The Disabled Athlete in British Online Media A Critical Discourse Analysis Diplomarbeit zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie an der Geisteswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz vorgelegt von Tina Görzer am Institut für Anglistik Begutachter: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Bernhard Kettemann Graz, Dezember 2010 Acknowledgement I want to thank Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Bernhard Kettemann and Mag. Dr. Georg Marko for their continuous guidance during the time of writing this thesis, as well as in the process of topic search. They always helped me with words and deeds. Further, I would like to thank my family and friends for always supporting and encouraging me during my studies. Danksagung Herzlichst möchte ich mich bei Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Bernhard Kettemann und Mag. Dr. Georg Marko bedanken. Sie waren nicht nur im Verlauf der Arbeit selbst, sondern auch bei der Themenfindung sehr hilfreich und sind mir immer mit Rat und Tat zur Seite gestanden. Außerdem gilt mein Dank meiner Familie und meinen Freunden, die mich im Laufe meines Studiums immer unterstützt und bestärkt haben. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………...1 2. Disability, disability sports and the media ……………………………………… 4 2.1 Defining disability ……………………………..…………...……….…………... 4 2.2 The construction of disability …………………………………………………… 5 2.3 The development of disability sports …………………………..………..….........6 2.4 Media coverage ……………………………………………...………....………. 7 3. The fascination and representation of the ‘Other’ …………………………..… 10 3.1 What makes differences so fascinating? ……………………………………... 10 3.2 Types and stereotypes …………………………………………….………….... 12 3.3 Stereotypes about disabled persons …………………………….……………… 14 4. Disability and sports – a contradiction? ……..…………….…………………… 17 4.1 Body cult and individualisation …………………………………..……………. 17 4.2 Higher, faster, stronger – the importance of competition in sports …………......20 4.3 Reasons for sports participation ……………………………………..….………23 5. Critical Discourse Analysis ……………………………………………………… 25 5.1 Language, Ideologies and Power ………………..………….…………………. 25 5.2 Norman Fairclough’s three dimensional model …………………………….…. 28 5.3. The analysts position ………………………………………………………….. 30 6. Conclusion: Theoretical and Socio-Cultural Background …………………… 31 7. Research question and hypothesis …………………………………………….…33 8. Method and Data ……………………………………………………….…….… 36 8.1. Method ………………………………………………..………………….…. 36 8.2. Data …………..…………………………………………………………..…. 36 8.2.1 The two corpora in detail ………………..…………………..……….. 37 9. Research ………………………………………………………………….…..…. 38 9.1 Biographical emphasis – the tragic fates of disabled athletes ………………… 38 9.1.1 Athletes with a physical disability ……………………………………….. 38 9.1.1.1 Body Parts ……………………………………………………….. 44 9.1.1.2 Disability ………………………………………………………… 44 9.1.1.3 Origins of physical disabilities ………………………………..… 47 9.1.1.4 Conditions ……………………………………………………….. 52 9.1.2 Athletes with a mental impairment ……………………………………… 55 9.1.2.1 Disability ………………………………………………………… 56 9.1.2.2 Origins of mental disabilities ……………………………………. 58 9.1.2.3 Conditions ………………………………………………………...59 9.1.3. Positioning of biographical facts in the articles …..…………………….. 62 9.2 Non-competitiveness of disability sports ………………………..…………….. 66 9.2.1 Success and failure ………………………………………...……………. 67 9.2.2 Improving the personal best and taking part as central motivation………. 71 9.2.3 Changing sports …………………………………………………….…… 72 9.2.4 Classification system ………………………………………………….…. 75 10. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………78 11. Deutsche Zusammenfassung ….………………………………………………… 81 Bibliography Tables and Figures 1. Introduction In this thesis the focus is on professional sports and how the media (linguistically) represent athletes not on sports as a leisure time activity. Language is an important tool to spread ideas and beliefs, and ideas and beliefs, in turn, influence language. In news about sports we therefore find stereotypes and ideologies about sports, about gender and race of an athlete, and about many other issues. Commonly shared beliefs are included within texts and texts add to the creation of beliefs. In order to understand this process I want to give a very simple example. Let us take the Austrian football squad, for instance. The team is commonly rather smiled at and not taken very seriously as previous results were more often disappointing than convincing. If the squad were to win an important World Cup qualification game against the current European Champion Spain, the media would probably come up with headlines such as “Surprising success of the Austrian team against the European Champion” or “David beats Goliath – Austria on its way to the World Cup”. These invented headlines on the one hand represent the commonly shared idea of the Austrian team being clearly inferior to the Spanish team, but would, if they were actual headlines, also spread it, because everyone who is confronted with the headline automatically gets the impression that this success was rather caused by luck than by competence. The choice and positioning of words, the structure and grammar of a text as well as the use of metaphors influence how we perceive the given information. On the following pages, I will take a look at stereotypes and ideologies about the represented individuals, namely about the athletes. A professional athlete is usually considered as strong, well-trained, attractive and highly competitive. These are only a few characteristics that can be assigned to an athlete. This thesis will, however, not concentrate on this athlete, but will focus on an unfortunately less respected subcategory of athletes. If we categorise athletes, we can either group them in terms of the type of sport they practise, according to their gender and age, or according to their degree of profession. We can also distinguish between able-bodied athletes and athletes with a disability. The thesis will focus on the disabled athlete. A disabled athlete is generally not considered very strong and attractive due to her/his impairment and s/he is also not perceived as very competitive as s/he will never achieve the same goals as a sportsperson without a disability. This fact, besides others such as complicated classification systems and a lack of interest of the public, makes it very difficult for the media to report about disability sports. Media coverage is therefore very low. Nevertheless, articles on disability sports exist, and those articles contain a huge amount 1 of ideologies and stereotypes about disability in general and about disabled athletes. The word disabled implies that a person, for whatever reason, is not able to do something. If we consider that sports on the contrary demand specific abilities, it becomes very clear why this topic is so interesting. In the face of this contrast it is difficult to accept the professional character of disability sports for many people. In this thesis, I will attempt to uncover concealed ideologies about mentally and physically impaired athletes in newspaper articles by analysing linguistic features of online newspaper articles on disability sports and interpreting them carefully. The first part of this thesis provides all the necessary information to understand the relevance of the second, the empirical part. In this part, I will first of all give a brief introduction to the terminology of disability (also concerning the terminology used in this thesis) and how the term is socially constructed. I will explain how disability sports actually developed and how the media deal with it. The main reasons for the above mentioned lack of media coverage will be discussed and I will try to explain why the ‘Other’, referring to something or someone different from ourselves, on the one hand fascinates us, and on the other hand scares us. Another very interesting issue which will be discussed is the difference between types and stereotypes and the development of the latter. I will further focus on a few stereotypes about people with a disability which are regularly used by the media and I will try to explain why the idea of a discrepancy between sports and disability exists, and which factors influence the development of this idea. The method which will be applied in order to analyse the data in the empirical part of this thesis, is the method of critical discourse analysis. As there is an undeniable connection between language, ideologies and power, I will briefly explain a few approaches on the issue, relating them to the relevance of this method and show how it can actually be carried out on the example of Norman Fairclough’s approach. The second part of this thesis starts with my research question and some sub-questions I defined. Method and data are briefly explained and I will then evaluate the results I achieved by linguistically analysing the online newspaper articles that form my corpus. These findings are thus used to strengthen or weaken the hypotheses I suggested following my research question. The empirical part is divided in two big chapters, of which the one deals with the media’s focus on the personal tragedies of the athletes and the other with the image of non- competitiveness of disabled athletes and disability sports. In these chapters I will also try to illustrate my findings by giving concrete examples from my corpora. 2 The main aim of this thesis is to come to conclusions concerning my hypotheses about biographical emphasis and the image of non-competitiveness in articles