Serving Equality: Feminism, Media, and Women’s Sports

Serving Equality: Feminism, Media, and Women’s Sports offers a much-needed methodological innovation to sports media research by expanding the focus beyond traditional sports media outlets to examine the diversity of media outlets writing about sports. In doing so, Serving Equality draws analytical attention to the ways in which feminism and feminist principles such as equality, progress, empowerment, and intersectionality shape media narratives of women’s sports. With a focus on networked sports media spaces, including news coverage, promotional cultures, and sports films, chapters examine narratives of Title IX, the Olympics, the treatment of women sports journalists, the activism of women athletes, the routine coverage of the sports world, as well as the COVID-19 global pandemic. Serving Equality illustrates how feminism informs not only the media narratives of women’s sports, but how women’s sports contribute to and mobilize feminism in networked media spaces. Serving Equality ultimately encourages students, instructors, researchers, athletes, sport media content producers, and those in the sports industry to consider the ways we can tell stories differently about sportswomen and women’s sports.