Under the glass ceiling: Power, identity and sexuality in sports information
Open Access
- Author:
- Whiteside, Erin E
- Graduate Program:
- Mass Communications
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 03, 2010
- Committee Members:
- Marie Hardin, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Marie Hardin, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Matthew Paul Mcallister, Committee Member
Colleen Connolly Ahern, Committee Member
Mark Dyreson, Committee Member - Keywords:
- sports media
sexuality
feminist media studies
sports information
gender and sports
women in sports media - Abstract:
- Women’s marginalization from high status workplace roles has been a common theme across areas of literature, including that which looks at women’s experiences in sports media. The general field of scholarship is at a critical turn where difference must be interrogated as difference between women, rather than between men and women (Aldoory, 2006). Such a perspective will offer more sophisticated analyses of women’s experiences, choices and work outcomes. This dissertation seeks to continue that trajectory by focusing on how sexuality shapes workplace experiences and sense of self, using college sports public relations, commonly called “sports information” as a specific site of inquiry. Sexuality has not been a focus of research from any perspective in the context of sports media producers and micro-level studies of public relations and sports journalism workroom cultures, and this project seeks to address that gap. As a media scholar, I used this dissertation to take ideas developed in literature related to sports participation and physical education and apply them to a media setting, where I could begin to think about the ways sexuality mediates relationships among women, organizes the sports media workplace and works as a system of discourse that produces what Bartky (1988) calls a specifically feminine docile body. In doing so, I have employed a poststructuralist perspective that regards sexuality not as an inherent identity natural in each of us, but as a discursive framework that normalizes bodies through the naturalization of sexual identity categories (Foucault, 1990). These ideas are not new among those situated in sports cultural studies literature. However, applying such an analysis to workplace media cultures does reflect a divergence in this area of scholarship, and I offer this project as an answer to recent calls for such a theoretical turn (Aldoory, 2006). In articulating arguments about the ways sexuality as a public, but often invisible, discursive framework functions as an organizing principle in sports information, I draw from in-depth interviews with female sports information directors (SIDs) that I conducted at a regional and national convention of this industry’s large, formal organization, called College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA). I used the transcripts to think through how the SIDs I interviewed situated sexuality in their everyday lives and to further theorize about the politics of sexuality in this particular sports media workplace culture.