‘To inspire women and girls’: Exploring elite female cricketers’ uses of, and responses to, mediated (in)visibility in ordinary and extraordinary times

According to Brighenti (2007) “everything I see is at least potentially within the realm of I can” (p.328). This is the logic that underpins many perceptions of why visibility matters for elite female athletes. After all, researchers have found when girls can see and have active women athletes as role models, they are significantly more active than girls whose role models are outside of sport (Young et al., 2015). Indeed, visibility is often seen as something that is inherently positive and often one dimensional by the sports industry. However, across the last forty years scholars have maintained women’s sport receives less than 10% of all sports coverage (Cooky et al., 2013; Godoy-Pressland, 2014). Predominantly, research has focussed on the ways in which elite female athletes are either represented or ignored by mainstream media (Bruce, 2016). More recently, debates have centred on the potential digital media has to bypass traditional media to enable athletes to take ownership of their narrative (Bruce 2013; Smith & Sanderson, 2015; Thorpe et al., 2017) and access sponsorships (Pegoraro, 2010; Hasaan et al., 2018).

Therefore, there is an increasing expectation that athletes want to participate in and should be visible on social media platforms for these goals. Though there has been little interrogation of what visibility means as a concept. Equally few studies explore attitudes and experiences of visibility and even fewer gain access to elite female athletes who represent their country both within ordinary and extraordinary times. Specifically, this study draws from interviews 8 former England cricketers, 7 current England cricketers and their media manager. The historical angle of this thesis provides useful context of a challenging but shifting women’s sport mediascape.

To make sense of visibility across time, this thesis poses a political economies framework. The aim is to bring together well-established debates of economies of visibility where much of the literature relates to ideas of athletes as brands alongside a politics of visibility where the focus is on power dynamics and representation. This thesis asserts that the integration of both approaches is more sufficient to explore elite female athletes’ experiences and perceptions of mediated (in)visibility. In fact, within this study female athletes dismissed themselves as brands, employed minimal social media strategies, did not seek sponsorships, and lacked social media training. Instead, perceptions of visibility were said to be important to promote their sport and inspire women and girls (see Pocock & Skey, 2022). Though what players want to do, think they do and actually do, may not align.

In this respect, this study theorises several novel ideas. For example, imagined inspiration conceptualises the overarching emphasis that players saw their social media use as important to inspire women and girls. But in reality, their following was predominantly men. Another key idea is the gender play gap which calls for scholars to examine not just the amount of media coverage, but the opportunities afforded to women to participate. Here we argue that the gender play gap exacerbates the gendered visibility gap between men’s and women’s sport. This thesis also builds on McClearen’s (2021) work on gendered media labour and combines this with Chahardovali and McLeod’s (2022) theorisation of inspirational labour. Here we argue that elite female athletes are required to do often uncompensated and unnoticed work to make themselves and their sport not only visible but to be seen as inspirational.

In sum, this thesis presents a nuanced account of visibility as shared by elite female voices both past and present. In doing so, this project challenges pertinent assumptions about athlete social media use and visibility whilst building on the small but growing research in this space (See McClearen, 2021; Pocock & Skey, 2022).