ABSTRACT
This chapter examines transgression and image repair for a prominent woman in US professional sport, soccer's Abby Wambach. It looks at how Wambach was constructed by social media users upon her retirement from professional play in late 2015 and consider how these constructions shifted following a transgression. Benoit's image repair theory (IRT) has been the primary theoretical tool to date for scholars who examine how athletes work to redress reputational damage after a transgression. Essentially, social media are apt at capturing the before and after of transgression that allows for nuanced analyses of image repair's effectiveness. The lack of research on women athletes and image repair is notable for several reasons. For one, public responses to transgression vary by the gender of the athlete. Women are often subject to added scrutiny for transgression compared to men, as many legal and social transgressions are also at the same time a violation of gender expectations.
