Women, Sport, and Film Course

Cosponsored by Athletics and Physical Education at Bryn Mawr College and the Exercise and Sports Studies Department at Smith College, with support from the Center for Science In Society at Bryn Mawr College and the Serendip website.

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WEB PAPERS

At the end of the course, each student will write a three page paper on a subject related to the course. These papers will be posted as links from a directory on this page, so that they can contribute to continuing general discussion of important issues related to women and sport.

Paper topics (select one):

1. Through the readings, films, and discussions, we have identified several themes. One is a theme of mergers-submergers. We see evidence of this historically with women who organized and administered their own sports structure and then were "invited" by the male sport structure to merge (eg AIAW and NCAA, Women's Olympic Games and USOC, ABL and NBA/WNBA). Generally, the women's structure is lost of submerged within the dominant male sport structure. Discuss the social and cultural costs and/or benefits of these mergers in the development of women's sports.

2. What are the social and cultural costs and benefits of an individual (male or female) entering a non-traditional sport for their gender/sex (eg women who enter body building, power lifting, boxing; men who enter synchronized swimming or field hockey)?

3. Using the four topics, history, race and class, gender, and sexual orientation in sport, assume you are a screen writer in the year 2010. You have been commissioned to write a movie script about women's sports and current society. What is the theme? Who are the protagonists? What are the issues and how does the movie end?

Write your paper as instructed (3-4 pages, double-spaced, 12 point type) and print a hard copy to submit. Then make a second version of your paper by saving the original one as "text only". This new text-only version is the one you will submit electronically for posting. It will have lost some formatting, including double-spaced lines, underlining and boldfacing, and any special layouts usings tabs and tables, so try and avoid depending on these in your original paper (unless you are familiar with HTML tags and can add these later yourself). If paragraphs are not separated by a blank line in the text-only version, add a carriage return after each paragraph.

To submit the text-only version of your paper electronically, go the web paper posting area and follow instructions there.

To see papers, go to the Index of Web Papers.