WOMEN, SPORT AND IMAGES: FROM LITERARY EKPHRASIS TO AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA

This article situates and prologues the special issue Women and sport in audiovisual media: bodies, images, politics, contextualizing its main themes and case studies as well as relating them, comparatively, with key visual precedents in the history of literature. By using two examples of literary ekphrasis where the practice of sport by women is central: on the one hand the heteropatriarchal, sexualized and objectifying portrayal of the woman's sporting body (exemplified by a chapter from the Chinese classic Journey to the West), on the other, the liberatory views and gazes of sportswomen that, like the poet Concha Mendez, defied the limits and impositions of the male gaze with their own explorations of sport and images. Moreover, the article rethinks Walter Benjamin's comments on the link between cinema and sport, and Susan Sontag's concept of the "market of images", reading both of them from the perspective of affect theory and Sara Ahmed's analysis of the class, race and gender signifiers of womenpracticed sport in her book The Promise of Happiness.