This paper aims to examine how the postfeminist contradiction is reorganised under platform conditions and develops the Postfeminist Analytical Framework (PFAN) as a critical framework for analysing this shift within sport media. The focus is not on establishing whether contradiction exists but on examining how it is articulated through athlete-led visibility labour, platform infrastructures, audience interpretation, commercial value and exposure to harm. The PFAN is therefore positioned as a critical relational heuristic for qualitative market research rather than as a stand-alone theory, showing how researchers can trace contradiction systematically across the platformed conditions through which it is produced and made consequential.
The paper develops the PFAN from postfeminism as a sensibility into a relational heuristic for qualitative analysis. Rather than treating contradiction as a static textual feature, the framework traces how feminist and antifeminist meanings are produced and articulated across platform affordances, affective dynamics, audience uptake, governance arrangements, value production and harm. The argument is advanced through critical synthesis of feminist sport media scholarship and operationalised through a linked theoretical and analytical matrix. The paper foregrounds method as much as concept by clarifying what researchers should look for, how different analytical dimensions relate and where reflexive judgement remains necessary.
The paper shows that postfeminist contradiction remains a recurring feature of digital sport media, but under platform conditions it becomes both representational and infrastructural. Contradictory meanings are organised, circulated and reworked through platform affordances, affective engagement, monetisation, moderation, branding expectations and uneven relations of visibility. The worked illustration further shows how audience responses may reproduce or contest the same articulation, linking interpretation and affect to visibility, value, governance and vulnerability. The PFAN therefore makes analytically traceable not simply the presence of contradiction, but how it is reproduced, modified and made consequential as it moves across representation, circulation and reception.
The PFAN’s contribution lies in offering a relational analytical heuristic for tracing how postfeminist contradiction is articulated across discourse, platform infrastructures, affect, interpretation, value, harm and governance. It does not claim to replace existing postfeminist scholarship or to discover contradiction anew. Rather, it brings established insights into a coherent, transparent and sport-specific framework that connects conceptual analysis with empirical questions about visibility, value, governance, vulnerability and interpretation in contemporary sport media research. Its originality therefore lies in analytical integration, transparent operationalisation and sport-specific application rather than in claiming an entirely new account of postfeminism.
