‘The golf course doesn’t know what gender you are’: feminist perspectives in the online blog of a female professional golfer

Abstract

Many female athletes are using online platforms to control their own portrayals, and such representations have been examined mostly through neoliberal and postfeminist perspectives, which position female athletes as responsible for their own self-promotion, visibility, success and failure. This paper seeks to employ these and other feminist frameworks in exploring how professional golfer Meghan MacLaren uses her online blog to respond to gender inequality in her profession. Using a myriad of feminist perspectives, the authors discuss the cultural/media conditions through which MacLaren writes her blog, the individual or collective nature of MacLaren’s activism, and the significance of binary outlooks in her blog. Along with shedding light on the contemporary gender politics operating in professional women’s sport, this paper illustrates the synthesis of perspectives that exist when closely examining the voices and choices of one female professional athlete.