Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. Issue 10: Women and Media in the Twenty-First Century

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https://hdl.handle.net/10468/5578
In celebration of its tenth issue, Alphaville is proud to introduce this special issue on Women and Media as a reflection of the journal’s enduring interest in, and desire to contribute to, this dialogue. The range of articles presented in this issue offers an insight into the expanded spectrum of work by and about women in the new millennium, providing a snapshot of the multifaceted ways in which women are working and being represented across the globe. Edited by Abigail Keating and Jill Murphy, University College Cork.

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    The feminist cinema of Joanna Hogg: melodrama, female space, and the subversion of phallogocentric metanarrative
    (2015) Barrett, Ciara
    In this article, I provide a scholarly introduction to the cinema of contemporary British director Joanna Hogg that stands in direct contravention to existing auteurist and concomitantly phallogocentric critical discourses on her work. Thus I establish an alternative, feminist theoretical framework for analysis of Hogg’s films, synthesising feminist and structuralist methodologies. Via close textual analysis of each of Hogg’s three feature films, emphasising their implicit critique of phallogocentric narrativisation vis-à-vis the deployment of certain “melodramatic” conventions, I argue that the director creates a filmic space both literal and conceptual for “the female”. Significantly, this contravenes the inherently phallogocentric theoretical framework by which auteurist film criticism has (up until now) largely attempted to “package” Hogg’s work. I thus conclude the cinema of Joanna Hogg represents a subversive challenge to phallogocentric metanarrative, within which auteurist film criticism has traditionally been imbricated.
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    Femininity, ageing and performativity in the work of Amy Heckerling
    (Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, 2015) Smith, Frances
    This article concerns the complex negotiation of ageing and femininity in Amy Heckerling’s two most recent films: I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) and Vamps (2012). These films are positioned as part of the contemporary postfeminist media culture, (Gill, 2007) noting the scrutiny received by the ageing female body, and its changing status under the prevailing cultural norms of femininity. However, Heckerling’s films also demonstrate a sense of play with these gender norms, and so calls to be read also in terms of Judith Butler’s theorisation of performativity (1990; 1993; 2004). This article contends that Heckerling’s representation of liminality and indeterminacy—in her teen movies, and later work alike—provides a way for women to carve out an autonomous identity that humorously demonstrates the absurdity of mediatised constructions of femininity. Her work, then, is more complex than has hitherto been acknowledged, and the piece concludes by calling for the director and screenwriter to be repositioned as a significant female voice in 21st century screen media.
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    “Nice white ladies don’t go around barefoot”: racing the white subjects of The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)
    (Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, 2015) Thouaille, Marie-Alix
    Not only is The Help(2009; 2011) a text within which a white woman author (Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, played by Emma Stone) profits from the lives of women of colour, but it is also a text originally written by a white woman author (Kathryn Stockett) who profits from the real and/or imagined lives of women of colour. Both authors rely on the invisibility of their whiteness and white privilege in order to inhabit, and, appropriate from, marginalised subjectivities. Through an analysis of The Help’s filmic strategies for inscribing whiteness as a form of absence, this article posits that women of colour are erased and excluded by our continuing cultural reluctance to “see” whiteness and its privileges. I go on to argue that the film simultaneously offers a sceptical reading of Stockett’s and Skeeter’s appropriative projects, finding ways to make characters’ whiteness visible, embodied and accountable. Only in interrogating this cultural invisibility can we contest the ways in which neoliberalism and postracism interplay to reify middle-class whiteness as the default subject position for women in screen media in the twenty-first century.