Who speaks on footballers and sexual assault? A gender analysis of sports reporting

The recent spate of sexual assault allegations made against Australian Football League (AFL) players has generated intense media scrutiny and public concern. Following from similar highly publicised allegations directed at the National Rugby League, these incidents have engendered significant debates around sexism and football culture in the popular press. It is the media&rsquo;s response to allegations of sexual assault made against AFL footballers that will be analysed here. This study offers a content analysis of articles from the sport sections of two major Australian newspapers, The Age and the Herald-Sun, with the aim of assessing the prevalence of women&rsquo;s perspectives on the issue of player misconduct and whether the gender of the reporter has any bearing on gender stereotyping in sport reporting. By assessing how the phenomenon of player misconduct has been covered in sport news, this paper evaluates the media&rsquo;s role in changing dominant attitudes and perceptions of gender relations in Australian society.<br /

Catastrophic subjects: feminism, the posthuman, and difference

This article considers the question of difference in posthuman representations, through an interrogation of feminist reclamations of monstrous and cyborg forms. Through a critical analysis of the popular culture phenomenon Marilyn Manson, I pursue an alternative engagement with hybrid forms that disrupts the oppositional structuring of self/Other relations upon which a politics of identity and difference gains currency. Theories of the monstrous, Jean Baudrillard\u27s writing on catastrophe, and digital morphing are explored to interrogate established understandings of difference within the context of a simulation culture that complicates the binaries of gender difference. Theorizing the posthuman subject as catastrophic occasions new imaginings for the subject that reside beyond the fixity of signifying practice.<br /

Gossip Girls in a Transmedia World: The Sexual and Technological Anxieties of Integral Reality

The proliferation of sexualised imagery of children and adolescents – especially girls – within media and advertising has elicited considerable public debate and academic discussion within Australia and overseas. Within these debates, girls are commonly configured as being ‘at risk’, that is, in danger of being sexualised, objectified and exploited. They are said to be in danger of growing up believing that popularity and success are tied to sexual appeal (Durham 2008; Reist 2008; Rush and La Nauze 2006). Books for young people are not exempt from these critiques, with children’s literature implicated in the agendas of mainstream consumer culture (Kline 1993). A case in point is Cecily von Ziegesar’s hugely popular Gossip Girl series, which has come under fire, most notably by American feminist Naomi Wolfe (2006) in a review essay for the New York Times. Wolfe criticises the books, and others like them, for fostering the sexualisation of young women through the championing of sex, shopping and status as the pathways to social approval and personal fulfillment for teenage girls. While acknowledging an established history of texts that grapple with the dilemmas of adolescence – including themes of sexual exploration and identification – Wolfe insists that these newer versions of the genre are not in keeping with ‘the frank sexual exploration found in a Judy Blume novel’, but instead present us with ‘teenage sexuality via Juicy Couture, blasé and entirely commodified’ (Wolfe 2006)

Oh yes, he is hot : female football fans and the sexual objectification of sportsmen’s bodies

The past decade has witnessed a growing focus on the study of women sports fans within the social sciences and related disciplines. Emerging from and responding to the historical marginalization of women in sport and the bias towards the male fan in literature on sports spectatorship, critical research on women spectators serves the valuable function of illuminating &ldquo;women&rsquo;s everyday experiences of being a sports fan&rdquo; (Gosling 2007: 250). This chapter considers one aspect of women&rsquo;s participation as followers of male sports, namely, the extent to which female fans partake in the sexual objectification of sportsmen. We aim to assess how looking at male athletes in sexually desiring ways impacts on the individual and collective construction of women&rsquo;s gender and sports fan identities

The place of scandal : Lara Bingle and Brendan Fevola

Over the period of a few short weeks in 2010 Australian media coverage and public discussion was dominated by news of a &lsquo;sex scandal&rsquo; involving two high-profile celebrities &ndash; Lara Bingle (model and then fianc&eacute;e of the vice-captain of the Australian cricket team Michael Clarke), and the Australian rules football &lsquo;bad boy&rsquo; Brendan Fevola. The scandal began with the publication of a pixellated photograph in the popular Australian women&rsquo;s magazine, Woman&rsquo;s Day, of a naked and apparently unconsenting Bingle in the shower, which was allegedly taken by Fevola during a brief affair years previously and distributed via his mobile phone.&nbsp;This article examines the constructions of women&rsquo;s sexuality, gender and celebrity scandal in mainstream media coverage of this event. Attending to the Australian news media&rsquo;s discursive constructions of Bingle&rsquo;s sexual behaviour, this research begins to map the ways in which celebrity scandals in the mainstream media provoke wider debate about &lsquo;gender appropriate&rsquo; conduct (sexual and otherwise).<br /