When commencing my master’s dissertation, I knew I wanted to investigate media representations of female AFL players. I was curious to know how journalists portrayed the new women’s league, and how their messages were being conveyed in their reporting. I had a notion of analysing for appraisal, but I also wanted to avoid ‘cherry-picking’ examples for text analysis. Like Georgia Carr and Lauren Robertson, I therefore decided to combine corpus linguistics with text analysis of appraisal. A corpus-based approach meant that I could identify patterns across a wider data set, and then use those results to guide selection of texts for further analysis.
To create a specialised corpus, I collected 235 articles about AFLW from the Herald Sun for a 12-month period (June 2016 – March 2017). This period captured both the announcement of the new league and three months after the inaugural season had finished. I also used a reference corpus of general Australian news (a subset of NOW) for comparison.
Using keyword analysis, I compared the AFLW corpus to the NOW corpus. I then categorised the keyword results using four broad categories (Table 1) corresponding to dominant patriarchal discourses previously identified in sports news reporting: objectification, trivialisation, gender stereotyping, and gendered othering. For example, keywords related to body parts and appearance (e.g. hands, pretty) were initially categorised as potential objectification, and keywords related to domestic roles (e.g. mum, daughter, father, dad, parents) or emotions were categorised as potential stereotyping.
Then, using the concordance tool, I went to the co-text to understand how these words were being used. For example, the keyword pretty was always used as an intensifier, and thus provided no evidence of objectification. In fact, the text analysis revealed no evidence of overt objectification for any of the identified keywords. There was, however, some evidence of stereotyping (through focus on domestic roles and emotions), trivialisation (through the use of girls), and othering (through gender marking). Instead of being stereotyped in domestic roles as wives and mothers, these athletes were instead positioned as daughters to their usually famous fathers (Figure 1). However, this was combined with a more positive – and less stereotypical – portrayal of these women as strong and tough athletes who had talent and skills on the field.
The text analysis also revealed consistent evaluation – both positive and negative – of players’ abilities and performances. While some level of evaluation in sports reporting is expected, this evaluation was frequently presented through comparison to male players and the men’s game. This pattern of comparison was prevalent throughout the corpus, where female players were consistently held up against their male counterparts (and in some cases, young boys) and generally falling short of the mark (e.g. the women won’t be as good as the men; picks are not as valuable in the AFLW as in the men’s league). This finding is the most problematic, as it continues to frame the AFL sporting space as male, thereby positioning the men’s game as the ideal and ‘better’ version of AFL.
You can read more about this research in my masters dissertation, available in the Sydney University Library repository.