ABSTRACT
Sport is a powerful cultural site for the construction of significant fundamental identities and discourses. Amongst these, gender, sexuality and race are notable social categories and forms of knowledge and understandings that are both embedded in and arise from sport as a social and cultural site. Since sport is now predominantly consumed as media by mass audiences and dedicated fans, sport-media (or rather its producers) effectively serve as powerful gatekeepers of the meanings, understandings, and memberships of the categories of sport that have implications for wider society. Essentially sport-media has become influential in the construction and reproduction of key socio-cultural formations such as gender. It is therefore problematic that mainstream sport-media continues to produce and reproduce (re/produce) discourses that value and privilege traditional white, hypermasculine, heterosexualized male formations. Indeed the cultural familiarity and naturalization ofgendered and racialized sport-media representational practices comprises a significant element of the processes through which their impact, power, and wider social significance remain invisible and deniable (Foucault, 1972). However, the recent rise of digital sport-media as a pivotal form of mass consumption has added new dimensions within which the impact of sport, sport-media, and the gendered practices embedded within these formations need to be understood and scrutinized.
