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Description
Movies engage and facilitate social awareness and the meaning of sport with people we cross paths with. Sport-orientated movies that transgress the boundaries of race, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and culture inject a different narrative and representation. Global migration of diasporic South Asian communities into Western, colonial spaces has led sports to facilitate multicultural citizenship and identity in “spaces, relationships, and [to build] forms of social capital” (Burdsey et al., 2013, p. 212). The movie Bend It Like Beckham (Chadha, 2002) follows a South Asian women soccer player in London, England who overcomes challenges of cultural, ethnic, and traditional gender norms by negotiating of her multicultural identity. This significantly changed the discourse of representation of women in sports for South Asian communities. Recently, the Indian film industry released more women in sports movies such as soccer in Bigil (Atlee, 2019), boxing in Irudhi Suttru (Kongora, 2016) and Mary Kom (Kumar, 2014), cricket in Kanaa (Kanaraj, 2018), and wrestling in Gatta Kushti (Ayyavu, 2022).
While these movies focus on empowerment of women (Karupiah, 2022; Amaljith, 2021), sports participation, and identity affirmation, the female protagonist narrative is still centred around the patriarchy and neoliberalism and perpetuates problematic behaviours in “male characters” that are being normalized as part of the athlete journey for local South Asian communities. Through film analysis, this inquiry aims to examine the transnational representation and meaning of women in sports over time, and the tensions that affect socio-cultural studies' ability to effect social change in South Asian localities.
