‘What if I Had Been the Hero?’

2020

Feminist Media Studies

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“…3 For a fuller articulation of this argument, see De Lauretis (1984), Thornham (2012. 4 She discusses in particular Carroll's Alice and Nabokov's Lolita.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Undoing violent masculinity : Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (2018)

2020

Feminist Media Studies

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“…Elsewhere, the haymaking scene and the framed landscapes recall those of seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as van Ruisdael (Jaehne, 1996: 27–8). See Thornham (2012) for further discussion of the film's use of Dutch landscape painting in its re-imagining of the relationship of its female subjects to space and time.…”

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confidence: 99%

Women's time and the cinema of Marleen Gorris

2022

Feminist Theory

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This article examines the cinema of Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris in the light of Julia Kristeva's concept of ‘Women's Time’ and of more recent attempts to conceptualise a temporality that is lived ‘in the feminine’ but is not, as Kristeva's is, either outside historical time – as cyclic and/or monumental – or aligned to the repetitive drudgery of domestic labour. Drawing on Lisa Baraitser's concept of ‘unbecoming time’, a time that ‘will not unfold’ but is lived as endurance, as ‘staying beside others’, and as care, it argues that Gorris's films seek to depict such a temporality. The article first explores the shifting engagements of feminist theory with concepts of time and the relationship of these to ideas of subjectivity and narrative, in particular cinematic narrative. It then examines the cinema of Marleen Gorris in the light of these concepts, focusing on three of her films that span a twenty-five-year period: her second film, Broken Mirrors (1984) ; Antonia’s Line (1995) , her fourth film and winner of the 1996 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film; and her most recent and possibly last film, Within the Whirlwind (2009). It gives most attention to Within the Whirlwind. In many ways, Gorris's most ambitious film, it is also her least discussed, and of her films, the one that focuses most directly on historical time.

“…This kind of interruption of realism (a ‘perforated’ or ‘haunted’ realism) has been identified by Patricia Ticineto Clough with a specifically female mode of writing. See: Clough (1998); Thornham (2012: 101–102).…”

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confidence: 99%

‘I’m not your mother’: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016)

2019

Feminist Theory

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This article examines Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014–2016) in the context of recent feminist attempts to theorise the idea of a maternal subject. Happy Valley, a police series set in an economically disadvantaged community in West Yorkshire, has been seen as expanding the genre of British social realism, in its focus on strong Northern women, by giving it ‘a female voice’ (Gorton, 2016: 73). I argue that its challenge is more substantial. Both the tradition of British social realism on which the series draws, and the neoliberal narratives of the family which formed the discursive context of its production, I argue, are founded on a social imaginary in which the mother is seen as responsible for the production of the selves of others, but cannot herself be a subject. The series itself, however, places at its centre an active, articulate, mobile and angry maternal subject. In so doing, it radically contests both a tradition of British social realism rooted in male nostalgia and more recent neoliberal narratives of maternal guilt and lifestyle choice. It does this through a more fundamental contestation: of the wider cultural narratives about selfhood and the maternal that underpin both. Its reflective maternal subject, whose narrative journey involves acceptance of an irrecoverable loss, anger and guilt as a crucial aspect of subjectivity, and who embodies an ethics of relationality, is a figure impossible in conventional accounts of subject and nation. She can be understood, however, in terms of recent feminist theories of the maternal.