Shame, pain and fame: sportswomen losing in Australia’s mainstream media reporting

Abstract

This article adds to a growing body of literature that engages with failure as a way of knowing and understanding the social. Through a focus on images of sportswomen's loss or failure in three Australian newspapers during the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games we analyzed affective-discourses and patterns in images and accompanying headlines, captions and stories to explore the place of loss in the narrative of mainstream sport reporting. Through this focus on loss we hoped to find points of rapture that might generate new conceptions of women in sport. What we found was that stories of loss in mainstream newspaper coverage reproduced transphobic, racist, nationalistic, ageist, and sexist discourses. We conclude calling for research that explores how athletes self-present their losses in digital platforms subjectively rather than being reported 'on'.

Ways to write an academic life: Queering the academic curriculum vitae

“…Behind a strong culture of excellence is an aversion to failure and mistakes, with stories of failure only articulated within the discourse of success. Outside of this narrative of success looms the discomfort of failure and losing, but failure can be a productive orientation for understanding the dynamics of gendered power relations (Pavlidis, 2013, Pavlidis et al, 2020). In the Queer Art of Failure , Halberstam dismantles the logics of success and failure in which we currently live.…”