Abstract
Contributing to a growing yet underresearched area of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues in sport, this study interrogates news discourses of the most prominent American athletes coming-out stories to date: the National Basketball Association’s Jason Collins and the National Football League’s Michael Sam. Mainstream media narratives invoked an overall congratulatory tone, hailing these announcements as watershed moments while at the same time emphasizing athletes’ physicality and athleticism in ways that reinforced the hypermasculine. Journalists and opinion leaders celebrated these announcements while simultaneously relying on coded and overt homophobic labels and language. Media storytellers subsequently relied upon dualistic, self-contradictory binaries, highlighting the paradoxes implicit in celebrating increased gay visibility within the confines of a commercialized sports/media complex with heterosexuality and hypermasculinity at its core.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 249-271 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Journal of Communication Inquiry |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 1 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s) 2018.
Keywords
- coming-out narratives
- critical communication studies
- framing
- gay athletes
- news coverage
- sports and media
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Cultural Studies
- Communication
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)