Crossing race, crossing sex in Gurinder Chadha's Bend it like Beckham (2002) : managing anxiety in multicultural Britain

In an interview, Chadha, director of Bend It Like Beckham (2002), declares that the reason that she tells stories through cinema is because her remit is "ultimately about racism. It's about the ways to diminish the impact of difference." Caught between the perceived "non-Briton-ness" of the director and Chadha's claim that it is her Britain is the valiant attempt to "diminish the impact of difference," an attempt dear to advocates of multiculturalism and one of the reasons that the film became such a crowd-pleaser not only in the United Kingdom, but in the rest of the Anglophone world where difference threatens to tear apart a hegemonic social fabric. This chapter, explores the film's feminist possibilities and limitations in relation to Chadha's earlier work, Bhaji on the Beach (1993), and argues that Bend It Like Beckham continues with her agenda of portraying Asian women as multidimensional figures rather than as "two-dimensional caricatures of passivity, brutalized by a backward culture and fanatical menfolk."