Spectacular physicalities: female athleticism in contemporary cinema

This thesis provides a critical account of contemporary female sports films. The research presented here is interdisciplinary in nature as it is situated in relation to (feminist) discourses around women and/in sport as well as women and/in cinema. Taking into account the embodied, discursive and psychic dimensions of identity and subjectivity, I investigate the ‘troubling’ implications of female athleticism within cinematic representation. Focusing on fictional, feature-length films, I provide insight as to the wider generic contexts in which depictions of female athleticism take place (i.e., the (male) sports film, the action cinema, melodrama and the musical). I explore the kinds of (heroic) narratives constructed around athletic female protagonists as well as the significance of the display of athletic female bodies ‘in action’. This allows me to provide insights as to the identities and subject positions (re-)constituted and privileged by these films. I additionally discuss the ways in which depictions of the athletic female body and its active physicality complicate (conceptualisations of) cinematic spectatorship. The film analyses are underpinned by a concern about female spectatorship in particular – about the relationship between the female spectator and the athletic female bodies on screen – and about the pleasures and anxieties cinematic depictions of female athleticism might provide