Beyond Caster as object? Examining media constructions of Caster Semenya through decolonial thinking

IF 8 2区 医学 Q1 HOSPITALITY, LEISURE, SPORT & TOURISM Qualitative Research in Sport Exercise and Health Pub Date : 2022-06-15 DOI:10.1080/2159676X.2022.2086164
Anna Posbergh, Samuel M. Clevenger
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

ABSTRACT The popular media coverage of South African track and field star Caster Semenya showcases how colonialist discourses shaped the sexed, gendered, and racialised meaning of her public biography. Yet, when researchers study Semenya as their research ‘object’, does this act of inquiry reproduce the knowledge constructs of Western coloniality as well? In this article, we consider both issues by conducting and reflecting on our poststructuralist analysis of popular media coverages of Semenya’s athletic career, with specific attention to her dealings with gender-verification testing. We examine the discursive construction of Semenya’s public biography by popular newspaper outlets in the United States and South Africa from 2009 to 2019, arguing that both geopolitical locales maintained Western social binaries and scientific discourses concerning Semenya’s sexual identity in similar, yet distinct ways. Drawing from the poststructuralist methodology of intertextuality, we reflect on its capacity to deconstruct the colonial discourses shaping the cultural meaning of a non-Western athlete of colour such as Semenya, as well as its relation, as a method of knowledge production, to the epistemological legacies of Western coloniality. We also contend that by approaching Semenya as the ‘object’ of our poststructuralist framework, our analysis implicitly reproduced, rather than challenged, the Eurocentric subject/object framework of modern (Western) epistemology. Thus, our purposes are empirical, methodological, and reflexive as we seek to contribute to critical analyses of the constructed cultural meaning of celebrity athletes while subjecting our own research assumptions and frameworks to poststructuralist and decolonial deconstruction.
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超越卡斯特作为对象?从非殖民化思维看卡斯特·塞门娅的媒介建构
摘要南非田径明星卡斯特·塞门娅的大众媒体报道展示了殖民主义话语如何塑造了她的公共传记中的性别化、性别化和种族化的含义。然而,当研究人员将塞门娅作为他们的研究“对象”进行研究时,这种探究行为是否也再现了西方殖民主义的知识结构?在这篇文章中,我们通过对塞门娅运动生涯的大众媒体报道进行后结构主义分析来考虑这两个问题,并特别关注她在性别验证测试方面的处理。我们研究了2009年至2019年美国和南非流行报纸对塞门娅公共传记的话语建构,认为这两个地缘政治地区都以相似但不同的方式维持着西方社会的二元性和关于塞门娅性身份的科学话语。从互文性的后结构主义方法论出发,我们反思了它解构殖民话语的能力,这些殖民话语塑造了塞门娅这样的非西方有色人种运动员的文化意义,以及它作为一种知识生产方法与西方殖民主义的认识论遗产的关系。我们还认为,通过将塞门娅作为我们后结构主义框架的“对象”,我们的分析隐含地再现了而不是挑战了现代(西方)认识论的以欧洲为中心的主体/对象框架。因此,我们的目的是实证的、方法论的和反射性的,因为我们试图对名人运动员的文化意义进行批判性分析,同时对我们自己的研究假设和框架进行后结构主义和非殖民化解构。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
10.60
自引率
10.20%
发文量
36
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