In an online book review, titled “Women’s sports in the media: From ‘sex sells’ to ‘feminism sells’,” the Nordic Sport Science Forum has reviewed Dr. Dunja Antunovic and Dr. Cheryl Cooky‘s (Purdue) groundbreaking book, “Serving equality: Feminism, media and women’s sport,” published by the Peter Lang Group in the fall of 2022. Antunovic is an assistant professor of sport sociology in the School of Kinesiology, and an affiliated scholar in the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport.

The reviewer discusses the authors’ argument that traditional ways of analyzing media coverage of men’s sports result in missed opportunities to examine how feminism shapes women’s sport media narratives. It is noted that the authors seek to explore where feminism occurs in media spaces and they call for new methodological and theoretical approaches that do not just focus on inequalities in sports media but also look for where feminism occurs in these spaces. Using case studies, the book explores the articulations of feminism in sports media, sports broadcasting, coverage of the Olympic Games, athlete activism, promotional culture, women’s sports films, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women’s sports. Antunovic and Cooky explore how academic narratives shape how the media discuss issues and inequalities and challenge readers to view the topic differently. Finally, the book seeks to tell stories differently and provide a more critical feminist narrative that investigates persisting gender inequality.

Quotes from the review include:

The book achieves its goal of ‘telling stories differently’ and provides a comprehensive review of the literature in the field.

It challenges us all to think differently about how we approach analysing media narratives of women’s sports and being more critical in our approaches.

See also previous post on this publication: “Antunovic’s book featured at annual North American Society for the Sociology of Sport conference“