Picturing the Beautiful Game by Daniel Haxall

Author:Daniel Haxall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501334580
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2018-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

The young man could see dim figures on the track even in this pale light, slowly pounding round and round the most infinite of footpaths. There would be, he knew, plump, determined-looking women slogging along while their fleshy knees quivered. They would occasionally brush damp hair fiercely from their eyes and dream of certain cruel and smiling emcees: bikinis, ribbon-cuttings, and the like.8

Cassidy, the protagonist for this cult novel for competitive runners, defines himself against these women who jog to fight their inevitable fleshiness. He is “an athlete” and a “real runner.”9 The women “slogging” along the track are neither. For a good stretch in the twentieth century, as it happens, some thought women were incapable of running distances longer than 800 meters. The women’s 800 meters was only added to the Olympics in 1960, an event which spawned public debate about women’s capacity. During that decade, in the United States, women were banned from all official road races. In 1967, Katherine Switzer was physically tackled by a Boston Marathon race official. She had registered using the initial “K”; she finished and is the first woman to have run that race as a registered athlete. The women’s 1,500-meter run was only added to the Olympics in 1972; the marathon in 1984. All of this is to say that in the late 1970s, women ran. And they ran with a sense of purpose insofar as each ran against a sense of what a woman was “for.” But they ran in the shadows. Feminist perspectives on sports orbit around the prohibitions against women’s participation and the suppression of images of women’s athleticism.

When Rocky’s producers decided that the film should be set in Philadelphia they certainly did not consider the idea of centering the story on a woman—such a thing was beyond the thinkable. (It is worth noting that the biggest women’s boxing movie to date, Million Dollar Baby [2004], centers on the story of a boxer who became paralyzed in the ring and was then euthanized by her trainer.) The woman in Brown’s film is, of course, an incidental detail in the backstory of the making of Rocky. I bring this story to your attention because it underscores the givenness of the erasure of women in motion from the picture. Broadcasts of women’s sports and artworks centered on women athletes almost never engage in remediation—there is no comparable mediascape into which the woman athlete can be located. There is a simple reason for this: women athletes are, quite simply, erased from the picture. This is particularly visible in works centered on women’s soccer, because the contrast with work centered on the men’s game is so stark.

I first started writing about art and sport to address this difference in the character of contemporary art about the men’s and the women’s game. I was led to do so when, in 2008, I was asked to speak to an exhibition centering on masculinity and sport in contemporary art. I found myself disturbed by the absence of images of female athletes from the exhibit (which did, however, include work by female artists).

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