***Apologies for cross-posting***
***Details for seminar next week***
The next Media and Politics Research Group seminar will take place on Thursday, 10 March, Seminar Room 202 in the Roxby Building (second floor), University of Liverpool.
Tea/coffee from 4.30pm, seminar starts around 4.45pm. All welcome!
Louise Wilks, University of Liverpool
“Boys don’t like girls for funniness”: Raunch culture and the 21st Century British “tween” film
The first decade of the twenty-first century offered Western audiences a salacious version of female sexuality, divergently interpreted as either oppressive or empowering. Various mediums habitually depicted females as sexually voracious, often representing them solely as sex objects choosing to display their bodies for male voyeuristic pleasure. Such texts are deemed to be illustrative that pornography has infiltrated the Western mainstream, resulting in the normalisation of “raunch culture” (Levy, 2006).
My paper focuses on the depicted impact of raunch culture discourse on young females within numerous British “tween” films released during this decade; those aimed at a pre-teen and teenage audience, including Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (Chadha, 2008). Raunch culture is often framed within a post-feminist schema, equating women’s pornified appearance and behaviour with female empowerment. However, various feminist scholars have condemned such ideologies, arguing that the premise that equates self-objectification with liberation for women posits a narrow and performative version of female (hetero)sexuality as the only acceptable version of women’s sexuality. A further debate - prevalent in the right-wing British press - incites panic by attributing media portrayals of female sexual behaviour and demeanour as direct causes of increased levels of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. I consider such discussions in relation to the films’ portrayals of their young female characters, including the depicted association of the sexual self-objectification of the female body with its capacity to attract the opposite sex, and the different perspectives and reactions offered which understand this objectification as either liberating or debasing.
For further details contact: Dr Katia Balabanova ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) or Dr Katy Parry ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>).
Details of this semester’s seminars are available on the website: http://www.liv.ac.uk/communication-and-media/mediapol.htm
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Dr Katia Balabanova
Lecturer in Political Communication
Department of Communication and Media
Roxby Building
University of Liverpool
Liverpool
L69 7ZT
UK
tel +44 151 794 2656
fax +44 151 794 3948
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
www.liverpool.ac.uk/communication-and-media
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