Advertising the 2015 Cricket World Cup

Abstract

Intersectional accounts of how women sports fans from diverse cultural backgrounds are represented remain largely unconsidered in fandom literature. This article examines an Australian advertisement for the 2015 Cricket World Cup, which features as its main protagonists female cricket fans supporting a variety of countries. It makes use of a transnational feminist cultural studies paradigm to frame a discussion of how commercial sports media narratives situate these fans as “ordinary.” In considering how the multicultural female sports fan is configured as ordinary in the Australian sporting context, I demonstrate the ways in which narratives of gender and nation are mobilized to situate multicultural women as marginal to both the Australian nation and cricket, despite the prominence given to ethnically diverse women in the advertisement. This manoeuvre, I argue, responds to the cultural and economic transformations of cricket globally, simultaneously denying and universalizing difference as a mechanism to assuage the anxieties generated by the decentering of Western power in international cricket.

How Nissin Represented Naomi Osaka: Race, Gender, and Sport in Japanese Advertising

“…Intersectional and transnational feminist critiques of the advertisements allow us to critically interrogate how representations of Osaka manifest interlocking oppressions of race, gender, and nation as well as mechanisms that “attend to racialized, classed, masculinized, and heteronormative logics and practices of globalization and capitalist patriarchies, and the multiple ways in which they (re)structure colonial and neocolonial relations of domination and subordination” (Nagar & Swarr, 2010, p. 5). Sports is not outside of these paradigms as scholars have used intersectional and transnational feminist approaches to study running magazine covers (Seyidoglu et al, 2021) and culturally diverse female cricket fans (Toffoletti, 2017). Following these scholars, an intersectional and transnational feminist focus is useful for thinking about how representations of multiracial sportswomen like Osaka can ripple through netizens and supporters in Japan and around the world, inciting new and existing discourses about race, gender, and nation.…”

Looks, Liveliness, and Laughter: Visual Representations in Commercial Sports for Children

“…Her studies display how notions of race in various advertisements are manifested by the depiction of White children and families and that traditional gender and family norms are pervasive. In critical market research, it is argued that race plays an ideological role in markets worldwide, and racial dynamics are a central part of contemporary postcolonial marketplace practices, such as target marketing, advertising, marketing communications, service delivery, and consumer profiling (Grier et al, 2019;Ho & Tanaka, 2021;Mocarski & Billings, 2014;Poole, et al, 2021;Toffoletti, 2017). Using the notion of epidermal racial schema, Fanon described how human skin color communicates differently depending on which skin color a person has (Borgerson & Schroder, 2018;Fanon, 1967Fanon, /2008.…”

“…In addition, his work also pointed at the interrelated nature of sport, gender, race, and commodification, which could be seen in marketing strategies, for example, by Nike (see also McKay, 1995). This interrelation has been expanded on more recently by others who have shown a blend of representational characteristics (Gee, 2015;Ho & Tanaka, 2021;Horne, 2006;Jackson & Andrews, 2005;Mocarski & Billings, 2014;Toffoletti, 2017). For example, to reach a new female audience for the 2015 Cricket World Cup, advertisements were to promote an idea of cricket as inclusive and transnational, but instead, a particular idea of Australianness as White and male was conveyed.…”

“…For example, to reach a new female audience for the 2015 Cricket World Cup, advertisements were to promote an idea of cricket as inclusive and transnational, but instead, a particular idea of Australianness as White and male was conveyed. Toffoletti (2017) argued that representations of skin color, hair, facial features, and gender contributed to this idea, together with old colonial logics of masculinity and White supremacy.…”

Consumption attachments of Brazilian fans of the National Football League

“…Sports are one of the most important modern entertainments, because they are massively mediated, but no longer limited by physical and geographical constraints. In addition, they also disseminate characteristics of the culture they are inserted in (Jackson, 2014; Toffoletti, 2015). According to Whannel (2014), sports can be divided into two categories: practice sports, which has popular commotion and a significant number of practitioners in a given place or culture, and media sports, which is popularized by worldwide broadcasts and has repercussion among viewers.…”