The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) was named the “fastest-growing brand in professional sports in 2024” by Forbes, with much attention centered on Indiana Fever’s number one draft pick, Caitlin Clark. Considering Clark is a white heterosexual woman, she stands in contrast to the WNBA’s historical and current demographic makeup, in which the majority are women of color and LGBTQIA+ (Yanity, 2024). This tension between societal majority and league minority raises important sociological questions about how discourse is being produced about Caitlin Clark. Therefore, this study utilized a Critical Discourse Analysis approach to examine the ways four leading sports media publications – CBS Sports, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and Yahoo! Sports – produced discourse about Caitlin Clark during her rookie season in the WNBA utilizing contemporary theorizations of her identities (Fairclough, 2010). Our findings revealed that Clark was portrayed as a savior, living legend, deserving of grace, and a victim. We argue that sport media’s discourse around Caitlin Clark has been instrumental in perpetuating racial ideologies of White saviorism, privilege, and victimization within the broader contexts of sport and society.
Gardner et al. (Fri,) studied this question.