"Fotboll är livet" : en medieetnografisk studie om fotbollstjejer och TV-sport

• Media represent a powerful institution in society reflecting dominant values in society and take part in socialization to gender roles for men and women. The gender discourses in society as well as in mass media are interrelated to a complex system of many parts in people’s every day lives (the family, the school, the peer group, boyfriends etc.). The study’s main focus is on how discourses in society and Sport Media offers different gender positions that young female football players use as tools when they as active subjects make meaning of their identities in a gender discourse of sport.In Sweden football is a well-represented sports in media as well as among a Swedish population of nearly 9 millions. The Swedish Football Association is the largest among the sports federations with more than 3.200 associated clubs consisting of more than 1 million active members where 20 % are females (The Swedish Sports Confederation www.rf.se). In media the most common sports is football and Television Channels with nationwide coverage produce more male sport than gendered mixed or female sport in all. Male and gendered mixed sport top the list of sports occurring on Television, as despite football, consists of ice hockey on second place, athletics on third, motor sports and skiing on fourth and fifth place. Popular female sports, that is sports dominated by women in Swedish sports federations, as gymnastics, equestrian and swimming, we find horse jumping on ninth place and swimming on eleventh but not gymnastics though it’s the second popular sports activity after football for females. Despite this when Germany and Sweden meet in Women’s World Cup Final in USA 2003 broadcasted by Swedish Channel 4, the match was followed by 3,5 million Swedish viewers. In the combined the annual audience rating 2003 on Television viewers in Sweden, this football match came second only beaten by The Swedish Trial Contest for Eurovision Song Contest. Other sports events positions on this annual list are far behind other popular TV-programs in Sweden as Donald Duck and Friends, a popular Disney production always sent on Christmas Eve and Swedish quizzes with popular program leaders (www.rf.se, www.svenskfotboll.se, www.mms.se). It has been said that Female Football reached a break trough 2003 in Sweden as a public popular sports event, and in 2004 spectators visiting But if this hints to better opportunities for more female football in the national media coverage, the male dominance still continues in media representations of sport. Even though female sport reporters and female sports appears in media more often than before, this suggests that Sport Media foremost is an interest only for a male viewer, but many women like sport on Television too. The question is what happens when teenaged girls (and boys) view mediated sport produced for male middle-aged adult audience groups? How does cultural meaning of generation, gender and social differences structure everyday life for a collective group as a female football team in how they construct and position them selves within a gendered discourse?  This brief summary reflects sports and media habits in the Swedish society and shows us the cultural importance of physical activities and media entertainment in our day-to-day lives. How the sport is represented through media reflect in certain ways our own picture of the concept sport, as well as sports is comprehended and valued on a cultural level. From a feminist perspective on the institutionalised power relations between media and culture the central question is how gender discourses negotiate meaning in society for men and women. The theoretical framework for feminist audience researchThe main theoretical perspectives used here are Stuart Halls reception model of the process of encoding and decoding media texts as meaningful TV-discourses, where viewers in terms of meaning structures approach the media. This model has developed by feminist media studies as power structures of gender discourses in production, content and reception (van Zoonen 1994:41f, Thornham 2000: 99). I will use this model to analyse female positions as gender discourses in a football team. The second perspective is a hermeneutic inspired approach supported by John B Thompson’s appropriation concept.The reception model suggests that even if media texts are framed in certain ways were a dominant power structure of gender representations are embedded; they are decoded by the audiences’ meaning structures in a social context with specific cultural and historical variations. The main point is that communication practices have to be understood in a wider context of social and cultural determinations, as context is both related to family matters and wider social relations. Instead of ideological power structures Hall emphasize the process of hegemony were three possible positions in the decoding process are offered to the viewers: a dominant /hegemonic, a negotiated and an oppositional position (Hall et al 1972/1992, van Zoonen 1994). By relate dominant structures to social processes in culture we can find different explanations. In one sense the media content offers a dominant/hegemonic female collective gender identity supported by the common western ideal for femininity, but in another sense the female gender identity expressed in this football culture by the female football players shows how the interpretation of media content adjust in a socio-historical context. Young females in a football club can negotiate or reject the offered media messages and construct other possible gender positions in their own socio-historical context. Appropriation is a concept that directs our attention to contextualise the process of reception as a cultural phenomenon, where macro structures of ideological power in society are interrelated with people’s ordinary lives and sense-making processes in their micro social world. This concept also helps us to direct our attention on combining the contexts of production, content and reception in order to analyse culture as meaning making processes. To appropriate is a cultural process were individuals use their available resources to make sense of media messages and adjust them to their social-historical context. Media products are an important part in how we create communication and shape our identities in modern society. The media stimulate to action and utterance as an active part in the formation of social reality. By following the content of sport in media, individuals actually can use that as information to guide their thoughts and actions in their own social context. The appropriations of symbolic forms in a social context are shared with other important individuals in every day communication (Thompson 1995:11f, 174f). In modern society collective identities are complex and culturally constructed in various ways. Media, as part of popular culture, have a particularly important role in the construction and mediation of different expressions and styles of identities. In one sense mass media serves us with a multiplicity of possible identities, free for any individual to pick up and adjust for individual needs in a social context outside the media content. In another sense we must also relate this to some of the important power structures in the organization of media production and content of Sport Media in order to show how mediated symbolic forms adjust in a cultural context by active meaning making subjects. (These structures are often referred to as the Media-Sport-Complex where the analyses of global power relations are connected to perspectives on political economy and culture. See Miller at al.2001, Roche 2000, Boyle & Haynes 2000). In relation to this study the football-playing girls have opportunities to choose what ever sport they like on a theoretical level, but on a social level they adjust to the cultural context they live in, where football for men and women are considered as two separate spheres, supported by the Sport Media content.The Sport Media’s gender representations divides sports in a female and male sphere according to gendered stereotyped structures in society, where team sports as football or ice hockey are dominated by men, and individual sports as gymnastic or figure skating are dominated by women. These stereotypes are structured within ideological representations of gendered positions for masculinity and femininity that are bound to social-historical context that changes over time. The framed structure in media texts function as ideologies but at the same time hegemony according to Hall rather suggests possibilities for opposition and social change since the production of cultural meaning always is open to contestation from below (Hall 1972/1992: 136ff).  The positions suggested here are considered as gendered ideal types not existing in reality. Rather they show how complex constructions of gender identities are and how the girls in this study reflect and move between discourses and different gender positions. The dominant/hegemonic ideal for femininity concerns appearance and beauty accepted as normal standards for females, and are reproduced in many social spheres of which mass media is one of the main messengers. The negotiated position acknowledges and adjusts the offered dominant feminine ideal to own experiences and social situation. The oppositional position recognizes the dominant feminine ideal but due to other experiences or social situation this position rejects and question the proposed ideal with skepticism (Thornham 2000: 100).But if media discourses reflect dominant values in society there is another standard to consider for the constructions of gender in sports. The commonly hegemonic gender ideals are reflecting dominant gender values that in part passes over to sport, where masculine and feminine ideals for physical body appearance distinguish between gender and between spor

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

sportkultur

medier

genusdiskurs

Media and Communication Science

Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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