessing sports media coverage through the lens of hegemonic masculinity, this study poses counterpublics as a generative theoretical concept for telling stories about sport differently and locating instances of feminist resistance within sports media. To theorize the nature of a women’s sport counterpublic, this study turns to online women’s sports media organizations. The analysis consists of a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of six identified outlets’ “About” pages and contends that the outlets employ elements of counterpublicity by making statements of (perceived) exclusion, developing their discursive arenas, and maintaining links to mainstream sports media outlets. In posing counterpublics as a valuable conceptual framework for the study of sports media, this study advocates for a paradigmatic shift to focusing on the margins of sport as spaces welcome to a re-imagining of an inclusive future of sport.