Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. Film. Directed by SpikeLee. Distributed by Gravitas Ventures, 2014.

Dew, Spencer

doi:10.1111/rsr.12255_7

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Kissing Candice (2017), Solar Bones (2016) and dissenting girls Set in early twenty-first-century Dundalk, Kissing Candice (2017) not only focuses on a female protagonistits director Aiofe McArdle makes clear it is 'from the perspective of a young woman […] We've seen so many films from the perspective of men' (Barry, 2018) but also 'brings together the Gothic, magic realism and the crime genre' (Asava, 2022). Its seventeen-year-old protagonist, Candice experiences epileptic seizures/visions, during which she imagines kissing a young man who, strangely, then appears in reality.…”

Section: Mike Mccormack's Solar Bones (2016) and Gendered Contaminationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet such theatre offers little insight into the novel's treatment of women, or its distinct aesthetics. 4 In order to draw out McCormack's subterranean reckoning with women's economic precarity, I instead link the novel to Aoife McArdle's film Kissing Candice (2017), which sits askance from recent Irish filmic trendsbeing neither urban, male-focused nor straightforwardly a genre film. 5 Instead, its gothic exploration of rural decay helps to elaborate McCormack's covert narrative interests.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Tracking the monstrous gendered precarity of neoliberalisation through novels and films of 1980s England and contemporary Ireland

Houlden

2023

Feminist Theory

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This article compares cultural production about 1980s working-class industrial England with that of contemporary, middle-class rural Ireland in order to identify aesthetic through lines in the portrayal of social reproductive violence across both early- and later-stage neoliberalism. It argues that, despite their differences in setting and demographic, novels by Pat Barker and Mike McCormack use peripheral political experience to show the bodies of women bearing the brunt of late capitalism's horrors. Barker's Union Street (1982) serves as an early warning of the neoliberal consensus-to-come, bringing to life the geographic peripheralisation that would accompany deindustrialisation. It portrays the conflicted dynamic between childhood and capital, also anticipating the ways in which care work would increasingly be externalised onto women in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. This overlaps with the 1987 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too's portrayal of childhood sexual vulnerability, as well as Letter to Brezhnev (1985) and its rendering of capitalism's consumption of women. Instead of the realism for which these films are known, Union Street uses gothic modes and the motif of vomiting in ‘irrealist’ fashion. So too, Mike McCormack's Mayo-set 2016 novel Solar Bones employs spectrality, as well as ideas of contamination, to evoke the damage wrought by a now-entrenched neoliberalism as it imperils the middle classes. The novel's recognition of female social reproductive labour is more oblique, but women are again shown to be at the coalface of neoliberal violence, their very bodies marshalled to detect and, crucially, resist gendered precarity. In this, I draw parallel with the Dundalk-set film Kissing Candice (2017) , which uses gothic tropes to show rural dispossession writ large through the body of a teenage girl.

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Section: Mike Mccormack's Solar Bones (2016) and Gendered Contaminationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracking the monstrous gendered precarity of neoliberalisation through novels and films of 1980s England and contemporary Ireland

Houlden

2023

Feminist Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. Film. Directed by SpikeLee. Distributed by Gravitas Ventures, 2014.

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Tracking the monstrous gendered precarity of neoliberalisation through novels and films of 1980s England and contemporary Ireland

Tracking the monstrous gendered precarity of neoliberalisation through novels and films of 1980s England and contemporary Ireland

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