Internet and the Visibility of Women's Football in France: Advances and Paradoxes

The sub-mediatization of women's sport is a recurrent question in social science research. Issues are mainly based on traditional media and very little on the Internet, which is nevertheless positioned as the 2nd media medium for sports broadcasting. Although women's soccer still has a weak presence in the media as a whole, it has nevertheless experienced strong growth in recent years. The objective here is to grasp the scope and the forms of visibility from Internet in a context strongly dominated by male hegemony. The research is based on a monitoring of women's football players and a netnographic observation of speciic websites. The tension between gender and the media coverage of women's sport shows how the Internet and its weight in the spread of sport could (or could not) ofer an alternative way of raising the proile of women's football and a new reading of the feminine and the masculine.