Out Takes

4 Oct 2016

Blood, Sweat and Tears: Spotlight on Sport & Masculinity

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Blood, Sweat and Tears: Spotlight on Sport & Masculinity

With the Olympics and footy finals dominating the headlines recently, we thought we’d put an OUT TAKES spin on the country’s sporting fever. Many films have paid homage to the sporting field but only a small few of them queer and we think that’s pretty telling.

There can be no doubt that Hollywood has deployed the sporting arena as a metonym for heteronormative masculinity, and that in many ways that metonym depends on the absence of queer characters. Nonetheless, a small few films have emerged, which challenge Hollywood’s portrayal of the sports arena as a locus for the production of masculinity – not surprisingly, most of them ‘foreign’.

So for this OUT TAKES, we celebrate those films; films that challenge the tropological (and heteronormative) imperatives of the sporting arena: think SUMMER STORM and GUYS AND BALLS from Germany, Thailand’s BEAUTIFUL BOXER, and Australia’s very own four part series, BARRACUDA.

We also speak with Glen Donnar, lecturer in ‘masculinities’ at RMIT, who runs us through the way that masculinity is ordinarily represented in dominant Hollywood cinema, and how the sporting field is used as a metonym for that masculinity.

Recommended viewing: Summer Storm (2004, Dir Marco Kreuzpaintner)

Hungry for more: Barracuda (2016, Dir Robert Connolly)