May
21, 2004
Museum
Video Turns the Camera on Women Athletes
Stills from
The Sporting Woman video |
"All
I’m asking
is, turn the camera on. Let us see what it looks like when
women participate in sports.” That’s the request
of Mary Jo Kane, a professor at the University of Minnesota
and director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and
Women in Sport. She’s one of several scholars on women
in sports who are featured in a video accompanying the art
museum’s exhibition The Sporting Woman: The Female
Athlete in American Culture.
Museum director Marianne Doezema and Tamra Hjermstad, an instructional technology
consultant in LITS, teamed up to create the 17-minute video, which examines how
women athletes have been portrayed in American media. Doezema researched and
wrote the text, while Hjermstad did the editing and narration. Using still photos
and film clips of such outstanding athletes as Venus Williams, Althea Gibson,
Babe Didrickson, Billy Jean King, Brandi Chastain, and many others, the video
juxtaposes powerful images of women athletes in action with other, more “feminine” images
of athletes posed in wedding dresses and bikinis.
Surveying the second half of the twentieth century, the video traces the discomfort
in American culture with women who are physically powerful. “I like a he
to be a he and a she to be a she,” says Spencer Tracy in an excerpt from
the 1952 film Pat and Mike, in which Katharine Hepburn portrays all-around athlete,
Olympic gold medalist, and renowned golfer Babe Didrickson. Tracy’s sentiments
are echoed some 30 years later in excerpts from George Butler’s film Pumping
Iron II: The Women. As contestants in the Caesars Palace World Cup Championship
talk about bodybuilding and femininity prior to the judging, one says, “I
hope [the judges] stick with the feminine look. I think [a woman] should look
like a woman.” When Bev Francis of Australia, indisputably the most muscular
of the contestants, comes in last place, many audience members boo, calling out
that it’s merely a beauty contest.
Doezema said the idea for the video arose during her art history seminar Exhibiting
the Female Athlete, which she taught last fall. Two of her students, Elena Dovydenas ’04
and Erika C. Gislason ’04, did a project on female athletes in film. “They
came up with a great series of films,” Doezema said, “and I thought,
this really has to be in the exhibition somehow.” In the end, copyright
costs limited the number of film clips that could be used, but Hjermstad and
her LITS colleagues found other resources for images. “We looked at ways
to bring in materials that would be copyright free,” she said, researching
AP archives and ultimately obtaining permission for a wide range of clips and
sound bites. The Media Education Foundation was also very generous in offering
permission to use excerpts from their video Playing Unfair:
The Media Image of the Female Athlete.
The project was truly collaborative. Doezema and Hjermstad met weekly for six
weeks to look at the clips, talk about what text was needed, and make decisions
about the flow of the narrative. At the beginning, Doezema said, “I couldn’t
imagine how it was going to come out,” but in the end, she was “very
pleased” with the professional quality of the video. For Hjermstad, the
process of “pulling it all together” was both challenging and enjoyable.
The video, she said, is a good example of interdepartmental collaboration and
of the work the Research and Instructional Support department of LITS does in
supporting
the curriculum and enhancing teaching.
The video is available for
viewing during the Sporting Woman exhibition, which continues at the Mount Holyoke
College Art Museum through August 1.
The
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2,685
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