Beckham Dress and Culture --

Beckham

Dress and Culture -- Body Modification and Supplementation in "Bend it Like Beckham"

The 2002 British film "Bend it Like Beckham" is a film about young women facing the physical and emotional demands professional sports. Thus it is a film about 'the body' on two levels -- the female body, as perceived by society, and the physical body, as deployed on the sporting field. Both the Sikh religion of the central female protagonist Jess as well as the sport of football (known as soccer in the United States) uses uniforms, or ritualized dress to communicate the wearer's status in relation to other individuals. The Sikh garb communicates that its wearer is 'other' to ordinary British citizens. The costumes of the sporting field communicate that the players are of a particular team.

Dress also communicates gender in both contexts. For instance, the sports costumes of the girl football players were originally designed for male bodies. The title of the film actually refers to a male football player of renown, David Beckham, rather than a female star, evidence of football's perceived masculinity, even in the eyes of the girls who play the sport. The Sikh heroine Jess keeps a portrait of David Beckham near her bed.

The Sikh dress demanded by Jess' mother of her daughter highlights how traditional costume also differs for male and females Sikhs -- thus gender as well as alternate social status is highlighted in both contexts. Even within the community, different types of Sikh garb marks Sikh females from males. This at first makes it seem unlike the androgynous Western dress of the girl football players, but because the football costume is so demonstrably male in its originally designed intent, the female body is rendered incongruous at first, even while such dress is more functional and comfortable than traditional female dress.

Dress is one example of body supplementation, or things attached to the body, from numbers on a team to a Sikh wrapped turban that temporarily conveys status. But the very act of social participation in sports can be considered a kind of bodily act of mortification or alteration, as the girls playing football train and improve upon their natural physical abilities and become more muscular and physically fit than either Sikh or British culture desires a woman's body to be. True British culture valorizes and celebrates football, unlike Sikh culture but both cultures are hostile to female participation in sports, and female physical prowess. Even British culture suggests that a girl cannot hope to be a soccer star like a boy, jut as according to Jess' Indian culture; a girl should not play soccer at all without losing her femininity.

Playing sports is seen as sexual in Jess' mother's eyes. The woman states that the game consists of "displaying your bare legs to complete strangers." Of course, British culture approves of such leg displays, but only for the approval of male desire, not for female empowerment through the medium of sports. British culture tends to see female sporting excellence not as dangerously sexual and immoral, like Sikh culture, but potentially rendering the female body more like the male body. For instance, Julliette, the girl who first motivates Jess to make her sports dreams come true, is pressed by her own mother to wear a Wonder bra. Julliette's failure to obey conventional feminine norms of the dress causes her mother to accuse the girl of being a lesbian, and tells her that she will never have a boyfriend if she persists at sport, as "there's a reason why Sporty Spice is the only one without a boyfriend," of the bra-wearing Spice Girls.