A Study On The Media Image Construction Of Sexual Minority Athletes In Chinese And American Social Media For The 2020 Tokyo Olympics

The Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics has been dubbed "the most queer Olympics ever," with at least 181 sexual minority athletes competing,more than three times as many as in Rio de Janeiro and more than all previous summer and Winter Olympics combined.As a "concentration" of public opinion,the discussion of sexual minority athletes on social media affects people’s understanding of this special group and reflects the image of athletes of a specific gender on social media.Taking the discourse about sexual minority athletes on Twitter and Sina Weibo during the Tokyo Olympic Games as the research object,this paper captures all the tweets and blog posts about sexual minority athletes on the two platforms from July 23 to 8,2021 to build a small corpus.According to the "three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis" proposed by Fairclough,the text practice analysis,discourse practice analysis and social practice analysis of the corpus are analyzed.In the text analysis stage,the corpus analysis tool Ant Conc is used to analyze high-frequency words,collocation words and index lines in the corpus,and summarize the basic images of athletes of a particular gender.In the analysis of discourse practice,it analyzes the corpus based on the concept of "intertextuality" and summarizes the grammatical features of the discourse.In the stage of social practice analysis,through analyzing the cultural background related to sexual minority athletes,the relevant regulations of the International Olympic Committee and the function mechanism of media in the process of discourse production,this paper provides references for understanding the image of sexual minority athletes.It is found that sexual minority athletes show rich images and connotations in social media at home and abroad.Gay athletes present the image of elite athletes who are "well-known","skilled","cooperative" and "Olympic champion" in social media.At the same time,they are also "leaders" and "representatives" of sexual minority communities.On the other hand,transgender athletes are portrayed as "history makers" who pioneered transgender athletes’ participation in the Olympic Games and "disenfranchisees" who use their physical advantages to influence women’s sports.