Performing Athletic Legitimacy on Instagram: Visual Self-Presentation in Elite Wheelchair Basketball

Abstract

Disability sport has become increasingly visible in digital media environments, yet comparatively little is known about how elite para-athletes sustain athletic legitimacy through routine, athlete-managed social media practices. This study examines how elite wheelchair basketball players organize Instagram content to render elite credibility publicly recognizable. Drawing on qualitative visual content analysis of 360 posts produced by 24 national team–level athletes from Canada, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, the study adopts a dramaturgically informed, cross-national comparative design. The findings indicate a recurring visual repertoire in which legitimacy is most consistently communicated through institutional competition settings, routinized preparation displays, visible team affiliation, and moderated affective presentation, while several US-based accounts more frequently incorporate commercially integrated and motivationally elaborated forms of visibility. Captions primarily function as concise multimodal alignment devices rather than sites of extended narrative elaboration. The study contributes to communication and sport scholarship by specifying how athlete-managed Instagram environments can function as routine sites of legitimacy work within platformed parasport cultures.