Tag: Women and sports

In one day’s time, from July 26 to August 11, the Paris Olympic Games open. For the first time in history, the Games are welcoming an equal number of male and female competitors. Despite the various obstacles, here and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, more than ever before sport is an engine of emancipation for women. This dossier on Women and Sports demonstrates as much.

After being kept on the sidelines of sporting activities for centuries, women made a massive entry into the world of sport. Still now, however, this world continues to heavily discriminate against them: from the hyper-sexualization of their athletic bodies to the negation of these bodies as experiencing menstrual cycles, types of discrimination against female athletes abound.

In Italy, racist incidents against female champions of African origin representing the country in national and international competitions are increasingly frequent. With the Paris Olympics coming up, it is as good a time as any to reassert that racism is a serious threat to women’s right to sport, a right which was hard-earned over the course of a good hundred years.

“I have no problem with movies directed by men, but I do not accept the fact that female characters are built and filmed as mere objects of desire, trophies or secondary characters. I want to show 3D female characters and not the binary “pretty women” vs the “evil woman.” More about cinema and feminism in this interview with Egyptian filmmaker Mayye Zayed.