Women's Sport and Spectacle: Gendered Television Coverage and the Olympic Games

by Gina Daddario

Overview

Historically, the mass media have marginalized women's sports by devoting more coverage to men's sports and trying to appeal to a male audience. This volume analyzes the mass media's portrayal of women's sports. The Olympic Games are highlighted because they provide one of the few sports arenas where women's participation is heavily covered, promoted, and celebrated. The author suggests the media are recognizing the significance of female spectatorship and are attempting to respond to this growing audience by adopting some of the rhetorical and textual characteristics of soap opera and melodrama.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780275958565
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/30/1998
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	1450L (what's this?)

About the Author

GINA DADDARIO is Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Shenandoah University. She has published numerous articles on women, media, and sport which have appeared in Women's Studies in Communication and Sociology of Sport Jourbanal.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Feminist Sports Studies and Genre Criticism
The Transformation of Women's Olympic Sport into Olympic Spectacle
"Chilly Scenes" of the 1992 Winter Games
Sports and Soaps: Gendered Coverage of the 1992 Summer Games
Soap on Ice: The Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan Story and the 1994 Winter Games
Mediated Melodramas and Network Nationalism: The 1996 Summer Games
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Contains essays providing feminist criticism of recent years' Olympic games including a case study focusing on the role of the mass media in representing female athletes; NBC's adoption of a "feminine" narrative form during their coverage of the 1992 Summer Games; and the soap-operatic nature of the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan story. An introductory essay presents a historical view of the transformation of women's Olympic sport into spectacle. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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