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Cross-country skiing is a popular TV-sport in Sweden and several skiers have become sports heroes due to media representations. However, media events on TV have traditionally portrayed female and male athletes differently. Audiences’ attitudes can be influenced by repetitive representations when certain affects are connected to certain bodies. In this article I investigate how female and male cross-country skiers are portrayed in public service TV in Sweden (SVT), using material from the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships in Lahti, Finland, 2017. The aim is to find out how the skiers are positioned with affect in anecdotes about them and how this contributes to intimization. The concept of affective positioning is used as a theoretical framework in this study, which involves a discursive production of identities through the meaning-making practices of expressing affect. The results reveal that there are asymmetries between how the female and male skiers are positioned with affect. Affective practices about the female skiers mostly position them with mental strength and sometimes in a personal discourse, as mothers, whereas the male skiers are only positioned in a professional discourse with both mental and physical strength and with the affect humour. Since the narratives are created asym-metrically media representations reproduce different notions about how female and male athletes are supposed to be, which femininities and masculinities are considered to fit in the sporting discourse.

Response is an effective tool for exercising power in humour, since it can make a person seem funny. In the same way, the lack of response can make a person seem unfunny. In this article I argue that failed jokes make a female skiing pundit on TV seem humourless and that this is due to the other interlocutors refraining from giving adequate responses. The material is from a sports programme about cross-country skiing on Swedish Television. The aim of the case study is to find out how power is exercised discursively in humour that fails and to discuss possible implications the rejections may have on notions of gender. The theoretical framework used is a feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis in combination with an analysis of internal and external control mechanisms. The discursive practice of repeated rejections of the female pundit may have consequences for her possibilities in seeming humorous.

Humour is a means of negotiating for power positions in conversations. In conversations on TV,these negotiations reach a large audience. The aim of this study is to investigate how power positionsand gender are negotiated for through the use of humour by female and male sport punditsand commentators. How does the host interact with the sport pundits in a comical discourse? Whatresponse do sport pundits receive when interacting in a comical discourse? In my analysis, I investigateto what extent social closeness and distance affect both the outcome of how humour isgenerated and which power positions are achieved. The method employed in this article is discourseanalysis in combination with conversation analysis, and the material comes from the WorldChampionship in cross-country skiing 2017, broadcast on Swedish public service TV (SVT). Theresults show that humour gives somewhat different outcomes between different interlocutorsdepending on gender. The male expert and commentators achieve powerful positions and socialcloseness in the comical discourse when interacting with the host. The female expert is not able toachieve powerful positions in the same way, due to the different responses she receives in thecomical discourse. This also creates a social distance between her and the others. The asymmetryin how different interlocutors are treated is also a part of how notions of gender are (re)producedin a comical discourse.