NAME, IMAGE AND LIKENESS: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF HOW WOMEN STUDENT ATHLETES SHARE THEIR STORIES AND LIVED EXPERIENCES ON SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE AGE OF NIL

Abstract

This dissertation assesses the self-representation and representation of ten elite collegiate women athletes during the first year of the NCAA’s new ‘name, image and likeness’ policies. Building on theories of representation, gender performance, self-presentation and intersectionality, this study explores how women athletes reproduce notions of feminism, femininity and athleticism on their public TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts. Each of the women in this study have at least 50,000 followers across their social media accounts, and the content they produced on these platforms over the 12-month period from July 1, 2021, to July 1, 2022, serves to both reflect and reject hegemonic norms surrounding women in sport. Previous research has demonstrated that women athletes remain marginalized and underrepresented in sports. Scholars have also noted that women athletes typically represent themselves on social media in ways that highlight their personal lives, as opposed to their athletic experiences. This study explores these questions of self-representation through a content analysis of social media posts produced by ten collegiate women and addresses how these women navigated digital storytelling within the neoliberal, capitalist, patriarchal U.S. college sports media ecosystem. The ways in which athlete content was reproduced by journalists during this same period was also assessed. Findings show that journalists rarely engaged with women athletes’ posts during the first year of the NCAA’s new NIL policies and presented women’s success in the NIL era as surprising, unexpected and unrelated to athletic achievements. This dissertation adds to the larger body of research on women’s representation and self-representation in sports but adds a new dimension to this subject by exploring such representations in the collegiate environment, an arena in which athletes were previously denied the opportunity to earn money from their digital storytelling and online brands. The ways in which women challenge and reproduce hegemonic norms in their social media content during this period also contributes to the broader understanding of gender tensions in sports.