A Critical Discourse Analysis of Intersectional Identity Construction in Women's Football

My PhD thesis will offer the first academic investigation into the role of language in intersectional identity
construction in professional women's football discourse using Critical Discourse Analysis. Specifically, I
will address the following questions: What role does language play in creating and maintaining identities
in women's football media? How does women's football interact with broader cultural issues concerning
identity? How do athletes and journalists use language to position themselves in these discussions?
I will conduct four qualitative case studies involving the English and American national teams, and teams
in the highest division English and American leagues: Arsenal and Manchester United in the FA Women's
Super League and Utah Royals and Portland Thorns in the NWSL. This study will include the construction
of a data set foregrounding the underrepresented perspectives of female footballers via Twitter posts and
interview responses, whilst also featuring sports journalism from British media across the political
spectrum including The Guardian, MailOnline, and the BBC. The data set will surround and succeed 2019,
'a breakthrough year for women's football' (FIFA 2019). As accessibility of discourse is a crucial
consideration in discussions of public identity construction and in the emancipation of marginalised
groups at the heart of this study, this data set will draw from publicly available online sources (Lazar
2008; Fairclough 2014). I will adapt a multidisciplinary approach to analysing this diverse data set,
combining key critical discourse analytical approaches (Fairclough 1995, 2003, 2014; Lazar 2008, 2014)
with van Leeuwen's (2008) legitimation strategies and Wodak and Koller's (2008) conceptualisations of
the public sphere