[Commlist] CFP - L'Atalante 37 - Women and sport in audiovisual media: bodies, images, politics

CFP - L'Atalante 37 - Women and sport in audiovisual media: bodies, 
images, politics

L'Atalante is pleased to announce the call for papers of issue 37, which 
under the title "Women and sport in audiovisual media: bodies, images, 
politics", is open for contributions.

Submissions: 1 May 2023 to 31 May 2023
Date of publication: January 2024
Editors: Manuel Garin, María Aparisi Galán

Articles should be between 5,000 and 7,000 words including all sections. 
There are no article processing costs charged to authors.

Detailed information at:
http://www.revistaatalante.com/index.php?journal=atalante&page=announcement&op=view&path%5B%5D=109 
<http://www.revistaatalante.com/index.php?journal=atalante&page=announcement&op=view&path%5B%5D=109>


WOMEN AND SPORT IN AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA: BODIES, IMAGES, POLITICS

Just as Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco foresaw, sport as a social 
construct has come to occupy a central place in the lifestyles and media 
habits of contemporary societies, to the point that many authors 
consider it to be one of the critical symptoms of broader processes of 
economic, geopolitical and cultural globalisation (Bale 1994, Carrington 
2010, Critchley 2017). As far as images are concerned, there is an 
abundance of film and media productions dealing with sports figures, 
stories and locations that have had a big impact on the general public 
and on discussions about gender, racial and class identities. While live 
broadcasts and sports journalism have enjoyed hegemonic status for 
decades, in recent years there has also been an increasing number of 
film and media productions (biopics, docuseries, reality shows, fiction 
series, transmedia projects) filling the catalogues of online streaming 
services and generating discussion on social media. Norbert Elias’s 
historical theory of sport as a major force in the civilising process is 
being updated today in light of its absolutely central role in the 
contemporary process of “mediatisation”.

In this context, there is an urgent need to identify the audiovisual 
productions, icons and genres that have historically shaped or are 
currently shaping the social construct of sport in film, television and 
new media. To this end, as the football historian Jean Williams once 
pointed out, it is vital to establish forms of resistance and criticism 
that can update our understanding of sport from a gender studies 
perspective, placing the focus on how different women have written 
about, filmed, interpreted and documented sports through images. Despite 
the patriarchal dominance and highly masculinised attitude that still 
characterises the depiction of sports in the media today, film history 
offers case studies that can open up critical perspectives on the agency 
and representation of women in sport, ranging from the well-known case 
of Leni Riefenstahl and the German Bergfilme, or the iconographies of 
Soviet physical culture, to the various forms of indoctrination and uses 
of the female body during the Franco years in the NO-DO newsreels about 
the Sección Femenina, or the film-event "Las Ibéricas FC". A kind of 
gender performativity that transcends cinematic and geographical 
boundaries and extends into the present day can be traced in the work of 
European female actors and filmmakers such as Juliette Binoche and 
Céline Sciamma, emblematic works such as the Iranian film "Offside" and 
the American "Million Dollar Baby", or the worldwide success of "Bend It 
like Beckham", which the philosopher Sara Ahmed specifically analysed in 
her book The Promise of Happiness from the perspectives of race, 
queerness and feminism.

But beyond these and other examples from cinema, this issue is open to 
studies and proposals that address other audiovisual media and formats. 
These might include the connections between women and sport in TV series 
(from classic sitcoms to "Orange Is The New Black", the obsessive images 
of Robin Wright jogging in "House of Cards'', or "Killing Eve" and "The 
Hockey Girls''), the ways of depicting women’s sport in historical 
newsreels and in contemporary documentaries (from "Olympia" and the 
Istituto Luce or UFA archives, to contemporary films and docuseries 
about female footballers, tennis players and boxers), or strategies for 
self-filming the body in motion via platforms such as YouTube, Instagram 
and TikTok. A series of audiovisual creation and consumption strategies 
that revolve around what Dick Tomasovic called kino-tanz, “the 
choreographic art of cinema” (2009), combining the moving image with the 
kinetics of dance, music and physical culture. In this way, based on a 
critical rereading of sports iconography, and more specifically of 
images created by or featuring women, this call for papers is open to a 
wide range of topics, approaches, and lines of research, including:

- Depictions of the athlete’s body performed, filmed or distributed by 
women.

- Gender performativity related to sport in films, series and other 
audiovisual formats.

- Analysis of key scenes or actions depicting female sporting activity 
in non-sports films.

- Agency, sisterhood and feminisms in the social construct of sport and 
physical culture.

- Objectification, censorship and showcasing of the female body in 
sports images.

- Disciplines of the body, totalitarianism and women’s sport in news or 
documentaries.

- Case studies of biopics about fictional or real professional 
sportswomen from the perspective of star studies.

- Discourses of class, gender and race by or about women negotiated in 
sports images.

- Strategies for self-representation of sportswomen on social media and 
other new media.

- The role of the visual and the performative in the struggle to 
professionalise women’s sport.

- Women, sport and non-binary gender identities in contemporary 
audiovisual media.


References:

Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bale, John (1994). Landscapes of modern sport. New York: Leicester 
University Press.

Balló, J. & Bergala, A. (2016). (eds.). Motivos visuales del cine. 
Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg.

Besnier, Niko et al (2017). The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, 
Biopolitics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bou, Núria & Pérez, Xavier (eds.) (2018). El cuerpo erótico de la 
actriz bajo los fascismos. Madrid: Cátedra.

Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies that Matter. London: Routledge.

Carabías, Josefina (1950). La mujer en el fútbol. Barcelona: Editorial 
Juventud.

Carrington, Ben (2010). Race, sport and politics: the sporting black 
diaspora. London: Sage.

Coronado Ruiz, Carlota (2013). “Mussolini las quiere deportistas: mujer 
y deporte en los noticiarios cinematográficos Luce (1928-1943)”. 
Feminismo/s Num. 21.

Critchley, Simon (2017). What we think when we think about football. 
London: Profile Books.

Crosson, Seán (2013). Sport and Film. London: Routledge.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. (2009). La imagen superviviente. Madrid: Abada.

Dunn, Carrie (2014). Female Football Fans. Community, Identity and 
Sexism. London: Palgrave McMillan.

Dyer, Richard (1986). Heavenly bodies: film stars and society. London: 
British Film Institute.

Gil Gascón, F. & Cabezas Deogracias, J. (2012). Pololos y medallas: la 
representación del deporte femenino en NO-DO (1943-1975). Historia y 
Comunicación Social 17.

Gori, Gigliola (2004). Italian Fascism and the Female Body. London: 
Routledge.

Hake, Sabine (2017). The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and 
Emotion. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Haraway, Donna (1991). “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and 
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” en Simians, Cyborgs 
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Kracauer, Siegfried (1995). The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge: 
Harvard University Press.

Mulvey, Laura (1975). "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Screen, 16: 3.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo (2015). Sobre el deporte. Barcelona: Contra.

Pastor Pascual, Ana (2021). #Chandaleras. Masculinidad femenina vs. 
feminidad obligatoria en el deporte. Piedra Papel Libros.

Sentamans, Tatiana (2010). Amazonas mecánicas: engranajes visuales, 
políticos y culturales. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura.

Sontag, Susan (1977). On Photography. London: Penguin.

Tomasovic, Dick (2009). Kino-Tanz. L’Arte Chorégraphique du Cinéma. 
Paris: PUF.

Williams, Jean (2007). A Beautiful Game: International Perspectives on 
Women’s Football. New York: Berg.

Zubiaurre, Maite (2014). Culturas del erotismo en España, 1898-1939. 
Madrid: Cátedra.


More information at: http://www.revistaatalante.com 
<http://www.revistaatalante.com>

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