Misogynoir in women’s sport media: race,nation,and diaspora in the representation of Naomi Osaka

Abstract

Overt and subtle misogynoir (anti-Black misogyny) pervade sport and sport media, as women in the Black diaspora are rarely in control of sporting regulations or their media representations. One recourse racialized athletes have at their disposal, however, is active resistance. This paper provides a textual analysis of the intolerable misogynoir aimed at tennis professional Naomi Osaka, and key moments in her media (mis)representations. Results revealed three main themes: (1) ongoing misogynoir and colorism of sport media and athlete sponsors; (2) racial, national and diaspora media (mis)representations; and (3) resistance to gendered racism through self-representation. After Osaka’s historic win at the 2018 US Open, narratives of her Japanese nationality and Asian identity became the story that rendered her Blackness invisible, and enabled her to be read against her opponent Serena Williams. Some information and communication technologies (ICTs), including social media, presented counter-narratives and a recognition of the mainstream media vilification and erasure of Black women. At times, ICTs disrupted racist dominant narratives, and counter-narratives of Osaka’s Blackness and position as part of the Haitian jaspora (diaspora) prevailed.

Keywords

diaspora Haiti Japan misogynoir race social media sport media tennis women

Introduction

In 2018, Women’s Tennis Association player Naomi Osaka had been largely unnoticed by mainstream media, despite accumulating impressive wins, including capturing her first Premier Mandatory event in March at the Indian Wells Open. In September 2018, millions from around the world intently watched Naomi Osaka (ranked 21st) face off against Serena Williams (ranked 8th) at the US Open women’s single finals. Toward the end of the match, Williams became upset with what she viewed as unfair and sexist umpiring: the Chair Umpire, Carlos Ramos, called her for receiving coaching hand signals during a match and consequently removed a point from her score. Williams repeatedly demanded an apology from Ramos for his accusation of cheating. He then further penalized Williams by awarding an entire game to Osaka. Controversy ensued throughout the remainder of the match. Osaka won and was thrust into the media spotlight. It was not her talent that made headlines, however.

A number of studies on Serena Williams (Douglas, 2002, 2012; Ifekwunigwe, 2018; Rankine, 2014) demonstrate the perpetual discrimination she experiences as a professional tennis player. The rise in global popularity and unquestionable weight of Williams’ persona also catapulted Osaka to gain celebrity status, including scrutinization. The US open is the most watched Grand Slam tournament and Williams has won six times – not without controversy (Rankine, 2014). Williams led the Women’s Tennis Association in fines issued, by a massive margin, in comparison to her male and female counterparts (N.A, 2012). Williams is arguably the most prominent female athlete of the recent generation and continues to be one of the highest earning athletes in the world. Being an American, the crowd, the United States, and undoubtedly most of the world were rooting for Serena Williams, not her opponent Naomi Osaka. It is in this context that Osaka won the 2018 US Open.

Osaka is of Haitian and Japanese heritage, born in Japan, but was relocated to the United States for training at the age of three. She plays professionally for Japan, making her a nikkei (Japanese migrant) and jaspora (Haitian diaspora) celebrity of global renown. Osaka’s association with both the Japanese and Haitian diasporas, along with her United States domicile, has resulted in contradictory media representations of her race as Asian, White, mixed or, less often, as Black. At times, her Haitian identity is embraced, but more often it is erased and she is represented as Japanese. This paper analyses key moments in the media (mis)representations of Naomi Osaka.

For many decades, scholars focused on sports (e.g. Birrell, 1989; McDonald and Birrell, 1999; Ratna and Sami, 2017) have called for deep intersectional analyses of athletes. More specifically, Joseph (2017) and Mwaniki (2017) claim what is necessary is to consider the cultural, national, gendered, and experiential intersections of Black athletes from across multiple diasporas. Mwaniki (2017: 156) directs us to “include people of color on the spectrum of Blackness who face racism (such as Latinos, Asians, American Indians, Asian Indians, and Arabs).” Investigations of sport media with a cultural feminist lens continues to reveal the predominance of sexist, homophobic, and racist tropes (Hylton, 2008; Thorpe, 2017). However, this literature mainly reproduces Black/White binaries and has failed to take account of diasporic, Asian, and multi-racial identities.

This case study draws attention to visual and textual representations of Naomi Osaka from August 2018 to September 2019, in a broad range of media sources, from mainstream United States news outlets, to international popular sources, to Osaka’s own self-representation through social media. Starting with her win at the US Open, we draw on these sources to show (1) Osaka performs and authenticates multiple, hybrid, cultural, diasporic, and racial identities, including identifying as a Black Haitian; (2) Osaka is (mis)represented in the mainstream media that relies on misogynoir tactics – that is, the reproduction of stereotypes of, jokes about, and erasure of Black women (Bailey and Trudy, 2018); and (3) Osaka complicates gendered racial representation through the self-authorship available through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) including social media.

Naomi Osaka, diaspora, and hybridized identities

Osaka’s Haitian father, Leonard Francois, was inspired by father-coach Richard Williams’ training regimens for Serena and Venus Williams. Francois eventually relocated the family to Broward County in Florida, an area with a thriving Haitian population, French Creole as the third-most common language after English and Spanish, and proximity to well-known tennis training opportunities (Farzan, 2018; Larmer, 2018). When Naomi and her sister Mari, dual citizens of Japan and United States, turned professional in 2013, their father made a choice largely motivated by economic opportunity, that his daughters would represent Japan nationally. Japan has fewer female tennis players than the United States and in a geo-political sport system that ranks nations, professional national affiliation is a form of symbolic capital. This decision and her subsequent athletic success, firmly planted Osaka as a visible and prestigious member of the Japanese diaspora, perfectly positioning her for lucrative deals with international, Japanese-rooted companies including Nissin noodles, Nissan Motor, Yonex racket company, and Shiseido cosmetics. At the same time, her skin color and expressions of cultural heritage link her firmly to the Haitian diaspora. A brief overview of the concept of diasporas helps to understand how Osaka is situated.

Diaspora is a term that comes from the Greek language and refers to the scattering of people from an original homeland to multiple sites across the world (Cohen, 1997). The United States is home to the largest population of Haitians outside of Haiti (over 1 million according to the 2017 American Community Survey), with well-established communities in Florida and New York (Schulz and Batalova, 2017). The Haitian jaspora is typically represented in popular and academic writing as “exceptional.” Coming from a country with a predominantly Black population, the jaspora communicates ideas about Blackness through their actions and media representations.

In George Dei’s recent article: “Black Like Me: Reframing Blackness for Decolonial Politics,” he urges academics to broaden their definitions of Blackness. Dei (2018) contends, “we must cultivate resistant knowledges that challenge our colonial complicities” (p. 118), meaning that the colonial binaries that segregate nations (e.g. Japan or Haiti) or races (e.g. Black or Asian) are insufficient to describe or represent real experiences and must be challenged. Dei equates Blackness with “a sense of being out of place and not belonging, given that Black and African peoples are continually asked to validate/legitimize [their] existence” (p. 119), while also acknowledging that “Blackness is seen as an identification that comes with a positive affirmation, political consciousness, as well as Black agency and resistance” (p. 120). Considering Osaka as part of a Black diaspora, rather than Black as a strict racial category, allows us to consider how her Black Haitian identity is core to her “Japanese-ness.”

Case studies of Japanese athletes highlight their ability to act as role models for children, and to unite local communities (Frost, 2010; Jette, 2007; Willms, 2017), but their connections to the Japanese diaspora have not been clarified. What is clear from the literature is that nikkei experience racism in sport. Willms (2017), in particular, points out how gendered racism in sport limits opportunities for Japanese-American women. Japanese athletes in the U.S. were racialized as Asian women; assumed to be “model minorities” (that is, demure, polite, and academically/professionally achieving); and expected to be small, not athletic and not knowledgeable about sport. Willms (2017) found that these stereotypes occupied athletes daily lives and led to them being underestimated and overlooked in sport. Cheng (2019) believes identifying Asian women as “Yellow” has the potential to contest normative ideologies of Asian women who experience some racial privilege. However, Cheng (2019) also posits that historical discrimination against Yellow women is often overlooked and representation is invisible, remains mute, or stays absent. In the contemporary “culture of grievance”, most people are familiar with the “angry Black woman” or the “angry Brown woman” – however rarely does the “angry Yellow woman” have a voice. Osaka’s Yellow and Japanese-American nikkei (migrant) identities are complicated by her connections to the Black diaspora, the racist tropes which assume Black athletic excellence, and specifically the Haitian jaspora (diaspora), largely made invisible in international sport.

Racial ambiguity is often met with confusion and identities become exoticized, objectified and not historically contextualized (Mahtani, 2014; Nakamura, 2019; Törngren and Okamura, 2020). The data available on people of mixed-race focus almost exclusively on discourses of White with another race (Mahtani, 2014). Rarely is attention given to interracial categorization of two non-White identities; White supremacy continues to permeate such scholarship. Cultural theorists, however, have produced decades of research on the complexities of hybridized identities. In particular, Bhabha’s (1994 [2012]: 54) concept of the “third space” describes how hybridized identities challenge our sense of nations or cultures “as a homogenizing unifying force.” All cultural and national systems are constructed in a place of cross-border flows and ambivalence; however, Osaka is consistently framed using traditional binary classifications as either Japanese or American in media discourses (Larmer, 2018; Luther, 2018). Most often, she chooses to disidentify with such limiting categorizations, explicitly recognizing the erasure of her Haitian identity (Osaka, 2018). Osaka’s own description of her cultural identity reveals the impossibility of binary classifications and the importance of naming the third space, which, according to Bhabha (1994 [2012]), is not to be used to articulate cultural hybridities as exoticism or diversity. Rather, the third space reveals the impossibility of “essentialist claims for the inherent authenticity or purity of cultures” (Bhabha, 1994 [2012]: 58). Osaka’s representation as national, diasporic, nikkei, jaspora, Yellow and Black are explored below.

Gendered racial sports media representation

Although incremental changes have occurred, for the most part, when female athletes are represented in traditional sports media such as newspapers and public and private broadcasts, images and stories are often trivialized and sexualized, while accomplishments are minimized (Thorpe, 2017). For Black female athletes, the trivialization extends to racist humor and ridicule, effectively maintaining White power. A recent report by the Women’s Sport Foundation (2020) notes a number of references to critical sports journalism in mainstream media; however, the authors concluded: sportswomen of color competing in the Olympic Games were more likely to experience racist and sexist micro-aggressions and to be rendered invisible in the media compared to their White counterparts.

Racist and sexist media practices are being exposed more often and are, therefore, being increasingly challenged by actors in and outside sport. Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), heightened media accountability, and public digital conscientization and democratization reduce dependency on traditional sport media and allow for alternative, feminist discursive formations and representations of women in sport (Billings and Hardin, 2014; Thorpe, 2017). ICTs such as blogs, social media and personal websites have gradually resulted in the ability to globally mobilize groups, garner support, and enable counter-hegemonic discourses that affect racialized women (della Porta, 2015; Mendes, 2015). A recent study by Pegoraro et al. (2018) noted that individual users on social media produced content that challenged gender stereotypes of soccer players during the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup, suggesting a potential for diverse representation of sportswomen. Feminist sport media are actively creating “transgressive space in which teachable moments occur, contradictions, omissions, and inaccuracies can be discussed, and a focus on female athleticism can be encouraged” (La Voi and Calhoun, 2014: 324). The potential of online spaces and digital communities can create new avenues for representation, include more diverse voices and media outlets, and challenge sexist discourses and ideologies of female athletes and women’s sports, through producing “transformative visual and textual narratives” that can serve as counter-narratives and “shift the institutional and ideological control of sport away from men” (La Voi and Calhoun, 2014: 326). However, Bruce and Hardin (2014) show they can also reinforce some negative representations of women.

To be clear, although this paper shows how ICT’s can contribute to disrupting cultural hegemonies in sport, online spaces have been designed within White heteropatriarchy and remain White male territory. Women and especially people of color, on average, experience disproportionate levels of discrimination, harassment and trolling on the Internet (Noble, 2018; Vickery, 2018). The support for the democratizing capabilities of networked communities must also be considered along with scholarship pontifying that emancipatory projects can never be adequately supported on the Internet, given the power relations of society and the freedom to post vitriolic comments, lies, or unsupported ideas (see Gandy, 2012; Saha, 2018; Vickery and Everbach, 2018). New media platforms are developing at a lightning pace; there have been numerous calls for more research in this area, to detail the specifics of whether/how dominant gender ideologies are challenged using ICTs (Wilson, 2007). This paper addresses this issue, with particular attention to gendered racial discourses.

Methodology

The methodology used for this study is a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of mainstream media and ICT texts that focused on Osaka’s representation immediately after the 2018 US Open tennis match, and in the following year. CDA is a research strategy that conceptualizes language as a discourse, as one opaque element of interconnected social processes to be explored (Fairclough, 2013[2010]). To be critical, the analysis must be concerned with providing resources for an emancipatory politics, exposing “how socio-economic [and gendered/racial] systems are built upon the domination, exploitation, and dehumanization of people by people, and to show how contradictions within these systems constitute a potential for transforming them in progressive and emancipatory directions” (Fairclough, 2013 [2010]: 304). Put another way, the objective of CDA is to promote equality, fairness and justice. The discourses analyzed are found within texts which include linguistic/semiotic elements that are aural, visual and verbal, following Fairclough’s (2013 [2010]) model.

Every media text is produced or constructed by an individual or a group for a particular purpose, to inform, entertain, or satirize. More than merely giving information, texts work through language and image to generate social identities, activities, and hierarchies and are, therefore, political because they direct us to understand the social world through promoting certain types of knowledge and ways of thinking (Gee, 1999). A disproportionate amount of power in how we understand our social world comes from Western-mainstream and corporate-global media sources (Rowe, 2011 ). This does not, however, mean that counter-discourses have been eliminated. Hall’s (1980) model of media reproduction and reception, commonly known as the encoding/decoding model, assumes an indirect or asymmetrical correspondence between the meaning intended by a sender and the meaning interpreted by a recipient. A text can, therefore, have many readings, interpretations or analyses, depending on whether the viewer/reader accepts or challenges the socially constructed gender, racial, or economic structures on which the text depends, and which other influential texts the viewer/reader consumes (Hall, 1980). Though this original theory has been critiqued and expanded to include more audience-centered approaches of not only accepting or challenging, but also (mis)understanding and negotiating dominant journalistic meanings, the decoding process remains central to CDA, which requires exposure of multiple meanings and impacts of any text. In fact, due to athlete activism and digital self-representations through ICTs (Hardin, 2011), we are better able to hear/read/see multiple discourses with varied meanings and offer a CDA that situates texts within socio-historical relations of power.

To collect data, we conducted an online search related to the US Open 2018 women’s final match between Osaka and Williams. Key terms included “tennis,” “US Open,” “Serena Williams,” “Naomi Osaka,” “Japan,” “Haiti,” “controversy,” “umpire,” “race,” “culture,” “representation,” and “citizenship”. During the period of August 2018 to September 2019, an initial exhaustive internet search of news items related to Osaka produced only Canada or US-based texts due to algorithmic search patterns. We subsequently employed the FACTIVA database to extrapolate international viewpoints and counter-narratives. We included written passages in mainstream international (online) newspapers, independent magazines, professional/organizational websites, and personal social media accounts (Twitter and Instagram), as well as visual forms such as photographs, illustrations, or emojis therein. After selecting and analyzing 76 texts from 28 varying online platforms, we narrowed our focus to texts that demonstrated the intersection(s) of race, gender, and diasporic identity, particularly driven by the words of Osaka, not only journalists and artists. We further analyzed 23 of those texts that engaged with or alluded to such discourses. The data was separated into initial categories, including “mainstream” and “ICT”, then distinguished those that “reproduced” and those that “contested” hegemonic race, nation and diaspora representations. In this paper, we do not aim to show who Naomi Osaka “really is” through our analysis. Rather, we use CDA to understand how Western mainstream, corporate-global, private national, and ICT media sources make sense of and (re)present Naomi Osaka.

Three main themes emerged through the process of data collection and analysis: (1) the ongoing misogynoir and colorism of sport media and athlete sponsors; (2) racial, national and diaspora (mis)representations, and (3) resistance to gendered racism through self-representation. These overlapping findings are discussed below.

Misogynoir and colorism

Building on Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000 and 2004) work on African American women’s media representations, and drawing from her experiences as a Black queer woman, Moya Bailey (2014) coined the portmanteau misogynoir. The term combines the English word for anti-woman contempt, misogyny, and the French word for Black, noir, to refer specifically to the unique visual violence against Black women seen in popular culture. Bailey used the term misogynoir in her online writings about women in digital media to describe how anti-Black racism operates: “What happens to Black women in public space isn’t about them being any woman of color. It is particular and has to do with the ways that anti-Blackness and misogyny combine to malign Black women in our world” (2014: 763). Oracene Price, the mother of international tennis moguls Serena and Venus Williams, astutely noted about her daughters: “The public reacts to the Williams sisters not as African Americans or as women, but as African American women” (cited by Schultz, 2005: 341). The intersection is important to name because the specific “denigration of Black females and their bodies has become so commonplace that it is rarely acknowledged” (Douglas, 2014: 5), and the sport media plays a role in continually reproducing structures of domination in its constructions and representations of gender and race. According to Bailey (2014), see also (Bailey, 2016; Bailey and Trudy, 2018), misogynoir contributes to an invisibility/hypervisibility of Black women. Not being truly seen minimizes their accomplishments on the court (Cooky, 2018; Thorpe, 2017; Tredway and Francombe-Webb, 2018), while maximizing their representation in media stories centered on controversy.

At the 2018 US Open, mainstream media did not acknowledge that two women of color were playing the final, instead Naomi Osaka was read as being a victim of Serena Williams. While this can be somewhat expected due to Williams’ celebrity status, it must also be understood in the context of numerous studies’ findings, which have outlined how Serena and Venus Williams’ bodies, attitudes and words have been misconstrued to reproduce stereotypes of Black women and reinforce White power (Douglas, 2002; 2012; Hobson, 2003; Ifekwunigwe, 2018; Schultz, 2005; Tredway and Francombe-Webb, 2018). Yet again, within minutes of the final, the global mainstream media (Briggs, 2018; Collman, 2018; Jurejko, 2018) used Williams’ repeated outbursts throughout the match to continue to represent her as an angry, Black force of nature. This time, her foil was Osaka, widely represented as a meek, polite, apologetic Japanese or even White woman, erasing her Black ancestry (Luther, 2018; Yeung, 2018). These two representations largely perpetuate misogynoir, which includes exaggerating Black women’s anger and the erasure of mixed-race women’s Black identities. Global mainstream media play a role in reifying these tropes, through words and images on television, print and online media, that are key pedagogical devices limiting the number and range of representations of Black women (Collins, 2000), a clear strategy of White supremacy.

The contrast between Williams and Osaka is represented no more vividly than by the Australian Herald Sun cartoonist’s interpretation of the pair at the US Open final (Knight, 2018). The visual depiction of Williams shows her to be violently angry, with an enlarged body, ballooned lips, chiseled facial features and oversized kinky hairstyle, smashing her racket while her pacifier lay on the ground. This imagery reminded many US readers of the racist caricatures drawn during slavery and the United States’ segregationist Jim Crow era. “Within the binary thinking that underpins intersecting oppressions,” writes Collins (2000: 90), “Black women with African features of dark skin, broad noses, full lips and kinky hair” are necessary for the “blue-eyed, blond, thin White women [to] be considered beautiful.” It should come as no surprise then, that in the background of Williams’ depicted tantrum, the cartoonist portrays a tiny, blonde, straight haired, light skinned Osaka, innocently close to the referee, on the right side of the net and the rules. Osaka is 2 inches taller than Williams, but depicting her in this small, light-skinned way allows for the racist beast and child-like exaggeration of Williams, for whom racist media representations is a long-standing feature. Furthermore, the images, symbols, and narratives that erase Osaka’s Blackness are also tools of misogynoir.

Osaka’s representation constructs a White innocence and reinforces a message that a racialized woman with lighter skin in is more fair, competent, and rational than a darker-skinned woman. This strategy, called colorism, is used in the dominant culture to distort Black women’s reality. Colorism refers to the “process of discrimination that privileges light-skinned people of color over their dark skin counterparts” (Hunter, 2007: 237). Women of African ancestry who appear thinner and with straighter hair or noses that are more angular fit in a longstanding hierarchy of physical features that are associated with higher value character traits of White femininity: morality and beauty. When sufficient proximity to Whiteness does not exist, racialized women can be “Whitewashed” with skin intentionally lightened, hair intentionally straightened, and body size represented intentionally as smaller to serve a racist and sexist agenda.

In another animated global media image that surfaced just before Osaka won the Australian Open women’s final in January 2019, Osaka appears Whitewashed again. Osaka’s domination over Anastasija Sevastova, Elina Svitolina, Karolína Plíšková, and Petra Kvitová could have made headlines. Instead, the traditional media grabbed readers’ attention through examinations of how Osaka was portrayed by one of her sponsors, Nissin Food Holdings, in the Manga animation style (Asahi, 2018). The Japanese company lightened her appearance in the animated advertisement without her consent (Scott, 2019); the character’s pale complexion and light brown hair bears little resemblance to Osaka, effectively erasing her Blackness. In the face of public backlash, Nissin cancelled this advertising campaign (Evening Standard, 2019), citing a commitment to human rights and denying they had sought to Whitewash the Haitian-Japanese star. This type of “color-blind” response and denial of racism is predicated on the normalization of humiliation and erasure of Black females and their accomplishments. “It is clear that in this so-called post-racial and color-blind era,” Douglas (2014: 17) reminds us “one of the ways in which a Black female presence has been disciplined has been through erasure.” Removing Osaka’s Blackness and then removing her advertisement altogether amid public outcry signals to global audiences how easy it is to make racialized identities invisible. Illustrations of Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka that either over- or under-exaggerate Black features work to create color hierarchies and render Black women invisible in the United States. This is also a global phenomenon due to the wide spread of sport and advertising media.

These illustrations are examples of “misogynoir” and “colorism” and are a direct result of, and contributor to, anti-Black structural racism and sexism. They reinforce understandings of mixed-race women as invisible and mysterious; dark skinned Black women as ugly and unforgivable; and serve to malign women who dare to be excellent in the White, male world of sport, and specifically the world of professional tennis.

Racial, national, and diaspora (mis)representations

Osaka’s multiple national affiliations and racial identities were often points of inquiry during post-match interviews and press conferences. Osaka was labeled as Japanese, American, and Haitian along with Asian, Black, and mixed. These six identity markers reveal and elide complicated geo-political histories and hierarchies.

When Osaka chose to play professionally for Japan, mainstream media discourses interpellated Japan as an obvious, preferred citizenship. Discussing Osaka as a “Japanese” tennis player, effectively erasing her Haitianness altogether, is a tactic to deny her Blackness, as well as to reinforce an erroneous narrative that renders Haiti inconsequential to her success. Japan is understood as a wealthy, powerful, colonizing nation. Haiti, in contrast, is well known for its long history of marronage (escape of enslaved Africans), its position in the Caribbean as the first successful slave revolt against French colonizers – which transformed one of the Atlantic world’s most productive colonies into the Americas’ second independent state, and its subsequent dire poverty due to the onerous indemnity debt which re-enslaved the nation as France’s commercial colony (Obregón, 2018). Haiti is often stereotyped in the media as one of the poorest and most dependent nations in the world, experiencing exceptional long-standing political turmoil, suffering devastating earthquakes, and offering minimal economic influence or contributions to international sport. The framing of Osaka’s identity via her Japanese heritage is privileged against her Haitian cultural identity. Nevertheless, Osaka (2018) refuses to be seen only as Japanese and challenges a lack of nuanced understanding of the messy multiplicities of her national identities, racial ideologies, and diasporic affiliations.

Despite growing up in the United States, Osaka is constantly asked to locate her “home.” A professional tennis player travels for most of the year, yet Osaka’s participation under the Japanese flag frames her as what Rinaldo Walcott (2003) refers to as an “outer-national” subject, effectively erasing “some aspects of the [US] national state” while other aspects “remain firmly in place” (Walcott, 2003: 233). The concept of diasporic sensibilities illuminates the fluidity and breadth of Osaka’s national representations within media discourses. Walcott (2003: 22) contends that diasporic sensibilities are “methods for overcoming the problem of locating oneself solely within national boundaries. Diaspora conditions work to produce Black peoples in the contradictory space of belonging and not.” Osaka exists within both the Japanese and Haitian diasporas, dominant races, and cultures. Hall (1997: 239) argues, although all cultures use concepts of difference to produce meaning, at the same time difference is also “threatening, a site of danger, of negative feelings . . . of hostility and aggression toward the ‘other’.” As Osaka has ties with three nations, Japan, United States and Haiti, her difference and threat are compounded.

The threat of Osaka was also linked to her racial categorization(s). Within cultural studies, Asian women’s experiences are undertheorized as they are often subsumed within or excluded by the “Women of Color” categorization. Research has demonstrated the stereotype of the Asian woman as silent, petite, meek, modest, obedient, and a carrier of culture (Cheng, 2019; Nakamura, 2019). The Asian woman is stereotyped as apologetic for taking up space. Mainstream Western media were eager to remind audiences of Osaka’s multiple apologies after winning against Williams. Several headlines praised her humility, while others attempted to evoke sympathy toward Osaka by insisting, she “deserved better” treatment during and after the match (Collman, 2018; Luther, 2018; Yeung, 2018). Osaka’s feeling “sorry” is directly aligned with the long tradition in women’s tennis of defining play with standards that require women to uphold traditional upper class, White attitudes, values, and aesthetics of femininity as well as stereotypes of Asian femininity.

Osaka was repeatedly praised for her conduct on and off the court. One journalist asked, “The other day Sascha [Osaka’s coach] said he thought you had an innocence, that quality, people could learn from that quality. Do you think you have that quality?” (Osaka, 2018). It is clear which “people” could stand to learn from Osaka’s obedient, apologetic Japanese/White innocence: unruly Black women like Serena Williams. The mainstream media also reinforces stereotypes by asking Osaka to evaluate Serena’s behavior:

Q. What were your reactions when everything was happening, and you heard Serena shouting against the umpire?

Q. Are you aware of the same rules that Williams is about coaching and about smashing a racquet, going after an umpire?

Q. You said for a long time Serena was always an idol of yours. What happened today in the final, her behavior on the court, does it change the image you had of her? (Osaka, 2018)

Pressuring Osaka to answer such questions contributes to framing Williams as a disrespectful Black female athlete and Osaka as an obedient, respectable Asain/White. Naomi is reduced to a victim of unfair treatment by Serena Williams. Osaka plays nationally for Japan; however, immediately after the 2018 US Open, in mainstream media, Osaka’s identity was further linked with Asia and Japan through descriptions of her as apologetic, meek, quiet, and emphasizing her Japanese heritage, skin color, and visible behaviors such as crying, that followed an ideology of respectable femininity, modesty, and obedience (Blay, 2017, 2018; Dawson, 2018). The Western mainstream media chooses to create an image of Osaka that is distinct from other Black female athletes. Rather than complicate her identity, they trade in simplified fictions of how Osaka identifies.

Resistance to gendered racism through self-representation

Osaka’s self-definition shifts with various audiences. Like mainstream media, she represents herself as Black, Asian, mixed, Japanese, American, and/or Haitian (Altaffer, 2018; Armstrong, 2018), depending on the assumptions journalists present to her. Unlike mainstream media she complicates her self-representation often choosing multiple categories. Because of a dominant understanding of national and racial identities as mutually exclusive, mainstream media reiterates binary or singular allegiances, and there have been many attempts to force Osaka into choosing a nationality, race or “home” (Osaka, 2018). Her ambivalence is rarely captured or understood. The complexity of her self-representation is ostensibly ignored or misused by the media. For example, when she is celebrated as “mixed-race,” her status remains valorized in contrast to an African American who is characterized as having mis-behaved, that is, Serena Williams. In other words, a label of “mixed-race” as opposed to African American is not neutral (Mahtani, 2014).

In contrast, Naomi Osaka and newer media, particularly through ICT, more fully represented the fluidity of her identities, and reinforced the ideology that racial, cultural, and national identities are never fixed. Osaka states: “I can understand way more Japanese than I can speak . . . and when I go to Japan people are confused. From my name, they don’t expect to see a Black girl” (McCarvel, 2016). Her self-authorship as a Japanese-understanding Black girl, in this case, helps to publicize the impurity of national affiliations that Bhabha (1994 [2012]) has written so eloquently about. Osaka’s Haitianness is not seen as her “claimed“ national identity due to the strictures of a sport that demand a singular professional national affiliation. This makes it easier for mainstream media to elide her Haitian identity and Blackness. Nevertheless, Osaka and her fans produce counter-narratives of jaspora.

In one example, Osaka gets distracted by interrupting a courtside journalist to celebrate and “represent” her Haitian ancestry: “Of course I’m very honored to be playing for Japan. But my dad’s side is Haitian, so represent. But um, yeah. I forget the rest of your question.” (#TeamEbony, 2018). She disturbs the easy assumption of a limited affiliation with Japaneseness. At a free event held on September 22nd at Futakotamagawa in Setagaya, Tokyo, the comedy duo “A Masso” (Ai Murakami and Aiko Kanou) ridiculed Osaka’s skin color. They claimed she “needs bleach,” “has too much of a tan,” and is “too sunburned.” Osaka wasted no time responding through Twitter, dropping the name of one of her sponsors in the process: “Too sunburned’ lol that’s wild. Little did they know, with Shiseido anessa perfect uv sunscreen I never get sunburned [three smiling rosy cheeked emojis]” (September 29, 2019). Multiethnic Japanese celebrities of African and Japanese heritage, such as Naomi Osaka and African-American-Japanese beauty pageant winner Ariana Miyamoto, may be praised for their accomplishments while at the same time questioned about whether they are Japanese “enough” by the public and the media (Törngren and Okamura, 2020). Amidst Osaka fan backlash, the duo publicly apologized for their words. Osaka demonstrates that she too can use media to offer comedy, but hers is a comedic resistance against misogynoir.

Along with celebrating her ties to Haiti, fans see Osaka as cementing a proud Black racial identity (Hunt, 2018; Osaka, 2018). In many ways, Osaka follows in Williams’ footsteps, flouting traditional White(’s) tennis uniforms and creating bold outfits for competition by asking African American music mogul, Pharrell Williams, to be her designer (Marija, 2018). Osaka’s father and Haitian family members were seen celebrating proudly with Haitian flags at her matches, and after her US Open 2018 win Osaka chose to go to her favorite Haitian restaurant (Blay, 2018; Dawson, 2018). Shortly thereafter, she flew to visit a school her Dad built in his Haitian hometown, Jacmel. Haiti’s 2019 President Jovenel Moise and Prime Minister Jean-Henry Ceant celebrated her accomplishment, and her win reverberated in the global Caribbean community (Altaffer, 2018; Charles, 2018). Local Caribbean news suggests that many in Haiti and the entire Caribbean region and jaspora recognize Naomi Osaka as a Haitian inspiration (Haitian American, 2018; Mbamulu, 2018). Osaka further represents Haiti through selecting videos, images, words and links to items of interest through Twitter and Instagram accounts, along with carefully crafting her posts and answers to questions from media.

When she emphasizes Haitian and “Blasian” (Black-Asian) ideas through videos, images, words, and links on her social media sites, Osaka’s self-representation is an act of resistance to the mainstream media, which often conflate, erase or are unable to address the complexities of her identities or refuse to recognize her as Haitian. Incremental shifts in some mainstream articles do signify potential ruptures and counter-narratives; however, as outlined above the more critical interpretations and complex analyses of Osaka remain mostly among independent media platforms. Osaka acknowledges that she has fans wherever she goes due to embodying multiple identities and welcomes the support. She remarks: “Probably because they think I’m interesting . . . Maybe it’s because they can’t really pinpoint what I am, so it’s like anybody can cheer for me” (Associated Press, 2018). This self-description counters her representation as a Japanese national. Similar to Mexican-American golfer Lorena Ochoa (Jamieson and Choi, 2017) and Nigerian-American basketball players Chiney and Nneka Ogwumike (Zenquis and Mwaniki, 2019), who experience such gendered racism and identity interrogations, Osaka refused to be limited by restrictive national media representations.

Osaka is just getting settled in the professional women’s circuit of tennis, and questions around her culture, national identity, and race will likely persist. Newer media, along with her own social media channels, resist racial binary or fixed Japanese identity classifications. While mainstream sources often disavow her Blackness in favor of simple, colonial, storylines, Osaka contests or disidentifies with simple binaries and positions herself as a complicated, “interesting” person, claiming her humanity and Haitian heritage. Fortunately, there are opportunities for resistance through ICT’s, providing athletes with chances to re-write the racialized story of their success. The ways these interventions challenge, hamper, or potentially change the field of sports journalism requires further research.

Conclusion

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the complexities of racial, national, and diasporic identities and the range of representations offered by mainstream and international media as well as ICTs, including social media. The simplified representations of female athletes in mainstream and international media continue to influence discourses that (re)produce gendered and racist ideologies. Specifically, in the case of Naomi Osaka, mainstream media renders her Blackness invisible and contributes to experiences and discourses of misogynoir. Osaka is a victim of colorism; her features were Whitewashed in illustrations and her skin color was explicitly critiqued, though these were positioned as “jokes.” In the 2018 US Open women’s final, her Japanese nationality along with dominant narratives of Asian femininity enabled her to be read against Serena Williams’ Blackness, using simple binaries. Dissenting views and counter-narratives that center Blackness within Japaneseness were present in newer media, including ICTs such as social media. Though social media is sometimes used to vilify women of color, the findings here show ICTs were used to recognize the vilification and erasure of Blackness in the mainstream media, celebrate connections to Haiti, and amplify agentic and comedic resistance to racism. Newer media has the power to shift representations. For example, the collective intolerance of misogynoir is more frequently being captured by individuals whose collective voices, at times, force media platforms, companies and individuals to be more accountable for their actions (Charles, 2018), to apologize, or to withdraw some of the offensive imagery they have used. The case study of Naomi Osaka provides an opportunity to complicate the way female athletes, and especially tennis players of African descent, are represented.

Osaka has just begun in the professional women’s circuit of tennis, yet questions around her identity, nationalism and race will likely persist. Osaka resists the simplified dominant narrative of her identity as a Japanese tennis player. She acknowledges her Japanese heritage, but also used ICTs to describe herself as Black and part-Haitian, contributing to re-writing the racialized story of her success. While mainstream sources disavow her Blackness in favor of simple, colonial, heteropatriarchal storylines, Osaka challenges binaries and claims her full humanity.

The remaining challenges include the development of skill required to articulate discourses of differences and hybridity within cultural, racial and national identities in sport. Forde and Wilson (2018) noted that the ability to provide a more nuanced critique in the realm of sports journalism requires a certain knowledge and skill set. Sports journalism is also constrained within the political economy of the sports media complex (Jhally, 2006; Sparks et al., 2006); therefore, journalists with the capacity and desire to produce work showing more complexities of identity, may have their agency severely compromised. The tensions that exist within the broad field of sports media compels researchers to also seek data from mainstream sources as well as ICTs that shed light, offer critiques, and create counter-narratives; yet, not all ICTs are created equal. Those contributing to ICTs may also reinforce misogynoir. Researchers must continue to investigate which media platforms are persistently working to disrupt misinformation, racism, and sexism, and how to create more consumable knowledge that can shift harmful and narrow representations of the diversity of women in sport.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Janelle Joseph

References

#TeamEbony (2018) Tell ‘em! Tennis player checks reporter for neglecting to mention her Haitian heritage. Ebony, 22 January. Available at: www.ebony.com/news/naomi-osaka-haitian-australian-open/.

Altaffer

(2018) Caribbean currents: the one-sided view of Naomi Osaka’s heritage. New Pittsburgh Courier, 13 September. Available at: https://newpittsburghcourieronline.com/2018/10/03/caribbean-currents-the-one-sided-view-of-naomi-osakas-heritage/.

Armstrong

(2018) Naomi Osaka is black, too — and we need to say so. Yahoo Inc., 14 September. Available at: www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/naomi-osaka-Black-too-215603554.html.

Asahi

Shimbun

(2018) Nissin food holdings advertisement. Asahi, 24 January. Available at: www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201901240037.html.

Associated Press (2018) U.S. Open champion Osaka charms Japan with her manners — and broken Japanese. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 10 September. Available at: www.cbc.ca/sports/tennis/u-s-open-champion-osaka-charms-japan-with-her-manners-1.4816951.

Bailey

(2014) More on the origins of misogynoir. Moyazb, 27 April. Available at: http://moyazb.tumblr.com/post/84048113369/more-on-the-origin-of-misogynoir.

Bailey

(2016) Misogynoir in medical media: on Caster Semenya and R. Kelly. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2(2): 1–31.

Bailey

Trudy (2018) On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism. Feminist Media Studies 18(4): 762–768.

Bhabha

(1994 [2012]) The Location of Culture. New York, NY: Routledge.

10.

Billings

Hardin

(eds) (2014) Routledge Handbook of Sport and New Media. New York, NY: Routledge.

11.

Birrell

(1989) Racial relations theories and sport: suggestions for a more critical analysis. Sociology of Sport Journal 6(3): 212–227.

12.

Blay

(2017) When we attack Serena Williams’ body, it’s really about her blackness. The Huffington Post, 9 January. Available at: www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/serena-williams-policing-of-Black-bodies_us_55a3bef4e4b0a47ac15ccc00.

13.

Blay

(2018) The whitewashing of Naomi Osaka. Huffington Post, 11 September. Available at: www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/the-Whitewashing-of-naomi-osaka_us_5b967eb3e4b0cf7b004209b5.

14.

Briggs

(2018) Serena Williams unleashes furious rant at umpire as she loses US Open 2018 final to Naomi Osaka. The Telegraph, 9 September. Available at: www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2018/09/08/serena-williams-vs-naomi-osaka-us-open-2018-final-live-score/.

15.

Bruce

Hardin

(2014) Reclaiming our voices: sportswomen and social media. In: Billings

Hardin

(eds) Routledge Handbook of Sport and New Media. New York: Routledge, pp. 311–319.

16.

Census (2017) American Community Survey. Fact Finder. Available at: https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk.

17.

Charles

(2018) Naomi Osaka who gets to be Haitian. Woy Magazine, 26 October. Available at: http://woymagazine.com/2018/09/10/naomiosaka-gets-haitian/.

18.

Cheng

(2019) Ornamentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

19.

Cohen

(1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press.

20.

Collins

(2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd ed). New York, NY: Routledge.

21.

Collins

(2004) Black Sexual Politics: African Americans Gender and the New Racism. New York, NY: Routledge.

22.

Collman

(2018) Naomi Osaka “I felt like I had to apologize” after beating Serena. Business Insider, 10 September. Available at: www.businessinsider.com/naomi-osaka-had-to-apologize-beating-serena-2018-9.

23.

Cooky

(2018) What’s new about sporting femininities? Female athletes and the sport-media industrial complex. In: Toffoletti

Thorpe

Francombe-Webb

(eds) New Sporting Femininities: Embodied Politics in Postfeminist Times. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 23–41.

24.

Dawson

(2018) Serena Williams shown as angry baby in controversial US Open cartoon. Business Insider, 10 September. Available at: www.businessinsider.com/serena-williams-cartoon-angry-baby-us-open-herald-sun-2018-9.

25.

Dei

GJS

(2018) “Black like me”: reframing blackness for decolonial politics. Educational Studies 54(2): 117–142.

26.

della Porta

(2015) Social Movements in Times of Austerity: Bringing Capitalism Back Into Protest Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press.

27.

Douglas

(2002) To be young, gifted, black and female: a meditation on the cultural politics at play in representations of Venus and Serena Williams. Sociology of Sport Online 5(2): 1–16.

28.

Douglas

(2012) Venus, Serena, and the inconspicuous consumption of blackness: a commentary on surveillance, race talk, and new racism(s). Journal of Black Studies, 43(2): 127–145.

29.

Douglas

(2014) Forget me . . . not: Marion Jones and the politics of punishment. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 38(1): 3–22.

30.

Evening Standard (2019) Naomi Osaka Nissin advert. Standard, 24 January. Available at: www.standard.co.uk/sport/tennis/naomi-osaka-nissin-advert-noodle-company-removes-controversial-commercial-after-criticism-for-a4047291.html.

31.

Fairclough

(2013 [2010]) Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (2nd ed). New York, NY: Routledge.

32.

Farzan

(2018) Naomi Osaka Japanese, Haitian and historic tennis Grand Slam winner. Washington Post, 10 September. Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/09/10/japanese-haitian-and-now-a-grand-slam-winner-naomi-osakas-historic-journey-to-the-u-s-open/?utm_term=.37cc1a3c0a03.

33.

Forde

Wilson

(2018) Radical sports journalism? Reflections on ‘alternative’ approaches to covering sport-related social issues. Sociology of Sport Journal 35(1): 66–76.

34.

Frost

(2010) Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

35.

Gandy

Jr (2012) Matrix multiplication and the digital divide. In Nakamura

Chow-White

(eds) Race after the Internet. London: Routledge, pp. 128–145.

36.

Gee

(1999) An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge.

37.

Haitian American (2018) Tennis Champ Naomi Osaka receives a champion’s welcome in Haiti. L’union Suite, 9 November. Available at: www.lunionsuite.com/tennis-champ-naomi-osaka-haiti/.

38.

Hall

(1980) Encoding/Decoding. In: Hall

Hobson

Lowe

, et al. (eds) Culture, Media, Language—Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. London: Routledge, pp. 117–127.

39.

Hall

(1997) The spectacle of the other. In: Hall

(ed) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: SAGE, pp. 223–279.

40.

Hardin

(2011) The power of a fragmented collective: radical pluralist feminism and technologies of the self in the sports blogosphere. In: Billings

(ed) Sports Media: Transformation, Integration, Consumption. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, pp. 40–60.

41.

Hobson

(2003) The “batty” politic: toward an aesthetic of the black female body. Hypatia 18(4): 87–105.

42.

Hunt

(2018) Haitian community basks in Naomi Osaka’s U.S. Open championship. The Philadelphia Tribune, 14 September. Available at: www.phillytrib.com/sports/haitian-community-basks-in-naomi-osaka-s-u-s-open/article_b4288544-a730-5b35-bbfb-92c13f79c3b9.html.

43.

Hunter

(2007) The persistent problem of colorism: skin tones, status, and inequality. Sociology Compass 1(1): 237–254.

44.

Hylton

(2008) ‘Race’ and Sport: Critical Race Theory. London: Routledge.

45.

Ifekwunigwe

(2018) ‘And still Serena rises’: celebrating the cross-generational continuities of black feminisms and black female excellence in sport. In: Mansfield

Caudwell

Wheaton

, et al. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Feminism and Sport, Leisure and Physical Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 111–131.

46.

Jamieson

Choi

(2017) Lorena ‘La Reina’ Ochoa: disidentifying toward brown solidarity. In: Ratna

Samie

(eds) Race, Gender and Sport: The Politics of Ethnic ‘Other’ Girls and Women. New York: Routledge, pp. 171–188.

47.

Jette

(2007) Little/big ball: the Vancouver Asahi baseball story. Sport History Review 38(1): 1–16.

48.

Jhally

(2006) The Spectacle of Accumulation: Essays in Culture, Media, and Politics. New York: Peter Lang.

49.

Joseph

(2017) Sport in the Black Atlantic: Cricket, Canada and the Caribbean Diaspora. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

50.

Jurejko

(2018) US Open 2018 Naomi Osaka wins after Serena Williams outburst. BBC Sport, 9 September. Available at: www.bbc.com/sport/tennis/45462014.

51.

Knight

(2018) “Can’t you just let her win” [Cartoon]. Herald Sun, 11 September. Available at: www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/opinion-as-mark-knight-has-discovered-its-a-dangerous-business-being-funny/news-story/fe22f7ccd151760450ec70a6c4eeba7a.

52.

La Voi

Calhoun

(2014) Digital media and women’s sport. In: Billings

Hardin

(eds) Routledge Handbook of Sport and New Media. New York: Routledge, pp. 320–330. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203114711.

53.

Larmer

(2018) Naomi Osaka’s breakthrough game. The New York Times, 23 August. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/magazine/naomi-osakas-breakthrough-game.html.

54.

Luther

(2018) Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka deserved better than 2018’s sexist U.S. Open but fans shouldn’t be surprised. NBC News, 11 September. Available at: www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/serena-williams-naomi-osaka-deserved-better-2018-s-sexist-u-ncna908531.

55.

Mahtani

(2014) Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

56.

Marija (2018). Naomi Osaka’s 2018 style: energetic curls accessorize Adidas’ fine fashion. Women’s Tennis Blog, 12 November. Available at: www.womenstennisblog.com/2018/11/12/naomi-osaka-adidas-fashion/.

57.

Mbamulu

(2018) Is Naomi Osaka at the centre of another nationality claim? This is Africa, 10 September. Available at: https://thisisafrica.me/is-naomi-osaka-at-the-centre-of-another-nationality-claim/.

58.

McCarvel

(2016) Serena Williams: rising Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka is ‘very dangerous’. USA Today, 18 January. Available at: www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/aus/2016/01/18/japanese-rising-star-naomi-osaka-serena-williams-australian-open/78956596/.

59.

McDonald

Birrell

(1999) Reading sport critically: a methodology for interrogating power. Sociology of Sport Journal 16(4): 283–300.

60.

Mendes

(2015) Slutwalk: Feminism, Activism and Media. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

61.

Mwaniki

(2017) The Black Migrant Athlete: Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sports. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

62.

Nakamura

(2019) Playing Out of Bounds: “Belonging” and the North American Chinese Invitational Volleyball Tournament. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

63.

No Author (2012) Serena Williams the most fined player in recent tennis history. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2012/jan/24/serena-williams-fined-player-tennis-history.

64.

Noble

(2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press.

65.

Obregón

(2018) Empire, racial capitalism and international law: the case of manumitted Haiti and the recognition debt. Leiden Journal of International Law 31(3): 597–615.

66.

Osaka

(2018) Interview Naomi Osaka, final. US Open News Official Site of the 2018 US Open Tennis Championships, 8 September. Available at: www.usopen.org/en_US/news/interviews/2018-09-08/2018-09-08_interview_naomi_osaka_final.html.

67.

Pegoraro

Comeau

Frederick

(2018) #SheBelieves: the use of Instagram to frame the US women’s soccer team during #FIFAWWC. Sport in Society 21(7): 1063–1077.

68.

Rankine

(2014) Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

69.

Ratna

Samie

(eds) (2017) Race, Gender and Sport: The Politics of Ethnic “Other” Girls and Women. London: Routledge.

70.

Rowe

(2011) Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures. London: Bloomsbury Press.

71.

Saha

(2018) Race and the Cultural Industries. Cambridge: Polity.

72.

Schultz

(2005) Reading the catsuit: Serena Williams and the production of blackness at the 2002 U.S. Open. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 29(3): 338–357.

73.

Schulz

Batalova

(2017) Haitian immigrants in the United States. Migration Policy, 2 August, Available at: www.migrationpolicy.org/article/haitian-immigrants-united-states#Diaspora.

74.

Scott

(2019) Nissin takes down Osaka Ad after backlash. Baseline, 28 January. Available at: http://baseline.tennis.com/article/79387/nissin-takes-down-osaka-ad-after-backlash.

75.

Sparks

Young

Darnell

(2006) Convergence, corporate restructuring, and Canadian online news, 2000-2003. Canadian Journal of Communication 31(2): 391–423.

76.

Thorpe

(2017) Action sports, social media, and new technologies: towards a research agenda. Communication and Sport 5(5): 554–578.

77.

Törngren

Okamura

(2020) Recognition of multiracial and multiethnic Japanese: historical trends, classification, and ways forward. In: Rocha

Aspinall

(eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 779–796.

78.

Tredway

Francombe-Webb

(2018) The performance of blackness and femininity in postfeminist times: visualising Serena Williams within the context of corporate globalisation. In: Toffoletti

Thorpe

Francombe-Webb

(eds) New Sporting Femininities: Embodied Politics in Postfeminist Times. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 63–85.

79.

Vickery

Everbach

(2018) Mediating Misogyny: Gender, Technology, and Harassment. Cham: Palgrave.

80.

Walcott

(2003) Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada. Toronto: Insomniac Press.

81.

Willms

(2017) When Women Rule the Court: Gender, Race, and Japanese American Basketball. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

82.

Wilson

(2007) New media, social movements, and global sport studies: a revolutionary moment and the sociology of sport. Sociology of Sport Journal 24(4): 457–477.

83.

Women’s Sports Foundation (2020) A women’s sport foundation research report. Women’s Sports Foundation. Available at: www.womenssportsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Chasing-Equity-Full-Report-Web.pdf.

84.

Vickery

(2018) This isn’t new: gender, publics, and the Internet. In: Vickery

Everbach

(eds) Mediating Misogyny. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 31–49.

85.

Yeung

(2018) Naomi Osaka makes history at U.S. Open and her humility will bring you to tears. Huffington Post Canada, 9 September. Available at: www.msn.com/en-nz/sport/tennis/naomi-osaka-makes-history-at-us-open-and-her-humility-will-bring-you-to-tears/ar-BBN6ebG.

86.

Zenquis

Mwaniki

(2019) The intersection of race, gender, and nationality in sport: media representation of the Ogwumike sisters. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 43(1): 23–43.