Donna Gall

I am a senior leader in the film and television industry, a seasoned lecturer at RTA School of Media at Ryerson University, and an award winning academic with a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture. My doctoral research was inspired by a documentary I wrote, directed and produced for Sportsnet in 2015 about women and sport in Canada. Of the many stories of inequity I told in the film, it was the voice of Hayley Wickenheiser that echoed through my head as she wondered why audiences will watch women play hockey during the Olympics but won't watch them play professionally. I conducted a national audience reception study during the 2018 Olympics and wrote up my findings in 2019, just as the professional Canadian Women's Hockey League folded. My analysis identified a persistent discursive strategy framing women’s hockey as “pure” for resisting the crass commercialization, incessant violence and individualistic star system of professional men’s hockey. Temporally frozen as the manifestation of the Canadian myth of hockey “as it used to be” women’s hockey becomes tangled in a double bind; virtuous yet non-viable as a commercial enterprise. I also argue that the audience for women's hockey exists and is waiting to be assembled by a broadcaster. For 50 years, the CBC constructed the audience for hockey as the audience for men's hockey. Recently, the CBC has announced that they would broadcast the whole season of the men's junior league while women's hockey languishes as "non-profit". For my doctoral work, I was nominated for both the 2019 C. Ravi Ravindran Outstanding Thesis Award and for the Ryerson Gold Medal, and was awarded the 2019 Communication and Culture Doctoral Dissertation Prize. I have worked as a lecturer at the RTA School of Media since 2016 teaching factual writing, documentary production, media audiences and various sport media courses. I continue to work in broadcast television and produce digital media for health care professionals and academics through my own company Docs4Docs. My current qualitative research explores the history of professional women's hockey in Canada as a persistent story of two groups of women who want the same thing fighting each other over the crumbs of patriarchy. I am also assembling a manuscript for publication about "purity" as a discursive strategy used to frame women's sport that purports to elevate but functions to disavow audience affective engagement.