Title: Women and sport in audiovisual media: bodies, images, politics
Acceptance of submissions for the Notebook section: 1 May 2023 to 31 May 2023
Date of publication: January 2024
Editors: Manuel Garin, María Aparisi Galán

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 F. C. 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.

L'Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos accepts submissions of unpublished essays on topics related to film theory and/or praxis that stand out for their innovative nature. Articles should focus on approaches to the cinematographic fact made preferably from the perspectives of historiography or audiovisual analysis. Those texts that approach novel objects of study with rigorous and well-evidenced methodologies will be appreciated. Articles that take as their main reference the processes of signification through the analysis of the audiovisual form and/or the narratological elements specific to our field, focusing on methodologies specifically related to the treatment of the image will be favoured in the selection process. Although we accept works with other methodologies that approach the filmic fact from transversal perspectives (Cultural Studies, philological approaches, etc.) we consider that the main interest of the journal is located on the studies that take the specifically cinematographic expressive tools as the main elements of discourse. Likewise, texts that are not limited to describing, enumerating or summarizing details of the plot, but that rigorously apply a specific and well-evidenced analysis methodology, reaching particular and novel results, will be given priority.

Below are a few aspects to keep in mind:

• Submissions must be original and must conform to the submission guidelines of the journal and to the standards and scientific rigour expected of an academic publication.
• Submissions will be evaluated for the originality of the topic explored, especially if it relates to an issue not previously addressed in the publication. Submissions dealing with topics previously addressed in the journal may be rejected. The content of the issues published to date can be consulted on the journal's website.
• All submissions will undergo an external peer review process that will respect the anonymity of both authors and reviewers (double blind peer review) in an effort to prevent any possibility of bias. In the event of a very high number of submissions, the Editorial Board will make a prior selection of the articles to be peer reviewed, choosing the articles deemed the most appropriate for the issue. Failure to observe the submission guidelines and/or standards of originality and academic rigour will result in rejection of the submission by the Editorial Board without external review.
• The acceptance of the manuscripts will be notified to the authors within a maximum period of six months.
• Articles (which should be between 5,000 and 7,000 words including all sections) must be submitted via the website of the journal as .odt or .docx files, using the template provided for this purpose. A blind version of the article will be provided. A complete version of the article and any images (.jpg, .png) must be uploaded to the website as complementary files. A detailed version of the submission guidelines can be found at the following link. Any articles that fail to meet these requirements will be rejected automatically.
• The selected articles will be published in a bilingual edition (Spanish and English). The authors of the texts accepted for publication must pay the costs that result from the translation or revision - in the case of providing, along with the original, a translated version - of their article.
• If the original manuscript is in English, the authors of the accepted papers must provide a professional translation to Spanish. The Executive Editorial Board may also require a revision by the translator recommended by the journal for Non-English speaking authors.
• If the original manuscript is in Spanish, the authors of the accepted papers for publication must pay the costs that result from the translation to English or revision—in the case of providing, along with the original, a translated version—of their article. In all cases, and in order to guarantee the quality of the translations and the unity of linguistic criteria, the text must be translated or proofread by the translator recommended by the journal, a freelance professional specialised in Film Studies. His work will be paid in advance and via credit card, bank transfer or Paypal by the authors.
• L'Atalante does not offer any compensation for published articles. For more information: info@revistaatalante.com