Is She? Female Bodies in Sports, Digital Sports Media and the Definition of Body Standards

Bodies are understood as social and/or symbolic constructions that impact a diversity of knowledge and representations, and only acquire meaning through the cultural perspective forged by human beings (Le Breton, 2007). In addition to being biologically constituted, bodies are constituted through psychological and sociocultural aspects, constituting the total social fact, while assuming different meanings in different times and in different social spaces (Le Breton, 2011). This study aims to analyze the body-gender relationship in high-performance sports, considering the influence of digital sports media, found on websites specialized in sports content, in defining body standards for female athletes in professional boxing, according to publications made during the period of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.Our goal is to analyze related to the sociology of the body, evidencing itself as an object of interest, has identification both in relation to gender and with reference to the social context, sports scenario. It starts from the following research question: how do digital sports media construct their discourses or narratives about the bodies of female boxing athletes in the context of the Paris 2024 Olympics? We developed a qualitative exploratory research, which constitutes the scope of ethnography and visual anthropology, seeking to interpret the narratives and images presented about the bodies of female boxing athletes. It can be inferred that the narratives constructed by the media about the bodies of female boxing athletes are forged through an ambivalent discourse, which is defined, on the one hand, by heteronormative female body standards, while these bodies are treated as fragile because they are women's and, on the other, as virilized bodies, when a discourse based on the masculinization and discrimination of these bodies is constructed.