CFP: Edited collection
‘Diggin’ Dancing Queens and Wedding Scenes: The Phenomenon of Mamma Mia!

Call for abstracts deadline:  19th April 2010
Full name: Louise FitzGerald

Contact email: [log in to unmask]



This cfp invites submissions for a proposed collection exploring the 2008 film 
Mamma Mia! and the cultural phenomenon that surrounded it. To date, the film 
is positioned as the 42nd highest grossing film of all time, the most successful 
musical of all time, and the 5th highest grossing film of 2008. In Britain, the 
box office success of Mamma Mia surpassed the phenomenal success of 
Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic and it has been estimated that at least one in four 
British households owns a DVD copy of Mamma Mia. Indeed, on the day of the 
film’s DVD release, Amazon reported that it had become the fastest selling 
product. Reports from America, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Australia, Germany, 
France and Greece have also testified to the phenomenal success of the film.  

Critics debating the film’s outstanding success have suggested that its 
popularity resulted from the dire economic recession that was enveloping so 
many countries in 2008 ( the idea of the musical functioning in terms of 
escapism has been debated since at least the classical Hollywood period).  
The film offered relatively cheap, escapist entertainment that, as many have 
argued, raised the spirits of audiences dealing with higher mortgage payments, 
bankruptcy and the threat of unemployment.  Despite Mamma Mia’s 
outstanding international success amongst filmgoers, film critics have lauded 
the musical as a “cumulative weight of terribleness” and warned that those 
who loved the film would have to “prove their intelligence”. Such sentiments 
reflect an established tension that functions to polarize films as either ‘high’ 
or ‘low’ brow entertainment, and the audiences as either critically engaged or 
an uneducated mass of consumers.  These sentiments are often couched in 
gendered terms and serve to reinforce the idea that films addressed to a male 
audience have more cultural capital than those addressed to women. 

This edited collection aims to study Mamma Mia! in terms of its success, and 
how this success can also be contextualised within the film’s cultural politics. 
Indeed, the film has often incited debate at the level of gender politics, and 
can variously be read as empowering ‘mature’ woman, as rejecting marriage as 
the pinnacle of young women’s lives and as foregrounding a more positive 
representation of cinema’s lone mother figure.  However others have 
commented on its apparent infantilization of Greek characters, and have 
pointed to Mamma Mia as an example of the cultural reiteration of regressive 
post-feminist gender politics.  As such, this collection will explore the ways in 
which issues of class, gender and popular culture are articulated in Mamma 
Mia and debates about it. Topics might also include (but are not restricted to);

The mother and daughter relationship
Portrayals of the ‘older’ woman
The music and cultural status of ABBA
Spectacle and the liminality of the film’s Greek location
The film’s representation of homosexuality
Mamma Mia! and the contemporary musical
Critical reception
Audience reception/fan culture
Adaptation
Female authorship
Stardom

Contributor guidelines:
Please provide a chapter abstract (maximum 500 words) and a brief biography 
(250 words).  These should be submitted by e-mail to 
[log in to unmask] by 19th April, 2010