‘We're Missing That Humanity’: A Feminist Media Analysis of Laurel Hubbard and the Tokyo Olympic Games

Abstract

At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Laurel Hubbard made history as the first openly transgender woman to compete in an individual sport. In the weeks leading up to and following her performance, hundreds of original news articles were written about her – few of which fully supported her participation. In this chapter, we detail our content analysis of written news media created in the weeks surrounding Hubbard's Olympic debut. Using Ahmed's (2000) theorization of the discursive creation of ‘strangers’, we relay how journalists' usage of imagery and narrative structures framed Hubbard as an ‘other’, separate from other elite athletes and undeserving of her status as an Olympian – serving to powerfully shape public perceptions of Hubbard's identity, humanity and her right to compete in the sport that she loves.

Citation

Nelson, M., Scovel, S. and Thorpe, H. (2022), "‘We're Missing That Humanity’: A Feminist Media Analysis of Laurel Hubbard and the Tokyo Olympic Games", Greey, A.D. and Lenskyj, H.J. (Ed.) Justice for Trans Athletes (Emerald Studies in Sport and Gender), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 151-163. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-985-920221010