MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Since the advent of motion pictures, athletics have found a home on the silver screen in Hollywood’s most powerful studios. In the year 2000, a film about two childhood neighbors growing up with intense passions for the game of basketball and each other rewrote the potential of a sports movie. In Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love and Basketball, the protagonist Monica, played by Sanaa Lathan, struggles with her feminine identity as she comes of age as an athlete and a woman. Torn between acting and looking more “feminine” to appease her traditional mother and her love interest of fictional USC Trojan and Los Angeles Laker Quincy McCall, played by Omar Epps, she struggles with Judith Halberstam’s accepted notion that a young girl’s tomboy mentality is a phase that one grows out of once puberty arises (Halberstam 6). In the film, Monica is unyielding in her pursuit of her basketball aspirations while trying to balance her identity with achieving her supreme goal of being with Quincy. Through an analysis of her actions towards her family and friends, her relationship with Quincy and the backlash she faces when trying to become feminized does she face the backlash when she becomes feminized or when she attempts not to be, Monica shatters Halberstam’s ideologies of female masculinity by staying true to her own definition of womanhood. Moreover, Monica’s character speaks to a larger issue of female masculinity in professional athletics today, as athletes such as Alex Morgan, Skylar Diggins, Hope Solo and Rhonda Rousey all find themselves in the same arduous position as Monica- trying to balance being viewed as a sex symbol while harnessing their innate drive to reach the peak of their athletic abilities.