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In French cinema, representations of girls have often been associated with films made by women, as demonstrated by Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet (2001). They claim that the young girl is the major cinematographic topic for a woman’s first film, and names, such as Céline Sciamma in the late 2000s, Diane Kurys and Catherine Breillat in the 1970s, substantiate this position. However, Breillat’s A Real Young Girl was different, as it attracted critics’ acerbic reception and was subsequently banned for its open depiction of a young girl’s sexual experiences. It is argued that Breillat’s images of the young girl’s sexual initiation in the 1970s brings to the fore the significance of the idea of authenticity in relation to sex and cinema. Examining the representation of the ‘real young girl’ highlights the ideas of reflexivity and creativity attached to the existentialist notion of authenticity. This article aims to show that the young girl stands as a metaphor for Breillat’s auteurist approach to challenging existing filmic conventions.
4 Girls with ‘go’: female homosociality in L. T. Meade’s schoolgirl novels Whitney Standlee T he juvenile fiction written by the Irish novelist L. T. Meade (Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Toulmin Smith, 1844–1914) was extensive and diverse in both substance and reach. Sales records for her novels, a number of which continued to be reissued decades after their initial publication and which sold in the tens of thousands, confirm that her work appealed across temporal, geographical, religious, and even gendered boundaries.1 Evidence of her widespread popularity
12 The Harris House girls: girls from the Kindertransport in Southport, 1938–1940 On 6 December 1938, as it sought to define its remit, the MJRC was given to understand by members of the Livingstone family of Southport that a local committee there had obtained premises at 27 Argyle Road, in a fashionable residential district near the town centre, at a rental of £900 for four years, which it proposed to convert into a hostel for twelve children. Approval had been obtained from Woburn House and the committee now sought the imprimatur of the MJRC, of which it
106 6 Women and girls in danger From the mid-sixteenth century, some moral campaigners began to set up rescue institutions in the form of conservatories rather than convents. These were intended to be halfway houses and boarding schools, places of transition and safe keeping. They were not designed to be places of penance, but were aimed at reconciling rather than punishing, at preventing sins rather than atoning for them, at providing refuges where women in difficulties could consider their next moves. The goals of these institutions were socially
The purpose of this article is to analyse the ambivalent politics of looking and discourses of gender, class and sexuality in a variety of 1960s–70s Japanese studio-made exploitation films, known as sukeban films. It first contextualises their production within a transnational and domestic shift emphasising sex and violence in film and popular culture. The article then highlights instances where the visual, narrative and discursive articulation of non-conforming femininities flips the gendered power balance, as in the sketches that satirise men’s sexual fetishes for girls. In conclusion, it suggests to understand the filmic construction of young women’s agency, and their bodily and sexual performance, in terms of a recurring modus operandi of Japanese media that ambivalently panders to and co-constitutes youth phenomena.
11 Plague, patriarchy and ‘girl power’ Jane Humphries Introduction The inspiration for this chapter comes from an earlier contribution, written with Jill Rubery in 1984, which surveyed theories of social reproduction and its relationship to the economy. We argued that the family, notwithstanding its extensive responsibilities for reproducing, training and socialising future workers, had not been established as an interesting, central and dynamic variable for economic analysis (Humphries and Rubery, 1984). Instead, across the whole spectrum of theoretical
Shanoo's unpublished novel ‘Baby Girl’, about a conflicted British Asian family, written during the 1970s, is an important source for The Buddha of Suburbia . Father and son's stories appear to have been developed in dialogue, most notably in The Buddha of Suburbia 's main subplot featuring Haroon's childhood friend Anwar and his wife Jeeta. They live above their grotty corner shop, Paradise Stores, with their daughter Jamila, a committed feminist and anti-racist, who is Karim's best friend and sometime sexual partner. When Anwar begins to
Introduction In 1969, Abbess Mary Joseph regaled the Poor Clares of Darlington on her return from the vocations exhibition in Leeds with ‘interesting and amusing’ talks on religious life, ‘especially on how to deal with the modern girl’. The following week, Poor Clare abbess Mother Mary Paula Smallwood of Baddesley Clinton visited Darlington and also ‘entertained us with stories of the “antics” of modern postulants’. 1 The Modern Girl was a recurrent trope which featured even in religious life. Each generation laid claim to its modernity with a Modern Girl
Esnart Lungu’s life story provides key insights into the history of girls’ employment in domestic service in southern Africa’s post-colonial cities. In March 1981, then-eleven-year-old Esnart left her parents’ rural home in Sinda, in Zambia’s Eastern Province, and set out for Lusaka. She travelled to the city to become a live-in maid for a family she had never met
This book examines the ways in which women were able to deploy ambiguous concepts such as the 'career woman' and the 'bachelor girl' to simultaneously indicate and mask a lesbian identity. Contemporary anxieties about female same-sex desire which attached to these figures offered the opportunity to deploy them as an indication of potential sexual deviance. But their very ambiguity simultaneously afforded a protection from censure which more explicit terms such as 'lesbian' did not. These cultural connections between 'deviant' and 'normative' models of sexual identity have become the focus of considerable attention by queer theorists and historians in recent years. Queer historians have sought to analyse the institutional practices and discourses which produce sexual knowledge, and the ways in which these organise social life. They have concentrated their research on the binary opposition of homosexuality and heterosexuality as the dominant epistemological framework of knowledge about sexuality. The book seeks to explore the connections between space and cultural practices in lesbian history and is therefore concerned with the material world of post-war Britain. Identities such as 'tomboy' were invested with specific meanings in particular spatial contexts. As a child in rural Essex in the early 1950s, Nina Jenkins could use the term 'tomboy' to explain and excuse her desire to climb trees and be part of a boys' street gang.