Contemplating in a dream-like room: The Virgin Suicides and the aesthetic imagination of girlhood

Mistral: Journal of Latin American Women’s Intellectual & Cultural History, 2021

This article explores how the film "Mate-me por favor/Kill Me Please" (dir. Anita Rocha da Silveira, 2015) appropriates and subverts horror tropes in order to consider class, gender and generational concerns in contemporary Rio de Janeiro. It questions what the use of horror elements seeks to promote, and how this approach to the genre can be productive in discussions of the fears of growing up in a violent and sexist society. Published both in Portuguese and English (translated by Alisa Wilhelm) at Mistral: Journal of Latin American Women’s Intellectual & Cultural History, vol. 1, n. 1, May 2021, pp. 92-118. Available at: https://ugp.rug.nl/Mistral/article/view/37511.

In today’s highly sexualized visual culture, the young girl as object of desire has become ubiquitous, resulting in a decidedly questionable and problematic fantasy of femininity. In this context, the following paper aims to question the fantasy of girlhood as it is conveyed by certain contemporary popular films, while at the same time approaching the topic from the perspective of contemporary Lacanian film studies. As such, focus is drawn on the theoretical standpoints offered by Slavoj Žižek, as well as by Joan Copjec, Elizabeth Cowie and Todd McGowan, all of whom approach film and its gaze not as a tool of objectification and mastery, but as an objet a. Fantasy is therefore presented as the veil that conceals a repressed desire that emerges through the perverted gaze implied by the young girl. Upon demonstrating the pertinence of present-day Lacanian film theory in the study of the aforementioned fantasy, an analysis of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty problematizes this very fantasy and its hidden, traumatic kernel. The ultimate aim is to determine how a certain cinema attempts to defy the mainstream ideology of sexualization by showing that which the symbolic cannot explain, namely the young girl as object of desire, and as a contemporary, inverted and perverted form of Oedipal fantasy. In so doing, it will be shown how this type of film demonstrates cinema’s potential in triggering reflections on complex social and cultural phenomena.

Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos

Este artículo analiza cómo el suicidio frustrado de las protagonistas de ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!! (Pedro Almodóvar, 1984) y Costa Brava (Family Album) (Marta Balletbò-Coll, 1995) es esencial para entender el lugar de estas dos mujeres en relación con los modelos de género de la España de los 80 y 90 . Argüimos que el acto de suicidio es más que una elección individual, puesto que surge de una serie de coyunturas sociológicas y de género. A su vez, consideramos que el suicidio fallido puede ayudarnos a entender cómo se presenta la autoría y la reescritura del mito de Edipo en las dos películas.

Joel Gwynne & Nadine Muller (ed.) Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), pp.204-221., 2013

Lost Girls: The Cinema of Jean Rollin (Spectacular Optical), 2017

s 1981 film 1 Les paumées du petit matin (aka The Escapees) 2 was famously met with several studio-related difficulties; most notably, it was minimally-funded (mostly selffunded by the director in order to be completed), and Rollin was required to work with a script writer of the studio's choosing (Jacques Ralf), whom he often found too wordy. 3 The cinematography and camerawork, however, are exquisitely Rollin -indulgent and colorful and lingering, particularly on his subjects, Michelle (Laurence Dubas) and Marie (Christiane Coppé). The perspective he provides on these girls -the literal viewpoint, as the camera provides a perspective the audience can inhabit and watch from -is simultaneously cynical and sentimental, exploring both externally-prescribed narratives of girlhood and rebellious narrative possibilities.

2006

of proofreading. Tanja Potok, for looking after our baby Elsa as if she had been her own. Jan Wadstein, for always being there, taking an interest, babysitting, cooking, problem solving academic issues, and most of all for always looking on the bright side. Christina Hagenfeldt, to whom I'm grateful for endless emotional and intellectual support, many hours of babysitting, and for showing me how to never give up, never mind what. Our lovely daughter demonstrated at a very tender age a capacity to entertain herself, without that skill this work would have been much delayed. Most of all, I want to thank Alex MacLeod, who has given me courage, love and support when I've most needed it, and to whom I dedicate this book with love. made the woman-child the perfect muse for the male surrealists. 3 The adolescent moment of sexual ambiguity has been a persistent theme in the history of art, particularly over the last century. Some examples are Edvard Munch's (1863-1944) anxiety ridden Puberty, 1894-95, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's (1880-1938) studies of Marzella and Fränzi, and Balthus's (1908-2001) erotically charged portraits of young girls and adolescents. This type of sexually charged girl seems to dominate how girls appear 12 Lena Cronqvist: Reflections of Girls Girls and Popular Culture Cronqvist's images reflect pressing issues in contemporary society and I consider it no coincidence that her theme of girls surfaced when it did. 5 In the 1990s the girl as a figure was visible as never before in western society, popular culture and visual arts. The alarming and heightened awareness of the atrocities of child abuse, pornography and honour murders were impossible to escape. These reports were all too often delivered through the mainstream media. Yet, not much points to the 1990s as a time when these violations of human rights actually increased, but rather that society suddenly acquired better awareness of it. As a consequence, today, instead of being taboo these issues can now be brought into the light and dealt with openly. In the following chapters I will argue that Cronqvist's girl figures have several faces; they draw on a distorted Lolita type and they also incorporate a visual tradition of the ugly and grumpy child, as mentioned above. The first type is far more common in popular culture, for, as Marianne Sinclair points out in Hollywood Lolita, the Lolita figure existed long before Vladimir Nabokov gave her a name and pointed out a genre, with his novel Lolita, 1955. Sinclair's many examples of famous 'Hollywood Lolitas' range over time; they differ in age and are as diverse as Shirley Temple, Mary Pickford, Nastassia Kinski, and Jodie Foster. 6 This tendency has by no means diminished, and the 1990s saw a steady stream of girls, perhaps most notably in fashion, where the so-called heroine chic fashioned models (i.e. under-aged, painfully thin and anaemic girls) became popular towards the middle of the decade. 7 However, it is not all doom and gloom concerning the way in which girls are portrayed. In the last ten years there has been an upsurge of powerful images of girls. Not only have the representations become more varied and powerful, girls themselves claim more space in art and media. 8 In the film Ghost World, 2001, based on a cartoon, the main character is the kooky and slightly weird Enid, who is sexually active but not sexualised. 9 Another example, which focuses on the complexities of a girl's transition from being a child to a teenager, is the 16

Child & Youth Care Forum, 2010

Three significant, prevailing and overlapping narratives of teenage girls have dominated North American popular consciousness since the early 1990s: the sad girl, victimized by male privilege and misogyny of adolescence and beyond; the mad grrrls who rejected this vulnerability through music and media; and the bad girls of much current popular debate, those girls who are bad because they are conniving and/or because they are violent. This article reviews these three discourses by locating them within their historical contexts, including conceptualizations of the 'girl' from feminist poststructuralist perspectives. Literature from the field of girlhood studies provides the basis from which the discourses of growing up female are explored. Keywords Girlhood Á Femininity Á Discourse Á Gendered constructions Á Violence Á Relational aggression Á Intersectional analysis This article details three significant, prevailing and overlapping narratives of teenage girls, including the sad girl story that dominated North America the early 1990s, she who was victimized by male privilege and misogyny of adolescence and beyond, the mad grrrls who rebuked this vulnerability, and the bad girls of much current popular debate, those girls who are bad because they are conniving and/or because they are violent. The article begins by examining history and debates surrounding the term 'girl', in order to raise questions regarding the construction of the label and set the context for how these stories have circulated. Literature from the field of girlhood studies provides the basis from which the discourses of growing up female are explored.

Feminist Theory, 2013

"The ‘girl subject’ and ‘young femininity’ are repeatedly and with great effect being made increasingly visible as a particular social, cultural and psychical problematic in late capitalist societies (Driscoll, 2002). The last two decades have witnessed a burgeoning and interdisciplinary field of critical girlhood studies that have rapidly taken up this contested site of young femininity (e.g. Walkerdine, 1991; Hey, 1997; Walkerdine et al., 2001; Gonick, 2003; Aapola et al., 2004; Harris, 2004; Mitchell and Reid-Walsh, 2005; Jiwani et al., 2006; Nayak and Kehily, 2007; Duits, 2008;Currie et al., 2009; Kearney, 2011; Hains, 2012; Ringrose, 2013). As a sociopolitical project, the figure of the contemporary girl is over-determined, weighted down with meaning and commonly represented through binary formations of celebratory postfeminist ‘girl power’ vs. crisis discourses of ‘girls at risk’ (Aapola et al., 2004; Gonick et al., 2009). One of the primary ‘luminosities’ (Deleuze in McRobbie, 2008) surrounding girls as both bearers of power and objects of risk centres on girls’ relationship to sexuality and entry into sexual womanhood. In this special issue, we bring together a series of articles that explore a veritable explosion of interest, debate and controversy over what is referred to as the (premature or hyper) ‘sexualisation of the (girl) child’. One of our aims in this introduction is to invite readers to think about what the collection of articles and shorter ‘interchange’ pieces do together as a type of assemblage, where each article intra-acts with the other to create new potentials for thinking about girls and sexuality. Each author explores in different ways how the figure of the ‘girl’ connects with culturally specific contexts across a range of topics and practices. The girl travels across the articles in multi-modal ways (as digital, as affect, as animation, as biology, as brand, as policy discourse) and through different theoretical, disciplinary and political lenses. What follows is our own particular, partial tracing of the girl and her affective address across this engaging range of articles."

This paper uses a post-structuralist perspective to articulate the conceptual limits of the discourse of 'coming of age' as a means of examining concerns about the representation of young female sexuality in the media. Through analysis of the content and production contexts of the films Lolita Thirteen (2003), it argues that the discourse of 'coming of age' is grounded in a contradictory logic that produces conflicting aims: a desire to preserve the innocence of youth and a simultaneous expectation that they 'grow up'. Using techniques of Derridean deconstruction, the paper examines the effects that this logic produces in terms of how key aspects of 'coming of age' contradict what the discourse sets out to determine and how this contributes to perceptions of youth sexuality as problematic. It will be shown that these conceptual contradictions remain unseen in attempts to make sense of the controversial aspects of the two films: the issue of pedophilia in Lolita and the problem of teenage rebellion in Thirteen. Importantly, the deconstructive reading suggests that it is the paradoxical underpinnings of this approach to youth identity that enables the discourse to be thought at all. By working to recognise this, it is possible to move beyond the limits of the discourse and think differently about youth in response to the perceived threat posed to young people by media representations of adolescent sex and sexuality.