No Coward Plays Hockey
Abstract
This thesis examined the landscape of women’s hockey in Canada, and focused on the national women’s hockey team, and how the treatment of female hockey players in the Canadian media, and in the eyes of the Canadian public, differs from the treatment of male hockey players. This thesis drew on three different research methods: an ethical/philosophical analysis, a media analysis and a narrative analysis.
The ethical analysis took a philosophical approach and discussed the different rules in men’s and women’s hockey. The ethical analysis also discussed other issues in hockey such as paternalism versus free will, and gender segregation in sport. The media analysis consisted of a content analysis centering on major Canadian newspapers published over the last 29 years, in order to see how these newspapers viewed female hockey players and women’s hockey in general. Finally, this thesis included a narrative analysis. The narrative analysis consisted of two separate types of narratives: a story analyst approach; and a personal narrative approach. The story analyst approach acted as a continuation of the media analysis and examined key themes and ideas from the media analysis and created a story from those data. The personal experience narrative was told from the first person. In this section, I added to the narrative surrounding women’s hockey in Canada by contributing my own stories from ten years of playing competitive girls’ hockey in the Greater Toronto Area.