Feminist Studies 140x: Girls on Film: Cultural Studies in Third Wave Feminism

Instructor: Patricia Pender
Department: Feminist Studies
Quarter: Fall 2002
Web Designers: Michele Cash and Laura Daener

In the late 1990s, the figure of the girl and the problematic of "Third Wave" feminism assumed unprecedentedly high profiles in the cultural imagination of the US media. A slew of best-selling sociological studies such as Mary Pipher's "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls," Lyn Mikel Brown's "Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls Anger," and Lynn Phillips' "The Girls Report: What We Know and Need to Know About Growing Up Female" constructed the "plight" of American girlhood as a national crisis. At the same time that the Monika Lewinsky trial saw media figureheads demanding "Where are the Feminists?," and Time magazine publishing a cover story that questioned "Is Feminism Dead?," a younger generation of feminist writers and activists were talking out in alternative popular media: in the runaway underground "girlzine" BUST; in memoirs entitled "Fast Girls," "Bitch," and "Slut" and in collections and cultural criticism like Barbara Findlen's "Listen Up: Voices from the next feminist generation," and Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards' "Manifesta: young women, feminism and the future." Throughout this period, popular culture saw the harnessed aggression of earlier Riot Grrl bands devolve into the saccharine simplicity of the Spice Girls, forcing the concept of "girl power" into an evolution that continues to produce new and problematic relationships with established feminist politics.

This course positions these related cultural phenomena as important contexts for the examination of "Girls on Film." It examines unlikely feminist heroines of late 1990s "chick flicks," such as Alicia Silverstone's "clueless" Cher in the 1995 remake of Jane Austen's "Emma," Winona Ryder's "Girl Interrupted," and Sarah Michelle Gellar's vampire-slaying cheerleader in the hit television series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Paying particular attention to issues of issues of race, class, ethnicity, education, sexuality, and mental health, the class will attempt to interrogate and destabilize mainstream media representations of female adolescence as predominantly white, heterosexual, and upper-middle class by looking at recent cinematic representations of African-American ("Just Another Girl on the IRT"), Latina ("Girlfight"), working class ("Chain Camera"), and transgender ("Boys Don't Cry") adolescents. We will employ a variety of methodologies (anthropological, psychological, economic, and textual) and media (film text, journalism, popular cultural critique, and academic discourse) in order to analyze the relationship between "Third Wave" feminism and popular cultural production. One of the primary goals of the class is to empower students to question dominant stereotypes, and to critique prevailing conceptions of feminist agency and political efficacy, without acceding to the defeatism implicit in the notion of "postfeminism."