 Tara is thirteen. She likes to go to the mall... and she wrestles boys. On her journey to the national championship matches, she battles critics who believe girls should not wrestle boys, she struggles with her father s expectations for her performance, and she fights with her own body to control her weight. GIRL WRESTLER is an hour-long documentary that follows Tara Neal, a girl who challenges cultural expectations of what sport she should compete in and, most importantly, whom she should wrestle. It documents a crucial moment in Tara s participation in wrestling; it is the last year that Texas  athletic association will allow her to wrestle boys. When Tara enters high school, her opportunities for competition will practically disappear because there are so few girls who wrestle. From allegations of referee bias against girl wrestlers, to coaches at the national tournament who proclaim their vehement hatred of Title IX (the federal statute that grants women s athletics proportionality in public schools), the documentary personalizes the clash of gender and sport and, in particular, the current policy debates over Title IX. Tara navigates the same environment of hostility that produced the recent lawsuit filed by the National Wrestling Coaches Association against the Department of Education to repeal Title IX. Over the course of the season, Tara confronts personal struggles that range from her body to her family. While boys who wrestle develop eating disorders on a much larger scale than non-wrestling boys, the pressure and consequences of dietary restrictions for girls are perhaps even more significant as their bodies are rapidly maturing and under such cultural scrutiny. During the course of the documentary, Tara experiments with not eating and running in the heat in order to lose weight, but eventually makes the healthy decision to accept her weight and wrestle at whatever weight she is. The documentary also becomes a chronicle of her relationship with her parents, as Tara struggles with her father s expectations and her increasing need to become less dependent on her parents. Ultimately, the themes of the documentary become more universal: the complications of divorced families, the dynamics of father-daughter and mother-daughter relationships, the desires of teenagers to break away from their parents, constructions of masculinity and femininity, health and body image, gender discrimination in sports, and the meaning and value of sport in American culture. GIRL WRESTLER documents a modern kind of girlhood, one that physically embodies feminism by literally placing girls  bodies into grappling competition with boys. It shows us how the gender roles we have constructed affect real girls and real boys as they crash against the boundaries of those roles. This documentary not only forces us to reflect critically on those roles, but also connects us emotionally to the struggle of one girl who challenges them.