Shame, pain and fame: sportswomen losing in Australia’s mainstream media reporting

Abstract

This article adds to a growing body of literature that engages with failure as a way of knowing and understanding the social. Through a focus on images of sportswomen’s loss or failure in three Australian newspapers during the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games we analyzed affective-discourses and patterns in images and accompanying headlines, captions and stories to explore the place of loss in the narrative of mainstream sport reporting. Through this focus on loss we hoped to find points of disruption that might generate new conceptions of women in sport. What we found was that stories of loss in mainstream newspaper coverage reproduced transphobic, racist, nationalistic, ageist and sexist discourses. We conclude by calling for research that explores how athletes self-present their losses in digital platforms subjectively rather than being reported ‘on’.