Titles and Abstracts (in alphabetical order)
Clara Bradbury-Rance (University of Manchester) - 'The Erotics of Interruption and Disruption in Films of Queer Lesbian Girlhood'
This paper emerges out of my doctoral research which explores the contradiction surrounding the 'figure' of the lesbian on the contemporary cinema screen who, at the threshold of the convergence of queer and feminist discourses, is marked by a paradoxical burden of visibility and invisibility. Through a consideration of the ambiguous intimacies that pervade Apflickorna / She Monkeys (Lisa Aschan: Sweden, 2011) and Naissance des Pieuvres / Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma: France, 2007), this paper will trace the queerness of the erotic spaces of female homosocial adolescent cultures. Whilst these two films (like others such as Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz: France/USA/Iran, 2011) might be understood through the conventions of the 'coming-of-age’ genre, my discussion of them in this paper moves beyond this potentially teleological generic description. I will consider instead those particular homoerotic moments that are less about a departure from childhood and an arrival into adulthood, and more about the dynamics of adolescent interruption and disruption. Focussing on the tensions between discipline and risk that characterise the interactions between adolescent female bodies in the sporting cultures of both films, this paper will seek to reconceptualise impressions of lesbianism that have concentrated on the lesbian 'figure', a term which in itself is no longer capable of describing desires in a cinematic context in which a queer feeling crosses cultural, national and theoretical borders.
Catherine Driscoll (University of Sydney) - 'Global Girlhood: internationalising teen film'
In scholarly literature and popular commentary on teen film it is generally assumed to be “American”, and the appearance of teen film conventions anywhere than in North American film is widely assumed to be a form of cultural globalisation if not colonising Americanisation. This paper argues that, despite its popular image, “teen film” is no more American than the component parts of an international discourse on modern adolescence, which means not particularly American all. The industrialisation of cinema is continuous with the institutionalisation of normative post-pubescent education and with the emergence of classification systems that manage film distribution in terms of “adolescence”. For such a history, national borders, of both the structural economic and the symbolic kind, are as significant and as malleable as any marker of maturity or citizenship. Teen film nevertheless offers a liminal sphere of adaptation and translation continually for a transnational audience and for this process a narrative about normal girlhood has been foundational. With a central comparison of Indian and U.S. teen film girlhood, although also considering other examples, this paper explores the girl’s place as simultaneously representing cultural difference and international adolescence.
Danielle Hipkins (University of Exeter) - ‘Making Girl-Rage Legible: revisiting the prefeminist in postfeminist filmmaking’
The ubiquitous girl in contemporary media culture is most often seen grappling with the contradictions of postfeminist culture. For many feminist critics youthful female agency loops between the outmoded vestiges of a demonized second-wave feminism and the re-traditionalizing interpellations of late consumer capitalism, often characterized by generational antagonism (Rowe, 2011). In this respect films that use the figure of the girl to explore culture on the cusp of second-wave feminism pose interesting questions about how visual narrative might find ways to short circuit this repetitive to and fro between the polarities of feminism and postfeminism, between mothers and daughters, between the 70s and the 90s.
In this paper I shall use two recent European films (Cosmonauta, Nicchiarelli, 2009, and Rosa and Ginger, Potter, 2011) that imagine the lives of politically active girl protagonists in the 1950s and 1960s, to explore the representation of the pre-feminist girl. Poised on the brink of second-wave discoveries, the female protagonists’ difficulty in articulating rage over a range of injustices (‘What is it you can’t say, Ginger?’) appears to speak to Angela McRobbie’s theorization of ‘illegible rage’. If, according to McRobbie, it is so difficult really to speak ‘rage’ in contemporary postfeminist culture which calls for a set of sassy, but ultimately compliant female subjects, like McRobbie these films also initially appear to gesture towards feminism as the future promise for these girls. Do the films, therefore, merely generate nostalgia for times in which direct action seemed to promise effective answers? Is the return to the 1960s a rallying cry to reactivate an old-school second-wave feminist discourse? Or rather, does their frequent collapsing of the identities of the pre-feminist and post-feminist through the figure of the girl and her particular concerns speak to a continued lacuna in female identity that transcends that temporal divide? With their ‘postfeminist sensibility’ for the personal cost of dogmatic political agenda, for female friendship and sexuality, and the difficult envoicing of their female protagonists in the political and the private sphere, it is the fantasy of personal legibility that drives these films. The prefeminist girls in these films find a voice in their own generation, but also in that of the present, neither disavowing the struggles of the past forty years nor making claims for second-wave feminism’s unique hold on our understanding of female development.
Karen Lury (University of Glasgow) - 'From "Disney Kid" to "Street Whore": the exceptional career of Jodie Foster'
Jodie Foster is – supposedly – the exception. She is the child actor – starting work at the age of three – who graduated from Yale and went on to develop a hugely successful adult career as an actor and director. Foster serves as the exception to the popularly endorsed rule that child actors never sustain their acting careers and that early exposure to ‘show business’ leads to a life of depravity and despair. As an adult, having played a number of post-feminist icons (such as Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs [1991]) Foster’s later career and stardom have been extensively scrutinised. Surprisingly, little has been written about her early childhood career, aside from her notorious role in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). In this paper I want to reflect on Foster’s ‘girlhood’ and look at her skills as a performer - and focus on her roles in a number of Disney films including Napoleon and Samantha (1972), Tom Sawyer (1973) and Freaky Friday (1976), as well as Alan Parker’s ‘kids musical’ Bugsy Malone (1976). Finally, I will reflect on her sideways move (rather than her graduation) to roles in edgier dramatic fare such as The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976) and - perhaps inevitably - to Taxi Driver itself. The surprising emotional range required by these films, Foster’s ambiguous ‘tom boy’ looks, her characteristic ‘awkwardness’ all resonate very differently but apparently successfully for audiences of all ages. But what made Foster so ‘good’? Or what made her not simply the exception but exceptional?
Deborah Shaw (University of Portsmouth) - 'Teenage Girls in the Films of Claudia Llosa'
Provocative teenagers who defy established gendered codes of behaviour have featured in a number of high profile Latin American films by women filmmakers. These include Perfume de violetas: nadie te oye/Violet perfume: No One is Listening by Marisa Sistach, (2001), La niña santa/The Holy Girl by Lucrecia Martel (2004), XXY by Lucía Puenzo (2007), and Claudia Llosa’s troublesome teenage girl protagonists in Madeinusa (2006) and La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (2009). All of these films are co-productions and have been the recipients of grants from European funding bodies and programmes such as the Hubert Bals fund aligned with the Rotterdam Festival; Cinéfondation a programme linked to the Cannes film festival and the German World Cinema Fund, an initiative of the Berlinale.
This paper focuses on the two films made by the Peruvian director Claudia Llosa. Both Madeinusa and The Milk of Sorrow are award winning and internationally acclaimed festival films, yet they have caused controversy among Peruvian and Latin American film critics for what some see as racist and offensive representations of rural, poor Peruvians. The paper will, through a focus on the protagonists, Madeinusa and Fausta, seek to relate the forms of representation of the girls to the funding secured and the success of the film in international art cinema circles. The paper will explore the relationship between local, national and global space in the films and their production and distribution, and consider whether feminist or postfeminist readings provide a fruitful theoretical framework to read the films and their reception.
Kate Taylor (Bangor University) - 'Girlhood in Japanese Imperial Cinema'For many the image of the Japanese teenage (or younger) schoolgirl is one that has become fixed in the contemporary global imagination. The prominence of fashion and music movements such as loli-goth and ama-loli and the sexualisation of the girls via cultural trends such as enjo Kosai (compensatory dating) highly sexualised manga, film and music and urban legends related to school girl panties has made the Japanese girl a site of tremendous tension and disruption.
Rather than look at contemporary manifestations this paper will look back to an earlier phase of Japanese development and will examine how this earlier development links into, and informs the contemporary view. Imperial Japan (1895-1945) was a fundamental (although often ignored) part of the contemporary Japan’s development. The cinema of this period especially from 1930 onwards was deeply imbued with the Imperial narratives of the time. These narratives stressed the military life for men and ryosai kenbo (good wife, wise mother) for women. In this way the ‘girl’ was a difficult figure to process and represent since she could not confirm to ryosai kenbo due to her age (and the lack of male partners as the war went on), nor could she ever aspire to the military life. In this way the girls became a blank spot in the imperial structure and, as a result, she was a site of potential disturbance that would need to be controlled and maintained.
This paper will concentrate on three main films The Good Earth/Atarashiki Tsuchi /Die Tochter des Samurai (Dir. Franck and Itami, 1937) Shina no Yoru/China Nights (1940, Fushimizu) and The Most Beautiful/ Ichiban utsukushiku (Kurosawa, 1944) and will illustrate how a contradictory gendering of girls and girlhood was taking place and illustrate how the complex narratives of the Imperial film culture would impact on contemporary manifestations of the girl in Japanese cinema and culture.
Emma Wilson (University of Cambridge) - ‘The Sea Nymphs Tested This Miracle’: traces of a liquid world in Naissance des pieuvres'
Céline Sciamma’s debut film Naissance des pieuvres [Waterlilies] (2007) takes us into an arena of female sexuality and sensory excess in its treatment of synchronized swimming. This sport, and the spaces of the municipal pool, with its chlorinated water and bleached, white-tiled surfaces, is an unlikely reservoir for the flowering of adolescent girls’ eroticism. In its initial attention to the sport, the film creates a series of brittle, coruscating sense impressions, where distorted sounds, and patterns of glittering light on the azure pool, match the cheap jewels encrusting the girls’ suits, the lacquer on their hair, the sheen of their make-up, their rigid nose-clips. But as Marie (Pauline Acquart) swims underwater, she glimpses a liquid world of headless, swirling, moving bodies, inner thighs and stretched fabric. The film turns from the pool to the domestic bathroom, where Marie, in bathwater, bathes with her miniature turtle, a living creature whose dark prehensile moves contrast with the shining artifice of the pool arena. In Naissance des pieuvres and in her second film Tomboy (2011), Sciamma makes use of scenes of washing and intimate care in the domestic bathroom to explore ‘the private parts of girls’. In Naissance des pieuvres the truth of girls’ sexualities and their relation to water, to the pool, is explored through sensory traces from Ovid’s myth of the origin of coral in Metamorphoses Book IV. In the synchronized swimmers, Sciamma creates a series of contemporary sea nymphs playing with the coral that petrifies in contact with the air, hardened by Medusa’s blood. As Julia Kristeva writes: ‘The generic word coral could come from coré, which means “young girl,” like Medusa; or it might be an allusion to Coré-Persephone, the queen of the dead’. Like Nan Goldin collaging images of water nymphs from painting and sculpture and her own photographs of women and girls in water in Scopophilia (2010), claiming women’s sensory pleasure in looking and feeling, Sciamma in her intersensory feminist cinema refinds traces of a liquid world in which she explores nascent sexuality, desire for the lips, the touch of the vulva, disavowed in the hardening coral, the bejeweled costumes, above the surface.
This paper emerges out of my doctoral research which explores the contradiction surrounding the 'figure' of the lesbian on the contemporary cinema screen who, at the threshold of the convergence of queer and feminist discourses, is marked by a paradoxical burden of visibility and invisibility. Through a consideration of the ambiguous intimacies that pervade Apflickorna / She Monkeys (Lisa Aschan: Sweden, 2011) and Naissance des Pieuvres / Water Lilies (Céline Sciamma: France, 2007), this paper will trace the queerness of the erotic spaces of female homosocial adolescent cultures. Whilst these two films (like others such as Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz: France/USA/Iran, 2011) might be understood through the conventions of the 'coming-of-age’ genre, my discussion of them in this paper moves beyond this potentially teleological generic description. I will consider instead those particular homoerotic moments that are less about a departure from childhood and an arrival into adulthood, and more about the dynamics of adolescent interruption and disruption. Focussing on the tensions between discipline and risk that characterise the interactions between adolescent female bodies in the sporting cultures of both films, this paper will seek to reconceptualise impressions of lesbianism that have concentrated on the lesbian 'figure', a term which in itself is no longer capable of describing desires in a cinematic context in which a queer feeling crosses cultural, national and theoretical borders.
Catherine Driscoll (University of Sydney) - 'Global Girlhood: internationalising teen film'
In scholarly literature and popular commentary on teen film it is generally assumed to be “American”, and the appearance of teen film conventions anywhere than in North American film is widely assumed to be a form of cultural globalisation if not colonising Americanisation. This paper argues that, despite its popular image, “teen film” is no more American than the component parts of an international discourse on modern adolescence, which means not particularly American all. The industrialisation of cinema is continuous with the institutionalisation of normative post-pubescent education and with the emergence of classification systems that manage film distribution in terms of “adolescence”. For such a history, national borders, of both the structural economic and the symbolic kind, are as significant and as malleable as any marker of maturity or citizenship. Teen film nevertheless offers a liminal sphere of adaptation and translation continually for a transnational audience and for this process a narrative about normal girlhood has been foundational. With a central comparison of Indian and U.S. teen film girlhood, although also considering other examples, this paper explores the girl’s place as simultaneously representing cultural difference and international adolescence.
Danielle Hipkins (University of Exeter) - ‘Making Girl-Rage Legible: revisiting the prefeminist in postfeminist filmmaking’
The ubiquitous girl in contemporary media culture is most often seen grappling with the contradictions of postfeminist culture. For many feminist critics youthful female agency loops between the outmoded vestiges of a demonized second-wave feminism and the re-traditionalizing interpellations of late consumer capitalism, often characterized by generational antagonism (Rowe, 2011). In this respect films that use the figure of the girl to explore culture on the cusp of second-wave feminism pose interesting questions about how visual narrative might find ways to short circuit this repetitive to and fro between the polarities of feminism and postfeminism, between mothers and daughters, between the 70s and the 90s.
In this paper I shall use two recent European films (Cosmonauta, Nicchiarelli, 2009, and Rosa and Ginger, Potter, 2011) that imagine the lives of politically active girl protagonists in the 1950s and 1960s, to explore the representation of the pre-feminist girl. Poised on the brink of second-wave discoveries, the female protagonists’ difficulty in articulating rage over a range of injustices (‘What is it you can’t say, Ginger?’) appears to speak to Angela McRobbie’s theorization of ‘illegible rage’. If, according to McRobbie, it is so difficult really to speak ‘rage’ in contemporary postfeminist culture which calls for a set of sassy, but ultimately compliant female subjects, like McRobbie these films also initially appear to gesture towards feminism as the future promise for these girls. Do the films, therefore, merely generate nostalgia for times in which direct action seemed to promise effective answers? Is the return to the 1960s a rallying cry to reactivate an old-school second-wave feminist discourse? Or rather, does their frequent collapsing of the identities of the pre-feminist and post-feminist through the figure of the girl and her particular concerns speak to a continued lacuna in female identity that transcends that temporal divide? With their ‘postfeminist sensibility’ for the personal cost of dogmatic political agenda, for female friendship and sexuality, and the difficult envoicing of their female protagonists in the political and the private sphere, it is the fantasy of personal legibility that drives these films. The prefeminist girls in these films find a voice in their own generation, but also in that of the present, neither disavowing the struggles of the past forty years nor making claims for second-wave feminism’s unique hold on our understanding of female development.
Karen Lury (University of Glasgow) - 'From "Disney Kid" to "Street Whore": the exceptional career of Jodie Foster'
Jodie Foster is – supposedly – the exception. She is the child actor – starting work at the age of three – who graduated from Yale and went on to develop a hugely successful adult career as an actor and director. Foster serves as the exception to the popularly endorsed rule that child actors never sustain their acting careers and that early exposure to ‘show business’ leads to a life of depravity and despair. As an adult, having played a number of post-feminist icons (such as Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs [1991]) Foster’s later career and stardom have been extensively scrutinised. Surprisingly, little has been written about her early childhood career, aside from her notorious role in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). In this paper I want to reflect on Foster’s ‘girlhood’ and look at her skills as a performer - and focus on her roles in a number of Disney films including Napoleon and Samantha (1972), Tom Sawyer (1973) and Freaky Friday (1976), as well as Alan Parker’s ‘kids musical’ Bugsy Malone (1976). Finally, I will reflect on her sideways move (rather than her graduation) to roles in edgier dramatic fare such as The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976) and - perhaps inevitably - to Taxi Driver itself. The surprising emotional range required by these films, Foster’s ambiguous ‘tom boy’ looks, her characteristic ‘awkwardness’ all resonate very differently but apparently successfully for audiences of all ages. But what made Foster so ‘good’? Or what made her not simply the exception but exceptional?
Deborah Shaw (University of Portsmouth) - 'Teenage Girls in the Films of Claudia Llosa'
Provocative teenagers who defy established gendered codes of behaviour have featured in a number of high profile Latin American films by women filmmakers. These include Perfume de violetas: nadie te oye/Violet perfume: No One is Listening by Marisa Sistach, (2001), La niña santa/The Holy Girl by Lucrecia Martel (2004), XXY by Lucía Puenzo (2007), and Claudia Llosa’s troublesome teenage girl protagonists in Madeinusa (2006) and La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (2009). All of these films are co-productions and have been the recipients of grants from European funding bodies and programmes such as the Hubert Bals fund aligned with the Rotterdam Festival; Cinéfondation a programme linked to the Cannes film festival and the German World Cinema Fund, an initiative of the Berlinale.
This paper focuses on the two films made by the Peruvian director Claudia Llosa. Both Madeinusa and The Milk of Sorrow are award winning and internationally acclaimed festival films, yet they have caused controversy among Peruvian and Latin American film critics for what some see as racist and offensive representations of rural, poor Peruvians. The paper will, through a focus on the protagonists, Madeinusa and Fausta, seek to relate the forms of representation of the girls to the funding secured and the success of the film in international art cinema circles. The paper will explore the relationship between local, national and global space in the films and their production and distribution, and consider whether feminist or postfeminist readings provide a fruitful theoretical framework to read the films and their reception.
Kate Taylor (Bangor University) - 'Girlhood in Japanese Imperial Cinema'For many the image of the Japanese teenage (or younger) schoolgirl is one that has become fixed in the contemporary global imagination. The prominence of fashion and music movements such as loli-goth and ama-loli and the sexualisation of the girls via cultural trends such as enjo Kosai (compensatory dating) highly sexualised manga, film and music and urban legends related to school girl panties has made the Japanese girl a site of tremendous tension and disruption.
Rather than look at contemporary manifestations this paper will look back to an earlier phase of Japanese development and will examine how this earlier development links into, and informs the contemporary view. Imperial Japan (1895-1945) was a fundamental (although often ignored) part of the contemporary Japan’s development. The cinema of this period especially from 1930 onwards was deeply imbued with the Imperial narratives of the time. These narratives stressed the military life for men and ryosai kenbo (good wife, wise mother) for women. In this way the ‘girl’ was a difficult figure to process and represent since she could not confirm to ryosai kenbo due to her age (and the lack of male partners as the war went on), nor could she ever aspire to the military life. In this way the girls became a blank spot in the imperial structure and, as a result, she was a site of potential disturbance that would need to be controlled and maintained.
This paper will concentrate on three main films The Good Earth/Atarashiki Tsuchi /Die Tochter des Samurai (Dir. Franck and Itami, 1937) Shina no Yoru/China Nights (1940, Fushimizu) and The Most Beautiful/ Ichiban utsukushiku (Kurosawa, 1944) and will illustrate how a contradictory gendering of girls and girlhood was taking place and illustrate how the complex narratives of the Imperial film culture would impact on contemporary manifestations of the girl in Japanese cinema and culture.
Emma Wilson (University of Cambridge) - ‘The Sea Nymphs Tested This Miracle’: traces of a liquid world in Naissance des pieuvres'
Céline Sciamma’s debut film Naissance des pieuvres [Waterlilies] (2007) takes us into an arena of female sexuality and sensory excess in its treatment of synchronized swimming. This sport, and the spaces of the municipal pool, with its chlorinated water and bleached, white-tiled surfaces, is an unlikely reservoir for the flowering of adolescent girls’ eroticism. In its initial attention to the sport, the film creates a series of brittle, coruscating sense impressions, where distorted sounds, and patterns of glittering light on the azure pool, match the cheap jewels encrusting the girls’ suits, the lacquer on their hair, the sheen of their make-up, their rigid nose-clips. But as Marie (Pauline Acquart) swims underwater, she glimpses a liquid world of headless, swirling, moving bodies, inner thighs and stretched fabric. The film turns from the pool to the domestic bathroom, where Marie, in bathwater, bathes with her miniature turtle, a living creature whose dark prehensile moves contrast with the shining artifice of the pool arena. In Naissance des pieuvres and in her second film Tomboy (2011), Sciamma makes use of scenes of washing and intimate care in the domestic bathroom to explore ‘the private parts of girls’. In Naissance des pieuvres the truth of girls’ sexualities and their relation to water, to the pool, is explored through sensory traces from Ovid’s myth of the origin of coral in Metamorphoses Book IV. In the synchronized swimmers, Sciamma creates a series of contemporary sea nymphs playing with the coral that petrifies in contact with the air, hardened by Medusa’s blood. As Julia Kristeva writes: ‘The generic word coral could come from coré, which means “young girl,” like Medusa; or it might be an allusion to Coré-Persephone, the queen of the dead’. Like Nan Goldin collaging images of water nymphs from painting and sculpture and her own photographs of women and girls in water in Scopophilia (2010), claiming women’s sensory pleasure in looking and feeling, Sciamma in her intersensory feminist cinema refinds traces of a liquid world in which she explores nascent sexuality, desire for the lips, the touch of the vulva, disavowed in the hardening coral, the bejeweled costumes, above the surface.