Bypassing the gatekeepers

Spectacle, social media and women’s sport

Featured in

  • Published 20250506
  • ISBN: 978-1-923213-07-4
  • Extent: 196 pp
  • Paperback, ebook, PDF

IN THE OPENING scene of the Copa 71 documentary, we see US women’s soccer great Brandi Chastain watch archival football footage on an iPad. 

(Chastain is about as famous as they get in women’s football, having scored the winning, pressure-cooker penalty in the 1999 Women’s World Cup in front of what was considered a record crowd of 91,185 people. Her spontaneous post-penalty celebration saw her rip off her shirt and celebrate with a knee slide in her shorts and sports bra. The celebration catapulted her to fame and infamy, with the celebration either seen as iconic and worthy of being on the cover of Sports Illustrated or, in the eyes of conservatives, inappropriate. Either way, it attracted more attention than it should have –
so much so that Chastain ended up penning an autobiography titled It’s Not About the Bra.)

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

About the author

Fiona Crawford

Fiona Crawford is the author of The Matilda Effect and The Rise of the Matildas: Inside the Women’s World Cup Campaign, and co-author of Never Say Die:...

More from this edition

Nobody panic 

Non-fictionThe desert of the real is now where most teens search for answers to life’s big questions: what is love? Who am I? What is truth? The images of reality we create hold messages about reality. Copies of copies of copies though they may be, they nonetheless have a material effect on our children’s thoughts, behaviours, opinions. Consumerism. Communism. Sexism. Cancelism. Nationalism. Anarchism. Stoicism. Humanism. Ideas about what we should live like, look like and love like, what it means to be a man or a woman, what it means to be an individual or part of a community, are all displayed on a screen in their pockets. The influence is profound, but not necessarily sinister if they are taught to interrogate what they consume.

The marketing is still crap

Non-fictionToday’s onslaught of available content (not just in books and writing) and the concurrent impossibility of wading through it all to select the new or the significant or the simple exploding pleasure of language (remember that?) is likely part of where the current malaise began, and not just for me. So much is on trend these days, with great swathes of the population all reading the same book simultaneously, and so much of this is generated by the star-making machinery of billion-dollar multinational publishing houses with gigantic marketing budgets.

The accidental film school

Non-fictionThe DVD format – the Digital Versatile Disc – was invented in 1995 and reached the peak of its popularity in Australia in the 2000s, before the rise of streaming platforms in the 2010s. During those salad days, Australian entertainment companies started producing and selling DVDs at a rapid rate, building a library of local and international films. The Melbourne-based company Madman Entertainment were competitive players... The extras on their DVDs – making-of documentaries, deleted scenes, audio commentaries – allowed producers to have an active role in the historicisation of film; audio commentaries typically featured directors and actors rewatching and reminiscing together. But companies like Madman (and Criterion in the US), which distributed ‘art-house’ cinema, were more likely to invite film theorists and historians to provide an analytical reading of the film as it played.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.