From Ridicule to Objectification: Depictions of Women’s Football in Spanish NO-DO Newsreels and Comedy Films of the 1970s

Abstract

After decades of control over women’s sports by the Franco regime’s Sección Femenina, Spain’s first women’s football teams were founded in 1970 with the aim of institutionalising the women’s game and establishing the first unofficial championships. However, the entrance of women into such a male-dominated sphere of activity was out of keeping with the heteropatriarchal ideological norms of Francoist society. Exploiting the novelty and controversy of the issue at this time, a number of mainstream cultural products depicted female footballers in deliberately negative ways characterised by ridicule and sexualisation. This article takes a perspective informed by gender studies and humour studies to analyse the circulation of different biological and technical-cultural discourses in Francoist Spain’s official newsreels and the comedy films Las Ibéricas F.C. (Pedro Masó, 1971) and La liga no es cosa de hombres (Ignacio F. Iquino, 1972). The comical discourses of these audiovisual products complemented each other to convey the collective anxiety of a society that felt threatened by teams of women who were advancing relentlessly with a ball at their feet.