The illegal transgression: discourse analysis of the media perception of the transgressive aesthetic of performance and display in top-level sports

Abstract

The debate over Caster Semenya’s female sex began shortly after the South African runner won gold in the women’s 800 m final at the 2009 Athletic World Championships in Berlin. Her victory was disputed by questioning her right to compete as a woman. Using the theoretical framework of gender and postcolonial theories and the methodology of discourse and dispositive analysis, the paper explores the contextualization of a perceived transgressive, aesthetic, performance and display in the field of top-level sports. The case study analyses the discourses surrounding a non-white, non-male South African runner in eight mainstream Swiss German language print media. The paper argues that the media response to Semenya exemplifies Butler’s claim that the discursive framework of gender constructs and naturalizes sex. A key question is, therefore, whether the assignation of deviant bodies to a ‘field of deformation’ works to pluralize and cross set gender boundaries, or rather, as Butler suggests, calls those bodies into question.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.