Femininity, Childhood and the Non-Making of a Sporting Celebrity: The Beth Tweddle Case

Abstract

This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Gymnastics is regularly classified as a feminine-appropriate sport, embodying grace and elegance. Furthermore, it is the Olympic sport which has regularly produced female sporting celebrities. Beth Tweddle is the most successful British gymnast of all time and the first to achieve international success, culminating in a medal at London 2012, yet she has received relatively little media coverage and few corporate endorsements. Employing a 'negative case' methodology, this athlete's relative lack of celebrity is investigated. The article suggests that it can be explained by a) contradictions underpinning the gender-designation of gymnastics, and b) the relative invisibility of a core audience for the sport: young girls. An implication is that the achievement of celebrity within 'feminine' sport may be increasingly unattainable, especially for female athletes. The article uses mixed methods, including primary analysis of print and social media and secondary analysis of a national survey of young people in the UK. Permanent repository link

The Role of Setting in the Field: The Positioning of Older Bodies in the Field of Elite Women’s Gymnastics

“…The lack of youthfulness in older female athletes has been interpreted as a ‘double barrier’ (Pfister, 2012: 369) for women’s participation in competitive sport. For example, Cohen (2013), in her article on Beth Tweddle, aged 27 at the 2012 Olympic Games, asked why Tweddle received so little in the way of media coverage despite being a multiple World Championship medal winner and an Olympic bronze medallist. She speculated that Tweddle did not fit the feminine ideal commonly associated with gymnastics by being insufficiently attractive and too old.…”

“…Yet, in contrast to the suggestion that age is a barrier, Eagleman et al (2014) examined media coverage from the 1980s and determined that journalists have shifted their emphasis on gymnasts as little girls to applaud the older gymnasts appearing on the scene from the 2000s. While Cohen’s (2013) and Eagleman et al’s (2014) research provides some understanding of how the changing, older gymnastics body is depicted, presented and constructed by the media, there has to date been no research examining the gymnasts’ and other key stakeholders’ understandings of the mature gymnastics body.…”

Smiling assassins, brides-to-be and super mums: the importance of gender and celebrity in media framing of female athletes at the 2016 Olympic Games

“…The troubling and complex aspects of female sporting celebrity are illustrated in Cohen's (2013) discussion of Beth Tweddle, Britain's most successful gymnast. Cohen considers the relative absence of celebrity in relation to Tweddle, and discusses why some sportspeople receive little social recognition.…”

“…As a highly consistent and successful athlete in a feminine-appropriate sport, Tweddle appears to be the epitome of media-friendly female athleticism, yet she received minimal coverage over the course of her career, especially in relation to other less successful female athletes, and had few high profile sponsorship or media roles. Cohen (2013) suggests that Tweddle's non-celebrity was due to her physical strength and technical abilities, and her misalignment with normative ideals of femininity in and beyond gymnastics. Consequently Tweddle did not embody the type of corporeal femininity valued in women who achieve celebrity (Edwards, 2013).…”

“…Her status was thus limited by the gendering of celebrity in relation to both production and consumption (Edwards, 2013). Tweddle's fan base is strongest with little girls, who are marginalised and virtually invisible in sports media terms, as they have little economic or sporting capital, and consequently she received little media interest and support (Cohen, 2013). The case of Tweddle thus illustrates many of the complexities and contradictions inherent in female sporting celebrity, where success is not enough to guarantee exposure and popularity.…”