Martin McAnulty - Bend It Like Beckham

This week the lecture, in CU 200 Pop Culture, was analysing the movie Bend It Like Beckham, and looking at the theory of hybridity, post – colonization and gender. All these ideas link up with the definition of identity and how it has changed in relation to globalisation and post – modernism.

            Bend It Like Beckham is a movie about a British Asian girl, called Jess, who dreams of playing football like her idol, David Beckham. However, her parents want her to go down the traditional path, which is to go to university. The movie is good at looking at the cultural collision between England and India.

            The collision creates a double identity, or as Bhabha describes the ‘third space.’ This means that a person like Jess - born in Britain daughter of Asian immigrants – is not British or Asian alone, but a hybrid mix of these two cultures, thus, the creation of an identity, ‘Brasian.’

            Also, in the movie Bend It Like Beckham traditional stereotypes of Britishness and gender were dismantled; the scenes where Jess and her sister go shopping in London, in an Asian immigrant district, the traditional Hindu wedding and the women playing football. All these scenes show that in a post – modern, post – colonial world, identity and culture are never static, but are constantly evolving over time.