The Heart of the Game: Girls, Sports and the Limits of “Empowerment”

As one of the most widely celebrated documentaries about female athletes to date, The Heart of the Game remains an important text to examine for the ways it represents female athletic experience and encourages audiences to consider gender issues in sport. Such an investigation is particularly apt, given how sports documentaries authenticate particular viewpoints while being understood by audiences as historical reflections of reality. Although the film is praiseworthy for exposing the cultural construction of gender as well as some ways gender ideologies hamper female athletic success, this essay argues that The Heart of the Game’s progressive agenda is ultimately undercut by its simultaneous reproduction of gender and racial ideologies that actually marginalize women and girls in sport.