Sportswomen, social media, and gendered affective labor: an analysis of two teams at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup

Julie Brice, Holly Thorpe and Hannah McNamara

Sport Management Review, 2025, vol. 28, issue 5, 986-1008

Abstract: Scholars and sports organizations are increasingly focused on sportswomen’s use of social media and the risks/rewards of using digital platforms to expand financial opportunities. Simultaneously, some feminist scholars have highlighted the high levels of brand management and digital labor that sportswomen are expected to perform to build their social media following and contribute toward their sport’s longevity and economic success. Here, we build upon this research by engaging the concept of affective labor to reveal the highly gendered digital work performed by sportswomen during the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. We focus on two national teams, the USA and New Zealand, with the former going into the event with high expectations to win, and the latter with very little international success and with a small fan base. Conducting a compositional analysis of the Instagram posts (images and text) of the five most followed players on each team, we identified three circulatory affects —1) honor/gratitude, 2) inspiration, and 3) guilt/shame – to showcase how athletes used social media to moderate affect within their fan base. We suggest that athletes are engaging in gendered digital affective labor in which they are responsible and (indirectly) expected to engage in immaterial (and unpaid) labor, carefully managing not only their own, but others’ emotions in ways not expected of male athletes. We argue that this digital affective labor will take an emotional toll on sportswomen if not identified and acknowledged by the sports organizations whose role is to ensure the health and wellbeing of their athletes.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/14413523.2025.2532216

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