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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 377

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Counter-ideological gender performances of female tennis players

Authors: Sznycer, Karolina
Submitted by: Sznycer, Karolina (School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland)

The major focus of the presentation is on the subversive process of institutional identity construction in the highly resistant discourse of female tennis players framed within the genre of a post-match press conference. It is posited that female tennis players’ performances illustrate Butler’s concept of ‘neither/nor’ gender identity (Butler 1990) reliant on the transformative deformation of canonical gender attributes. The innovative discourse of female players is juxtaposed against the saliently gendered discourses of sport and sport media. Other significant sociocultural frames of reference for players’ performances include the stereotypical discourses of femininity and masculinity and the construction of ambiguous and ambivalent institutional identities in professional settings as proposed by a variety of language and gender researchers (Holmes and Stubbe 2003; Martin Rojo and Gomez-Esteban 2005; Marra et al. 2006; Mullany 2007; Baxter 2008). Owing to the specificity of the analytical material, this paper employs the descriptive categories of performance art and transposes them upon Butler’s proposition of (gender) identity as performance. In addition, it utilizes Fairclough’s concept of recontextualization deriving from dialectical, critical discourse analysis.