Sports documentaries, gender, class and emotion: An autoethnography

Abstract

I am a documentary filmmaker and this research explores how my identity as a working-class woman shapes my approach to filmmaking, specifically in the sports documentary genre. Drawing on an autoethnographic methodology, I critically analyse gender, class and emotional themes in four of my sports documentary films. The films profile Scottish football and tennis stars and were broadcast on television between 2018 and 2021. I assess my production processes and narrative drives, as both a filmmaker and a subject of the research, by analysing contributor testimonies, my reflexive practices as a documentary maker, my production notebooks and edit notes and childhood memories, exploring how my personal subjectivities intersect with my emotions and emotional engagement to influence my storytelling.

The research also examines discrimination on the basis of gender and class within the TV industry, aligning my personal and professional experience of this within existing documentary film, ethics, class and gender academic frameworks. In addition, I investigate the impact of emotional engagement from the perspectives of the contributor and the filmmaker, assessing how my sense of self shifts in relation to my identities, creating specific dynamics with the contributors, resulting in a documentary filmmaking mode, specific to my processes, I describe as immersive collaboration.

In conclusion, this thesis argues that my analysis offers an added dimension to the sports documentary and to scholarship in this genre, illustrating autoethnography’s potential to align practice and theory, positioning the filmmakers’ subjectivities as central to documentary filmmaking, while repositioning the sports documentary from the margin to the centre in academic discourse. This research bridges a gap, presenting a framework for the understanding of how subjectivities and emotions can influence the creative process, offering an alternative perspective for documentary filmmakers, particularly for those from, or focussing on, underrepresented backgrounds.