Theologising the discourse of representation through ‘faith’ and religion in football news
The paper examines the use of ‘faith’ in football through the analysis of the patterns of its co-occurrences in the corpus of football news articles in The Star, a local Malaysian English language newspaper. These articles have been produced by the local news authors who claim to be the faithful o...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2019
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14005/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14005/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14005/1/27653-110173-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | The paper examines the use of ‘faith’ in football through the analysis of the patterns of its co-occurrences in the
corpus of football news articles in The Star, a local Malaysian English language newspaper. These articles
have been produced by the local news authors who claim to be the faithful of particular football teams. The use
of ‘faith’ has been found to express and call for the allegiance towards the preferred teams which is addressed
to the audience in general. In this sense, the overdetermined role of the authors as the news producers and the
supporters of certain football teams may contribute to how they are represented in the media. Moreover, ‘faith’
has often been limited to religion and little is known about its use in sport and representation. Hencethe
investigation is aimed at making sense of the meanings of ‘faith’ in the context of football to further unveil its
role in the discourse of representation. The results reveal the co-occurrences of ‘faith’ with the vocabulary of
religion simulating interdiscursive relations that strategise on theologising the representation of the news
participants in attempts to legitimise the allegiance to particular sides in football naturally. Consequently, using
faith of religion to call for faith in football may lead to the glorification and derogation of certain football teams
that further influence their representation as ‘Us’ or ‘Them’. As this practice may also be accepted as a
common practice indicating sports rivalry, it also makes ‘faith’ a naturalised code without appearing to be
ideological. |
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