When Women Fail to “Hold Up More Than Half the Sky”

Abstract

Communist beliefs on gender equality and Chinese female athletes’ consistent ability to win national glory have lead to female athletes in Chinese sports media being primarily portrayed as legitimate athletes akin to levels of male athletes. This study examines such assumptions within Chinese Central Television’s (CCTV) 2016 Olympic telecast of gymnastics, a sport in which Chinese female athletes failed to attain national expectations, exploring potential variations of gendered frames in Chinese sports culture. A full examination of 100% (over 14 hr) of CCTV’s broadcast coverage revealed that female athletes received less media attention in terms of clock time and name mentions. Regarding word-by-word commentary ascribed to the gymnasts, CCTV employees significantly devoted more descriptors related to personality and physicality to female athletes, indicating a noticeable deviation from the Chinese traditional gendered frame of depicting female athletes as tenacious fighters with their nonsport-related aspects rarely covered. Implications for the findings are offered.

Covering the Home Nation at Its Home Games: An Analysis of Australian Nationalistic Broadcast Coverage of the 2018 Commonwealth Games

“…Thus, there appears to be a high level of favoritism toward home athletes from the broadcaster. Similar findings were found by Xu et al (2018), who analyzed the Chinese coverage of the entire gymnastics events at the Rio Olympics and found that 40% of the top-20 mostmentioned athletes were Chinese, despite China only sending 10 of the 196 gymnasts to the Olympics. The metrics of name mentions have also been used to analyze nationalistic favoritism in the Canadian context, where all of the top-20 most-mentioned athletes were Canadian (Angelini et al, 2017).…”

“…Many studies have been conducted on the coverage of major sporting events and have found that home broadcasters will focus more of their coverage on athletes from the home nation (Angelini et al, 2017; Billings et al, 2017). The narrativization of the home nation pervades media outlets globally, from the United States (Billings et al, 2017), to Canada (Angelini et al, 2017), to China (Xu et al, 2018), to Australia (Eagleman et al, 2014; Scott & Kunkel, 2016), and others (Li et al, 2016; Xu & Billings, 2020). Further, Billings and Hundley (2009) suggested that the feelings of nationalism can be a stimulus for consumers to watch sports, even sporting events that they would generally not consume.…”

“…In terms of the description of personality or physicality by announcers of elite athletes, previous research has found that broadcasters tend to describe home athletes as more outgoing or extroverted, both globally (Billings et al, 2017; Ličen & Billings, 2013) and in Australia (Scott et al, 2020). Yet, there is an example where foreign athletes were described as modest or introverted in the analysis of the gymnastics events at the 2016 Rio Olympics in the Chinese coverage (Xu et al, 2018). In analyses of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Australian newspapers, online websites, and broadcasts of these games indicated that the storylines were closely linked to national ideology and favored Australian athletes (Rowe et al, 2010), while Scott and Kunkel (2016) found that Australian newspapers published more pictures of Australian athletes compared to foreign athletes.…”

A dialectical-relational approach to anti-trans sentiments on Hupu

“…Research has demonstrated that China's sports media tend to sexualise female athletes when they do not deliver expected results. This is most tellingly evidenced by their coverage of the Chinese women's gymnastics team at the 2016 Olympics, in which female athletes' failures are interpreted as a result of their "biologically determined" weaknesses (Xu et al, 2018). The gendered nature of China's sports nationalism is consistent with the male monopoly of political discourses in wider society (Fang and Repnikova, 2018).…”

Two Sides of the Chinese Sports Media Story: Contrasting State-Owned and Commercially Sponsored Chinese Websites by Nation and Sex of Athlete

“…Analyzing the media coverage of Li Na-a Chinese female tennis player who is the first and only Grand Slam singles champion from Asia, Xu (2016) suggested that Li Na's identity as a wife and her dependence on her husband were particularly emphasized. Xu, Billings, and Fan (2018) analyzed CCTV's broadcast of gymnastics in the 2016 Rio Olympics, suggesting that female athletes received less media attention compared to their male counterparts, also uncovering that CCTV depicted female Olympic gymnasts in more gender stereotypical terms.…”