The Skirtboarders, a Montreal-based crew of female skateboarders, purposely challenge discourses of femininity through an Internet skateboarding blog. Interviews with crew members reveal the similarity between their sporting and Internet practices and processes that Foucault (1986, p. 28) referred to as “self-formation as an ‘ethical subject’”. We draw on the four aspects that Foucault outlined by which an individual constitutes herself as an ethical subject—ethical substance, mode of subjection, ethical work and telos—to analyze the Skirtboarders’ reflexivity and critical engagement through their skateboarding blogging experiences. The results illustrate how sportswomen-driven forms of social media can become a means of individualized and collective ethical transformation.

By creating and posting their own stories on the Internet, sportswomen are able to challenge the persistent, sexist, mainstream and alternative (skateboarding) media (re)presentations of female athletes. A Foucauldian discourse analysis of 262 posts of the Skirtboarders' blog -a Montreal-based, Canadian female skateboarding crew's Internet project -explores the ways in which a group of sportswomen circulate alternative discourses of femininity. In these (re) presentations, the Skirtboarders embrace various femininities and, at the same time, reject binaries (male/female) without explicitly claiming a feminist agenda or attaching themselves to other oppositional discourses. This indicates a third-wave feminist sensibility. The Skirtboarders reproduce some normative discursive fragments commonly found in media (re)presentations. Furthermore, they post links to mainstream and alternative media coverage of their crew, which at times reflects the 'problems' of historical media coverage (sexualization, marginalization and trivialization). However, most of their online productions portray them as polygendered skaters (action shots, skating activities and lifestyle) and are thus radically different. The Skirtboarders' discursive portrayals of female skateboarders are therefore uniquely alternative to other media (re)presentations but at the same time, paradoxical.

This study examined the coverage of women's and men's varsity sport teams in the English- and French-language student newspapers at the University of Ottawa, Canada, during three academic years from 2004 to 2007. The analysis revealed unique findings, considering that previous research on campus print media had shown an enduring disparity of coverage featuring female athletes. In contrast, our descriptive statistics exposed few differences in the number or length of published articles and photographs of male and female athletes. In fact, female athletes tended to receive more coverage. Men's sports, however, were featured more often on the front page of the newspapers. A textual analysis of the coverage shows that sportswomen were not sexualized and were rarely trivialized. In general, rather than representing sportswomen as gendered subjects, the student-run newspapers discursively constructed them as `just athletes'.

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This article reconsiders the Skirtboarders' blog, produced by a crew of female skateboarders, as a space where crew members attempt to reflexively start a movement and, in doing so, construct and circulate a wider collective identity (Taylor & Whittier, 1992). Through a discourse analysis of blog comments and user interviews, we attempt to understand how young women who visit the blog interpret (re)presentations of female skateboarders and whether they become engaged in the movement to promote skateboarding among women. Do they adopt this collective subjectivity? While the analysis suggests that they do feel part of the movement, it raises the issue of blog user access to the more specific "Skirtboarder" identity.