Cover not available
Article published In:
Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 7:2 (2017) ► pp.213–234

Sports metaphors and women’s empowerment in the 2014 European election campaign in Romania

| National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest
| National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest

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.

Keywords: sports metaphor, metaphor and politics, electoral race, women’s empowerment
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.

Published online: 20 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.7.2.03dum
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bell, B.
(2009) Sport studies. Exeter: Learning Matters.Google Scholar
Boroditsky, L.
(2000) Metaphoric structuring: understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition, 75(1), 1–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2004) Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chilton, P.
(2004) Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Connell, R.
(1989) Gender and power. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Cudd, A.
(2007) Sporting metaphors: competition and the ethos of capitalism. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 34(1), 52–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Daley, J.
(2014) British politics is now a bare-knuckle fight again. The Telegraph. October 4. Retrieved April 30, 2016 from [URL]
Deignan, A.
(2005) Metaphor and corpus linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1999) Sport matters: sociological studies of sport, violence and civilization. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Forceville, C.
(1996) Pictorial metaphors in advertising. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(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.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, R. W.
(1994) The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language and understanding. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Howe, N.
(1988) Metaphor in contemporary American political discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 3(2), 87–104. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, E., & Hills, L.
(2009) Sport, media and society. Oxford & New York: Berg.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G.
(1995) Metaphor, morality, and politics, or, why Conservatives have left Liberals in the dust. Social Research, 62(2), 177–214.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M.
(1980) Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Manning, P.
(1991) Drama as life: The significance of Goffman’s changing use of the theatrical metaphor. Sociological Theory, 9(1), 70–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
(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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Messner, M.
(1992) Power at play: Sports and the problem of masculinity. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Messner, M., Dunbar, M., & Hunt, D.
(2000) The televised sports manhood formula. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 24(4), 380–394. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ritchie, L. D.
(2011)  Justice is blind. A model for analyzing metaphor transformations and narrative in actual discourse. Metaphor and the Social World, 1(1), 70–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scheithauer, R.
(2007) Metaphors in election night television coverage in Britain, the United States and Germany. In A. Fetzer & G. E. Lauerbach (Eds.), Political discourse in the media (pp. 75–106). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Segrave, J. O.
(1994) The perfect 10: ‘Sportspeak’ in the language of sexual relations. Sociology of Sport Journal, 11(2), 95–113. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2000) The sports metaphor in American cultural discourse. Culture, Sport, Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, 3(1), 48–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Semino, E.
(2008) Metaphor in discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Semino, E., & Masci, M.
(1996) Politics is football: Metaphor in the discourse of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. Discourse and Society, 7(2), 243–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Soulages, J. C.
(1998) Les mises en scène visuelles de l’information. Étude comparée France, Espagne, États-Unis. Paris: INA/De Boeck Université.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
VISMET Annotation Scheme, Metaphor Lab Amsterdam
Available on [URL]
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Heo, Mansup
2020. Abused metaphors in political communication: the case of two presidents. Asian Journal of Communication 30:3-4 ► pp. 221 ff. DOI logo
Juszczyk, Konrad, Barbara Konat & Małgorzata Fabiszak
2022. Speakers who metaphorize together – argue together. Metaphor and the Social World 12:2 ► pp. 245 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 april 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.