Sports metaphors and women’s empowerment in the 2014 European election campaign in Romania
This paper examines sports metaphors as symbolic resources for electoral discourse, focusing on both their conventional nature and their strategic value in delivering the political message. It takes the form of a case study analyzing the multimodal realizations of the ‘EuroChampion’ sports metaphor in five posters used by the Romanian Liberal Party in the 2014 campaign for the European Parliament. We argue that the ‘EuroChampion’ metaphor and the richness of sports imagery are strategically used to enhance deeper doctrinal party positioning, such as promoting meritocracy and competitiveness, while, at the same time, empowering women candidates in the election.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Sports and elections: Stimulating competition and assessing candidates’ performance
- 2.1Sports imagery and politics
- 2.2Sports metaphors in times of elections
- 3.‘EuroChampions’ at work: Corpus and methodology
- 4.Findings: Identification and analysis of the metaphors in the posters
- Campaign poster 1
- Campaign poster 2
- Campaign poster 3
- Campaign poster 4
- Campaign poster 5
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusions
- Notes
-
References
This article is currently available as a sample article.
References (50)
References
Bairner, A. (2000). After the war? Soccer, masculinity, and violence in Northern Ireland. In J. McKay, D. Sabo, & M. Messner (Eds.), Masculinities, gender relations, and sport (pp. 176–194). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 

Bell, B. (2009). Sport studies. Exeter: Learning Matters.
Boroditsky, L. (2000). Metaphoric structuring: understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition, 75(1), 1–28. 

Borowitz, A. (2012). Race for White House wide open after Hillary leaves office in 2024. The New Yorker. July 9. Retrieved on April 25, 2016 from [URL]
Burnes, S. (2011). Metaphors in press reports of elections: Obama walked on water, but Musharraf was beaten by a knockout. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(8), 2160–2175. 

Cassidy, J. (2016). What will Bernie Sanders and his supporters learn from New York? The New Yorker. April 21. Retrieved April 21, 2016 from [URL].
Charteris-Black, J. (2005). Politicians and rhetoric. The persuasive power of metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Charteris-Black, J. (2004). Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. London: Routledge. 

Connell, R. (1989). Gender and power. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cudd, A. (2007). Sporting metaphors: competition and the ethos of capitalism. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 34(1), 52–67. 

Daley, J. (2014). British politics is now a bare-knuckle fight again. The Telegraph. October 4. Retrieved April 30, 2016 from [URL]
Dunning, E. (1986). Sport as a male preserve: Notes on the social sources of masculine identity and its transformation. Theory, Culture & Society, 3(1), 79–90. 

Dunning, E. (1999). Sport matters: sociological studies of sport, violence and civilization. London: Routledge.
Dworkin, S., & Wachs, F. (2000). The morality/manhood paradox: Masculinity, sport, and the media. In J. McKay, M. Messner, & D. Sabo (Eds.), Masculinities, gender relations, and sport (pp. 47–66). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 

Forceville, C. (1996). Pictorial metaphors in advertising. London: Routledge. 

Forceville, C. (2008). Pictorial and multimodal metaphor in commercials. In E. F. McQuarrie & B. J. Phillips (Eds.), Go figure! New directions in advertising rhetoric (pp. 272–310). Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe.
Gentner, D., Imai, M., & Boroditsky, L. (2002). As time goes by: Evidence for two systems in processing space-time metaphors. Language and Cognitive Processes, 17(5), 537–565. 

Gibbs, R. W. (1994). The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language and understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gregory, M. R. (2010). Slam dunk: Strategic sport metaphors and the construction of masculine embodiment at work. In M. T. Segal (Ed.), Interactions and intersections of gendered bodies at work, at home, and at play (pp. 297–318). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing. 

Howe, N. (1988). Metaphor in contemporary American political discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 3(2), 87–104. 

Jansen, S. C., & Sabo, D. (1994). The sport/war metaphor: hegemonic masculinity, the Persian Gulf war, and the new world order. Sociology of Sport Journal, 11(1), 1–17. 

Kennedy, E., & Hills, L. (2009). Sport, media and society. Oxford & New York: Berg.
Lakoff, G. (1995). Metaphor, morality, and politics, or, why Conservatives have left Liberals in the dust. Social Research, 62(2), 177–214.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lepore, J. (2015). Bernie Sanders’s long run. The New Yorker. July 9. Retrieved on April 25, 2016 from [URL].
MacFarquhar, L. (2007). The Conciliator. The New Yorker. May 7. Retrieved November 14, 2015 from [URL].
Maguire, J., Jarvie, G., Mansfield, L., & Bradley, J. (2002). Sport worlds. A sociological perspective. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
Malszecki, G., & Cavar, T. (2001). Men, masculinities, war, and sport. In N. Mandell (Ed.), Feminist issues: Race, class, and sexuality (3rd ed., pp. 166–192). Toronto, Canada: Pearson Education Canada.
Manning, P. (1991). Drama as life: The significance of Goffman’s changing use of the theatrical metaphor. Sociological Theory, 9(1), 70–86. 

Matlock, T. (2013). Motion metaphors in political races. In M. Borkent, B. Dancygier, & J. Hinnell (Eds.), Language and the creative mind (pp. 193–201). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Matlock, T. (2012). Framing political messages with grammar and metaphor – How something is said may be as important as what is said. American Scientist, 1001, 478–483. 

Messner, M. (1992). Power at play: Sports and the problem of masculinity. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Messner, M., Dunbar, M., & Hunt, D. (2000). The televised sports manhood formula. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 24(4), 380–394. 

McGrath, B. (2007). Escapism express. The New Yorker. September 3. Retrieved April 30, 2016 from [URL]
Musolff, A. (2004). Metaphor and political discourse: Analogical reasoning in debates about Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Phillips, B. J., & McQuarrie, E. F. (2004). Beyond visual metaphor: A new typology of visual rhetoric in advertising. Marketing theory, 4(1/2), 113–136. 

Segrave, J. O. (1994). The perfect 10: ‘Sportspeak’ in the language of sexual relations. Sociology of Sport Journal, 11(2), 95–113. 

Segrave, J. O. (2000). The sports metaphor in American cultural discourse. Culture, Sport, Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, 3(1), 48–60. 

Semino, E. (2008). Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Semino, E., & Masci, M. (1996). Politics is football: Metaphor in the discourse of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. Discourse and Society, 7(2), 243–269. 

Shapiro, M. (1989). Representing world politics: The sport/war intertext. In J. Der Derian & M. Shapiro (Eds.), International/intertextual relations: Postmodern readings of world politics (pp. 69–96). Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
Soulages, J. C. (1998). Les mises en scène visuelles de l’information. Étude comparée France, Espagne, États-Unis. Paris: INA/De Boeck Université.
Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A. A., Krennmayr, T., & Pasma, T. (2010). A method for linguistic metaphor identification. From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Usborne, D. (2016). US election 2016: Gloves come off at last as Bernie Sanders attacks Hillary Clinton’s links to banks. The Independent. February 1. Retrieved April 30, 2016 from [URL]
Worsching, M. (1999). Metaphors of hegemonic masculinity – An analysis of sport and advertising in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel
. Journal of European Area Studies, 7(2), 177–195. 

VISMET Annotation Scheme, Metaphor Lab Amsterdam. Available on [URL]
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Juszczyk, Konrad, Barbara Konat & Małgorzata Fabiszak
Heo, Mansup
2020.
Abused metaphors in political communication: the case of two presidents.
Asian Journal of Communication 30:3-4
► pp. 221 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.