#ThisMama: The Professional Athlete, Pregnancy and Motherhood – The Case of Serena Williams

Abstract

This chapter shows how professional athlete-motherhood is presented by the mainstream media and challenged by self-representation on social media, using arguably one of the most successful professional athletes of all time, Serena Williams, as a case study. We suggest that Williams' use of social media has allowed motherhood to be a part of her entrepreneurial self, accessing sponsorship and endorsements while also normalising struggles and using her platform to raise awareness of what it means to be a ‘working mother’. In comparison, mainstream media presents athlete-motherhood as either the athlete-mother as a transgressor or as the ‘super mum’, a theme where the athlete manages the demands of motherhood with sport and does it all ‘perfectly’. While mainstream media may present these two tensions and speculate on what women's bodies should be able to do, Williams reminds us through her social media that her professional status does not disappear, she is not ‘coming back’ from becoming a mother, it's a part of who she is, thus, showing that motherhood can be part of being a professional athlete and can be celebrated via online self-presentations. We conclude with a call for future work to explore the understanding of the pregnant athlete beyond a case study of a global celebrity athlete to look at the experiences of athlete-mother at other levels of sport and society.

Citation

Thompson-Radford, H. and Skey, M. (2021), "#ThisMama: The Professional Athlete, Pregnancy and Motherhood – The Case of Serena Williams", Bowes, A. and Culvin, A. (Ed.) The Professionalisation of Women’s Sport (Emerald Studies in Sport and Gender), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 141-156. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-196-620211009