Becoming Pregnant

This article considers the implications of the presence of Juno's pregnant girl body in the film Juno (2007). The narrative follows the high school student Juno's pregnancy, her decision to have the baby adopted, and its birth as she attempts to determine her feelings for her friend Bleeker. As a pregnant girl, Juno persists in a state of liminality and disrupts linear ideas of becoming: becoming woman, becoming mother, becoming feminist. Having considered contemporary discourses of pregnancy, I explore Juno's representation of the pregnant body as both abject and humorous, recognising the restrictions upon girls' sexuality and moments in which they are contested. I then move to consider Juno in relation to discourses of risk and responsibility, acknowledging the ways in which the film simultaneously perpetuates and critiques the presumption that teenagers make bad parents. I argue that analysing the juncture of girl and pregnancy represented in Juno enables a move beyond simplistic expectations of “normal” feminine girlhood to recognise it as complex and messy.     

“Nyota Uhura is Not a White Girl”

This essay examines the online debate surrounding representation of the Black/African character of Lt. Uhura in the 2009 prequel film, Star Trek. Some fans, particularly those viewing the film from a gender/race intersection, applauded her portrayal, while others, including many “slashers” who espouse a homoerotic reading of classic Trek from an ostensible gender/sexuality standpoint, disapproved—especially of Uhura's romantic storyline. Virtual observation and appraisal of these discourses demonstrate the adaptability of Patricia Hill Collins' intersectionality framework to studies of media reception, especially in terms of hegemonic and interpersonal domains of power and cultural studies notions of articulation. Accordingly, the investigation finds the first fan faction's rhetorical efforts more authentically and pro-actively oppositional.     

Portraying Trafficking in Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-Ever

The issue of human trafficking is frequently represented in visual images on television and in cinema. These narratives often focus on the selling of young women into the sex industry. One of the most prominent productions on the subject is the Swedish film Lilya 4-Ever (2002). Written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, the film tells the story of a tough adolescent, Lilya. Abandoned by her mother and left to fend for herself, Lilya turns to prostitution in order to survive. She is later trafficked to Sweden. She eventually commits suicide. Set in an unnamed post-Soviet city, the film reflects the reality of the increase in trafficked women from this region since the collapse of the USSR. The article analyzes Moodysson's film as an important model for depicting trafficking. Specific focus is given to the way the director defines Lilya and her milieu and engages seriously with issues of globalization, poverty, post-Soviet realities, and the very real issue of human trafficking. Most notably, Moodysson's film offers a depiction of trafficking that eschews any sexual objectification of the film's protagonist and combines progressive filmmaking with a melodramatic narrative to create a film that inspires extra-diegetic activism. Lilya 4-Ever is an emotionally impactful narrative, a modern-day melodrama for the twenty-first century.     

From Beatles Fans to Beat Groups

While much is written about the cultural influence of the vocalist-driven girl groups and female singers of the early-to-mid-1960s, an air of mystery continues to shroud this era's all-girl rock bands—in the UK, US, and worldwide—that performed, recorded, and often wrote their own material. Influenced by the Beatles and the British beat boom that followed, these bands are an important missing link in rock music history, as they epitomize a less overtly gendered, if short-lived, period of the genre. In an era between Betty Friedan's 1963 Feminine Mystique and the changes to come with 1970s second-wave feminism, a handful of musically minded young women were determined to transform their Beatles fandom in order to become co-creators of what was not yet a resolutely masculinist music scene.     

Gender Monstrosity

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film's central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film as misogynistic torture porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here—where adolescent males become “men” by enacting sexual violence—are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film's gender conflicts.     

Remaking Charlie's Angels

From their initial appearance on US broadcast network television in the mid-1970s to their feature film incarnations in 2000 and 2003, the characters known as Charlie's Angels have been at the center of American popular culture's negotiations over feminism, femininity, and the relationship between the two. This article analyzes the “remaking” of Charlie's Angels over the past 30 years as a means of considering the “remaking” of discourses of feminism and femininity in a changing historical context. In addition to considering the original television series, this analysis also examines attempts to “clone” the series in late 1970s TV, parodies of and homages to the series in 1990s television and film, and the twenty-first-century feature films. I argue that analyzing the various re-imaginings and remakes of Charlie's Angels can be a means of revealing how post-feminism, as a series of cultural responses to feminism, has wound its way through American popular culture over the past 30 years, achieving an increasingly naturalized, and thereby more hegemonically entrenched, position over time.     

Germaine Greer's Adaptable Celebrity

There is little doubt that Germaine Greer is the West's, and especially Britain's, most well-known feminist. This article, looking at her more recent public appearances, argues that Germaine Greer has proven adept at adapting her feminist celebrity, especially through various (and often comedic) performances on quiz and lifestyle programmes on British television. In particular, she exemplifies what has been called an “unruly woman”; that is, she is a transgressive figure who uses the space provided by these new entertainment formats not simply to reinforce her celebrity but to circulate (and perform) a particular feminism. Her celebrity, and her relationship to the mainstream media in Britain especially, has shifted and evolved over time and therefore provides an important case study into the complicated operations of celebrity as well as the feminism–media nexus itself. As an instance of gendered celebrity—and that of a feminist especially—that comes to at once trouble and buttress certain celebrity logics, Greer illuminates the political importance of this ground for feminism and helps to underscore that feminist celebrity is a distinct, and developing, mode of public subjectivity which celebrity studies and feminist media studies have thus far failed to significantly address.     

Women's Alternative Internet Radio and Feminist Interactive Communications

The nude male centrefold spread like a virus through the new women's magazines of the seventies. At the time, and since, the academic gaze has viewed the centrefold as little more than a joke, a failure for feminism and female sexuality. This article returns to the heyday of the centrefold and listens to the responses of ordinary women in reader letters published in the new Australian women's magazine Cleo from 1972 until 1985. It argues that far from being a failure, these representations of the nude male became a practice of popular feminism, one of the early representations of popular feminist desire in mainstream women's magazines.     

“Emasculation nation has arrived”: sexism rearticulated in online responses to Lose the Lads’ Mags campaign

In the spring of 2013 a British feminist campaign sought to have men’s magazines, such as Zoo, Nuts, and Loaded, removed from the shelves of major retailers, arguing that they are sexist and objectify women. The campaign—known as Lose the Lads’ Mags (LTLM)—received extensive media coverage and was the topic of considerable public debate. Working with a data corpus comprising 5,140 reader comments posted on news websites in response to reporting of LTLM, this paper explores the repeated focus on men and masculinity as “attacked,” “under threat,” “victimised,” or “demonised” in what is depicted as a sinister new gender order. Drawing on a poststructuralist feminist discursive analysis, we show how these broad claims are underpinned by four interpretative repertoires that centre around: (i) gendered double standards; (ii) male (hetero)sexuality under threat; (iii) the war on the “normal bloke”; and (iv) the notion of feminism as unconcerned with equality but rather “out to get men.” This paper contributes to an understanding of (online) popular misogyny and changing modes of sexism.     

“Infertile Motherhood”

This study explores the socio-cultural arena following legalization of surrogate motherhood in Israel by analyzing Israel's most popular television series: A Touch of Happiness. The qualitative analysis presented here reveals a constant tension between women's reproductive and sexual bodies. This analysis demonstrates how social institutions of marriage, divorce, and motherhood are serving as instruments that reward fertile and punish infertile women. Advances in medical technology and modern surrogacy enable the infertile female to achieve motherhood even though her body remains infertile. Thus, paradoxically, if a woman selects to avail herself of these medical advances, she becomes an “infertile mother.” Viewed more broadly, the implications of such hybrid conceptions pose a threat to the patriarchal order, and therefore it was negated in this television series by a rich array of narrative and rhetorical devices. Derived by deeply rooted cultural–religious beliefs, the ideological stance applied in the series de-legitimizes female infertility and non-biological motherhood achieved through surrogacy. In doing so, it perpetuates notions of the inferiority of both types of women in the social order and cultivates the perception of biological determinism as a primary measure in determining all women's destinies, solely by the state of their wombs.     

Indigenizing girl power

This article considers the intersection of girlhood, agency, and indigenousness through a reading of the internationally renowned film Whale Rider. I suggest that Whale Rider presents a double project that resymbolizes girlhood as it also produces a “decolonizing of the screen.” On the one hand the film resonates with what emerged in the 1990s as the assertion of “girl power” and the notion of a new, active, powerful and agentic femininity. On the other hand, the film mobilizes a re-articulation of these discourses of “new femininities” by “indigenizing the image” of the empowered girl.     

The Funny Business of Being Tina Fey: Constructing a (feminist) comedy icon

Since her appointment as head writer on Saturday Night Live in the fall of 1999, Tina Fey has enjoyed unprecedented success as a writer, creator, and performer, in a genre notorious for favoring male-oriented fare and its attendant male writers and performers. The press surrounding her various film, television, and literary projects provides a unique opportunity to consider how Fey has worked with reporters to construct her public reputation as a successful woman working in comedy. Based on a Lexis-Nexis search of major English-language newspapers worldwide dating from Fey's appointment as head writer on Saturday Night Live in September 1999 through to the release of her best-selling book Bossypants in April 2011, this analysis finds that Fey employs a complex mix of self-deprecating and somewhat aggressive humor to answer reporter questions about topics ranging from her personal grooming habits and myriad talents to the treatment of women in the male-dominated business of comedy.     

Incomplete Resistance

The purpose of this essay is to examine the contradictions between narrative and filmic technique that result in conflicting messages in Karim Aïnouz's film O Céu de Suely. Although the film demonstrates the hardship and isolation that drive its northeastern Brazilian protagonist to raffle herself in order to buy a bus ticket out of town, it simultaneously sensualizes and encourages the audience to take pleasure in the female body by displaying it erotically. I call this tension between message and form incomplete resistance. The questions of how prostitution relates to patriarchy and the success of the protagonist's scheme in selling sex while refusing the label of prostitute are central to this analysis.     

Call Me Kuchu

This paper examines Call Me Kuchu, a 2012 documentary that profiles a group of activists in Uganda as they respond to the introduction of anti-homosexuality legislation in the Ugandan Parliament, the exposure of members of the LGBT community in the Ugandan publication Rolling Stone, and the death of activist David Kato. Utilizing queer theory, transnational feminism, and critical media studies, the authors provide a close reading of the film's formal elements in relation to the geopolitical context in which the film circulates. They argue for a more reflexive filmmaking praxis as well as significant contextualization of the issues of LGBT identity and human rights claims in relation to post-colonial politics. Ultimately, they offer suggestions for employing transnational filmmaking praxis and engaging with the film as a dynamic artifact of transnational and post-colonial contexts.     

Sofia Coppola

Sofia Coppola is currently one of the most discussed female filmmakers in Hollywood and one of the most prominent “indie” directors working over the last decade. Coppola has also divided critics, especially with her third and fourth features, Marie Antoinette and Somewhere both drawing heavy criticism. This article draws on a range of popular and scholarly sources in order to chart the different narratives that construct Coppola's public image, including the style of her filmmaking. I focus on perspectives of Coppola's work, investigating how the director's biographical details have become bound up with the reception of her films in ways that dismiss her films as too preoccupied with frivolity and privilege. Coppola's important position as a female director of independent features, specifically her unique position as a successful woman working in the masculinized arena of independent Hollywood, and her place within a lineage of women's cinema, is frequently elided in discussions of her success and style. It is the question of Coppola's status as a female director, the ambivalent process by which this status is acknowledged and disavowed in the reception of her work, that is most compelling for feminist film theory.     

Feminism and science in Masters of Sex

This article examines the fictional characterization of the real-life sex researchers and scientists William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson in the Showtime television program Masters of Sex (2013–2016). The historical Johnson had a complicated relationship with second-wave feminism: she disdained the movement and was interested primarily in improving heterosexual marriages and the sex lives of married couples. The Johnson character speaks in a language of postfeminism with minimal interest in collective action and broader social change. However, second-wave feminists later used her and Masters’ research in order to support their own beliefs about sexual autonomy and freedom, within and beyond marriage and heterosexuality. The television program demonstrates Johnson’s importance to both phases of her and Masters’ research—in the first phase, when they are based in a hospital and university environment, and in the second, when they establish their own research institute and raise funds directly from the clients that they serve. Johnson exemplifies postfeminist depictions of ambitious women in prestige television, her aim to have a successful career and marriage conflict, and while she is willing to compromise scientific values to serve her own goals, her male colleagues temper that ambition in service of “objective” science.     

Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama

This essay analyzes the video games in the popular Diner Dash franchise, paying specific attention to the games' protagonist Flo. While on its surface, the series appears to be a number of simple games about a waitress, they reflect more complex themes about gender, empowerment, work, and play. Ultimately, I argue that the game series can be seen as an open-ended (producerly) text that invites several possible interpretations (and negotiations) of femininity. By understanding the games in this open-ended manner, we are able to see how different meanings can potentially reinforce beliefs about feminism and femininity with women players—rather than advocating specific kinds of feminisms, means to empowerment, or lifestyles. All of these issues coexist simultaneously within the Dash games, creating a rich potential for media studies analysis, and a better understanding of women's leisure.     

Making E.T. Perfectly Queer

In the wake of E.T.'s 1982 debut, film critics Marina Heung and Vivian Sobchack established that the enduring appeal of E.T. inheres in the dissolution of the nuclear heterosexual family over the latter half of the twentieth century and the film's “fairy tale” stand-in for the “mythology of family relations” that Dana Cloud terms “conservative familialism.” As Carl Plantinga puts it, E.T. offers a “virtual solution … to [a] traumatic problem.” Despite this, however, E.T. remains for many an inconsolable tragedy. Approaching E.T. from the perspective of the queer child who grows “more sideways than up,” in the real absence of a fairy tale solution to the traumatic problem of conservative familialism, I here seek to identify and celebrate E.T.'s “complex range of queerness” that has until now remained largely closeted.     

Portrait of a Woman Artist

The analysis of the film Camille Claudel works to uncover the textual negotiations and sources of viewing pleasure rhetorically constructed into the cinematic representation of the film's subject. I argue that female viewers, in particular, are presented with a paradoxical viewing experience as the film both invites identification with Claudel, the film's subject, at the same time that it creates a sense of distance from the woman artist through her representation as an object of the filmic gaze. I conclude that these competing images may be seen as both ideologically interesting to female viewers and simultaneously challenging for feminist ideals.