Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology; Issue No. 16: Emerging Gender, Media and Technology Scholarship in Africa

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Issue edited by Audrey Gadzekpo, Paula Gardner, and Leslie Steeves

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Open Access
Newspapers as Gendered Spaces: Photographic Representation of Kenyan Female Athletes in the Kenyan Press during the Rio 2016 Olympic Games
(Fembot Collective, 2020-02) Nyanoti, Joseph
Kenya is known globally as the home of world champions in athletics, including the Olympics. However, although the Olympic games dominate public discourse in Kenya when they are being held every four years, there is hardly any academic interest in the many press photographs that are published in this season. The main objective of this study is to analyze how female athletes were photographically represented compared with their male counterparts in the Rio 2016 Olympics in the Kenyan newspapers. I employed quantitative content analysis and semiotic analysis to study Kenya’s two leading daily newspapers, the Daily Nation and the Standard between August 5 and 21, 2016, the time the Olympic games took place. My findings indicate that the two newspapers allocated more photographic space to men compared with women athletes. The findings also show that photographs in this study depicted women as weaker than men, as emotional unlike their logical male counterparts, and generally as inferior to men.