The Carer/ Career Dichotomy: Gender in/as Sports Biopics

Cinematic biographies have been a mode of narrating history, and they have become increasingly popular in India after 2010. Sports biopics on women athletes have been hailed as ‘empowering' and ‘inspiring', though, as this paper argues, these films inevitably reinscribe women into the patriarchal sex role gender ideology, making the female sportsperson conform to the hegemonic feminine ideal. The paper explores the ways in which sports, gender and the pressures of cinematic storytelling intersect in the process of deconstructing and reconstructing the lives of famous sportswomen, and analyses the ways in which gender structures the portrayal of sportsmanship, personal struggle, familial ties and the narratives of victory and failure. It analyses six sports biopics – Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013), Soorma (2018), Chandu Champion (2024), Mary Kom (2014) and Saina (2021) and Shabaash Mithu (2022) –– studying the contrasts and parallels in the construction of female and male sportspersons who achieved comparable success in sports to determine the cinematic textual apparatus that reiterate gender stereotypes and reify society's gender norms. It also argues that those films that coopt the sports woman into the familial space while valourising male sporting achievement achieve greater commercial success, while those that fail to construct ‘feminine' values and foreground purely sporting achievements registered poor audience reception.