“Smiles and laughs—all teeth intact”: A cultural perspective on mediated women’s handball in Norway

Abstract

This article explores gendered sport communication in Norway. The data highlight Norwegian TV2’s live game commentaries of the 2009 women’s handball world championships, as well as live and studio commentary and journalistic reports concerning the Norwegian national women’s handball team from 2009 to 2013. The narrative-analytic approach is structural-hermeneutic and concerned with processes of meaning making. Instead of reading off gender/macrostructure in data, this project maps the semiotic culture structure of mediated women’s handball and shows how gendered meaning is creatively used to inform understandings of female handballers’ situated practices. The analysis first outlines the cultural binaries that constrain the media presentations of Norwegian women’s handball, then scrutinizes how gendered conceptions of sport and female athletes are used to understand this binary culture structure. Analytically revealed is a staging of Norwegian women’s handball that portrays successful and powerful female bodies’ contextual conduct. Norwegian women handballers are playing the aggressive and physically violent game in what is analyzed as a gender-appropriate manner.