This talk focuses on practices of athletic identity construction on Instagram by young female football players in Austria. The goal is to investigate strategies of self-presentation, self-disclosure and parasocial interactions used by these amateur players. Juxtaposing these with practices by professional athletes, we discuss differences, commonalities and in-betweens.
(Professional) athletic identity construction builds on self-presentation and self-disclosure to create a positive image of self, to appeal to specific audiences and engage in parasocial (post)fan-athlete relationships (Sheffer and Schultz 2015; Sanderson and Kassing 2016). Identity and impression management by professional athletes draw on strategies like creating an expert status or a consumable commodity, but also on authenticity and showing "the real persona" allowing for illusions of intimacy and fan identification. While these strategies materialize across all media, social media increase potentials and possibilities for athletes and audiences in form of e.g. micro-blogging or mediated embodied (inter)actions (Thurlow and Jaworski 2011; Page 2012). Concurrently, social media platforms like Instagram shape and condition these identity building tasks (Tagg 2015). Given that (mediated) embodiment and constructions of professional sport shape sport discourse at large, these platforms provide evidence for typical practices and performances that are adopted and repeated by users like amateurs to re-create their own versions of athletic identity. Yet, following Naglo's (2014) claimed interconnection of professional and amateur sport, such adoption and repetition entail a mutually creative element that allows for various forms of in-betweens. As part of a larger project that covers aspects of gender, youth, local vs. global and other in-between spaces of young female amateur players of the First Vienna Football Club (Graf and Fleischhacker in prep.), in this talk we focus on how they construct their athletic identity on Instagram. We are interested in the practices used, to what extent these replicate or imitate existing professional practices or to what extent they represent novel or hybrid forms. The data consists of more than 100 Instagram posts (255 items) by 11 players collected between April and August, 2018. Our methodological framework follows Reichert Smith and Sanderson's (2015) (visual and thematic content analyses) combining it with other sensitizing concepts (Blumer 1954) to look into the practices and functions of amateur vs. professional athletes' Instagram profiles.
