Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

The use of social media in professional women's football: what are the perspectives?

Résumé

Our research focuses on the contemporary forms of communication that characterise women's football. While "women's" football has been invisible or anecdotal (Author, 2010, 2018), there is now a diversity of means of communication, particularly since the advent of the Internet, which makes this practice more visible. However, even if female footballers are now admitted into practice (Rowe & Brown, 2006; Ravel & Gareu, 2012; Rowe & Brown, 2006), their recognition (Honneth, 2013) remains controversial, given their low presence compared to men in the public space, and particularly in media communication. Beyond the question of visibility in relation to men, one of the recurring issues is the survival of stereotypes in football (Hekma, 1998; Caudwell, 1999; Menneson & Clement, 2003, Harris, 2005; Menneson & Clement, 2003). Because Internet platforms allow a high visibility and a certain interaction (Nilizadeh et al, 2016; Locke at al. 2018 ), our question is to know how this mode of communication contributes to changing this logic or not? In other words, how do social media change or not the gender representations conveyed through women's football ? We are interested in the professional practice of women's football in France. It is important to note that the number of professional players remains limited. In fact, it is a small group in the sense of Didier Anzieu (2014) both because they are few in number and because they focus a certain attention that positions them, to their defending body, as figures representative of the practice in general. Apart from institutional communication, it is interesting to understand how these actresses are staged and what types of images of women's practice are transferred through them. Following the work that has been done on analyzing new forms of communication in the public sphere and in particular the struggles for forms of recognition of actors (Honneth, 2013; Fraser, 2001) and on putting into perspective gender logics in the media treatment of sportswomen (Montanola, 2014), our study is part of a sociological and communicative approach to the Internet use (Beuscart, Dagiral and Parasse, 2016) in women's football development. The survey will be based on a netnographic approach to a selection of the personal accounts social networks of professional female football players. Particular attention will be paid to the most active Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. The netnographic observation will be completed by semi-directive interviews with the players whose accounts will be investigated or with any actors involved in their communication (agents, community manager, communication department...). The results will be based on a retrospective analysis over the duration of a championship year in 2019. Both a quantitative analysis of the recurrences of publications and a semantic analysis of their respective contents will be carried out to understand whether and how gender dimensions are present. We will capture the point of view of the players but also of the actors or communication experts in order to understand the role and impact of this mode of communication on the gendered representations of women's football.

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Dates et versions

hal-04750907 , version 1 (24-10-2024)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04750907 , version 1

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Marie-Stéphanie Abouna, Magdalena Zmuda Palka. The use of social media in professional women's football: what are the perspectives?. Summit on Communication and Sport 2020, Mar 2021, St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. ⟨hal-04750907⟩
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