Research Progress of Western Female Sport and Media

The issues about female sport and media becomes research focus in sociology of sport.This paper reviews 54 articles as samples from IRSS, SSJ, JSSI, 3 peer-reviewed journals for sociology of sport from 1997 to 2016.The reseaching characeteristics are studied with the method of text analysis.The result shows that in the past 20 years, the research data of western sports sociology on female sports and media comes from traditional print media, video media and the internet or new media.The methods of content analysis and discourse analysis and the theories of feminism and others are applied comprehensively in the field.The researches mainly focused on the inequality and discrimination of social gender, the constructed femininity and social identity of gender, the symbolizied female body and lesbian issues in the sport media.Meanwhile, this study reflects the opportunities and challenges in the field of female sport and media in the era of new media.