Doktoratskolleg Grenzen, Grenzverschiebungen und Grenzüberschreitungen in Sprache, Literatur, Medien

language-gender-and-sport-a-multimodal-analysis-of-the-representation-of-sportswomen-through-language-in-spain-and-mexico.html - language-gender-and-sport-a-multimodal-analysis-of-the-representation-of-sportswomen-through-language-in-spain-and-mexico.html

Language, gender and sport: a multimodal analysis of the representation of sportswomen through language in Spain and Mexico

Irene Rull Garcia

Sports journalism tends to produce coverage “about men, by men, for an assumed audience of men” (Bruce & Hardin 2014), resulting in underrepresentation of sportswomen in the front pages of sports newspapers, even when their achievements are greater than their male counterparts (Guerrero 2022). When women appear in the sports media, a language that “easily falls into topics and stereotypes” is employed (Rojas Torrijos 2010), resulting in a biased representation of sportswomen. The media not only provides content on a particular matter, but also “influences the next step in the communication process, our understanding and perspective on the topics in the news” (McCombs 2002). In this regard, my study aims to contribute to the understanding of the current situation on the (under)representation of sportswomen (2024 Olympic Games) in Spanish and Mexican newspapers from a linguistic discourse and semiotic perspective. In order to provide a full scope of the current situation, a multimodal analysis is conducted, setting the focus on providing a discourse analysis of front pages and news, as well as a semiotic analysis of the images included in those texts. Consequently, my research crosses the traditional limits (or metaphorically borders) of linguistic discourse analysis by considering them in the analysis. The data basis of my study crosses media boundaries, since the corpus consists of texts extracted from Spanish and Mexican newspapers, allowing a deep evaluation of the language usage employed as well as the visual representations of sportswomen in these publications.