Department of Film & Media UC Berkeley

Film & Media’s very own Penelope Martindale won the coveted $5,000 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship L&S this year. Penelope will be theorizing women in baseball movies, as well as making her own film on the subject. Big high fives to Penelope, who also came in 2nd Place with the Berkeley Women’s Baseball Team at the All College Women’s Baseball Tournament in LA last weekend.

Penelope Martindale SURF Research Question:
Despite film’s mythicization of America’s pastime and the game’s reinforcement of nationalism and traditional masculinity, I suggest that baseball serves as a site of gender renegotiation where women’s skills and abilities can be legitimized. I propose an examination of this renegotiation via elements of film form, and will both analyze existing baseball films and create my own baseball film, forcing me to confront in detail how distinct artistic practices contribute to ideological aims to answer “what would this practice of legitimization look like in film?” My question is important because it makes unfamiliar one of the most naturalized phenomena in American culture and explores whether this patriarchal institution makes inevitable the adoption of idealized masculinity or can be turned into something else.