Papers by Hannah Hamad
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2014
This article interrogates postfeminism and recessionary discourse in the time-travel police serie... more This article interrogates postfeminism and recessionary discourse in the time-travel police series Ashes to Ashes (BBC, 2008–2010). Viewing the series as an early example of ‘recession television’, it explores how the resident gender discourse of postfeminism established in the pre-recession first series, and attendant cultural
priorities, shifted over time in tandem with the onset of recession, following the 2008 global financial crisis, and in line with tendencies of emergent recessionary media culture. In early episodes it over-determines the characterization of female detective protagonist Alex Drake as a postfeminist subject, drawing her to well-worn cultural scripts of femininity. Later this gives way to the discursive centralization of her boss, Gene Hunt, already an iconic figurehead of recidivist masculinity from the earlier Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–2007), one of several gendered responses to the drastically changed economic environment in which the series was produced and received.
Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema , 2013
Fatherhood has emerged as a dominant identity paradigm of masculinity in contemporary Hollywood c... more Fatherhood has emerged as a dominant identity paradigm of masculinity in contemporary Hollywood cinema, as paternalised protagonists have become an increasingly and often overwhelmingly omnipresent feature of popular film in the twenty first century, while the currency of fatherhood as a defining component of ideal masculinity has enabled it to be normalised as a cultural trope of postfeminism. Pointing to the summer of 2002, and its clustered release of a triptych high profile star vehicle genre films (Minority Report, Road to Perdition and Signs), as a watershed moment in the marked turn towards the paternal in contemporary popular cinematic masculinities, this chapter explores cycles and sub-cycles of the contemporary Hollywood fatherhood film, arguing that postfeminist fatherhood is the new hegemonic masculinity.
The Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Media, 2012
Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, 2011
What Dreams Were Made Of: Movie Stars of the 1940s , 2011
The stardom of Greer Garson rose and fell contemporaneous with the duration of the Second World W... more The stardom of Greer Garson rose and fell contemporaneous with the duration of the Second World War. Her rise began with a lauded supporting role in Goodbye Mr Chips in 1939, and her decline was prompted by the poor performance of Adventure in which she and Clark Gable were sadly mismatched. In the interim however, she embodied a particular model of British (sometimes including inflections of Scottish and Irish) femininity that generated a persona characterised by noble, indomitable, altruistic, stoic figures with various literary, historical or contemporary origins ranging from Elizabeth Bennet in the 1940 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to the revered scientist Marie Curie in Madame Curie (1943). 1942 marked the apotheosis of the saleability of this persona, with the release of Mrs Miniver and Random Harvest displaying twofold her characteristic domestic home-front “spirit of the blitz” fortitude, the success of which made her MGM’s most significant female star at that time.
Celebrity Studies, Aug 6, 2010
This article offers post-feminism as a critical framework for understanding the phenomenon of cel... more This article offers post-feminism as a critical framework for understanding the phenomenon of celebrity fatherhood as it has been widely articulated through the channels of tabloid media, celebrity reality TV and the discourse of scandal. A heavily paternalised presence within the tabloid media has become increasingly central to the sustainability of a coherent public identity for innumerable male celebrities in contemporary media culture, including film and cable television celebrities, among them Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Patrick Dempsey, Jude Law, Snoop Dogg and Hulk Hogan. The post-feminist paternalisation of mediated masculinity in celebrity culture has increasingly permeated a growing arena of representational outlets, and while cinematic stardom remains one of the most visible popular cultural manifestations of this phenomenon, the popular cultural breadth and scope of these representations and personifications have expanded and converged exponentially alongside wider trends in the distribution and consumption of media texts, so that celebrity post-feminist fatherhood is widely discursively circulated in the realms of reality tv, celebrity gossip magazines and online celebrity forums and blogs. The examples of celebrity post-feminist fatherhood under the analytical purview of this paper are indicative of a major trend within the tabloid culture of the contemporary media, which increasingly function as a space for popular cultural ephemera to play out currently pertinent and discursively apposite gender concerns. For male celebrities, it has become increasingly necessary to showcase their heteronormativity through tabloid profiles that characterise their fatherhood as 'sexy', in order to meet the requirements of hegemonic masculinity in post-feminism, and for individuals whose celebrity is flagging to recuperate their status through revitalising and currently culturally apposite means of mediating their paternity.
Realities and Remediations: The Limits of Representation in Film, 2007
Talks by Hannah Hamad
Through recent decades fatherhood has become the dominant paradigm of movie masculinity in mainst... more Through recent decades fatherhood has become the dominant paradigm of movie masculinity in mainstream U.S. Cinema, a move that has taken place in tandem with the cultural normalisation of postfeminist discourse. Popular film that spans the Hollywood genre spectrum, as well as beyond into the realms of independent, middle-brow and arthouse cinema, is thus abundant with paternally signified screen protagonists, as a multiplicity of ideals of screen masculinity are increasingly anchored by a universalising and recuperative discourse of paternity. Considering a representative range of textual and contextual examples of this phenomenon, this paper argues for postfeminist fatherhood as the new hegemonic masculinity.
Through recent decades fatherhood has become the dominant paradigm of movie masculinity in mainst... more Through recent decades fatherhood has become the dominant paradigm of movie masculinity in mainstream U.S. Cinema, a move that has taken place in tandem with the cultural normalisation of postfeminist discourse. Popular film that spans the Hollywood genre spectrum, as well as beyond into the realms of independent, middle-brow and arthouse cinema, is thus abundant with paternally signified screen protagonists, as a multiplicity of ideals of screen masculinity are increasingly anchored by a universalising and recuperative discourse of paternity. Interrogating a representative range of textual and contextual examples of this phenomenon, this paper argues for postfeminist fatherhood as the new hegemonic masculinity.
Writing in 2001, Andrew Hoskins asserted that "never before has our relationship with the past - ... more Writing in 2001, Andrew Hoskins asserted that "never before has our relationship with the past - some judgment of it, celebration, commemoration or denial of it - been so much a part of public culture." This paper accordingly examines the proliferation of depictions of the 1980s in a spate of recent popular film and television (e.g. the BBC's 'Eighties Season' [2010]; time travel police drama 'Ashes to Ashes' [2008-2010]; and Thatcher biopic 'The Iron Lady' [2011]), arguing that this backwards-looking turn in mainstream moving image culture can be productively understood in relation to striking discursive parallels to be drawn between the present and the recent past of the represented period. Revisionist attempts to recuperate this much maligned decade in recent social, political and cultural history have sought to negotiate this discourse by eliciting nostalgic affect from audiences. I aim to interrogate what is at stake in this negotiation, and the political efficacy of articulating the present through the distorting prism of cultural nostalgia for the 1980s.
The stardom of Greer Garson rose and fell contemporaneous to the duration of the Second World War... more The stardom of Greer Garson rose and fell contemporaneous to the duration of the Second World War. Her rise began with a lauded supporting role in Goodbye Mr Chips in 1939, and her decline was prompted by the poor performance of Adventure in which she and Clark Gable were sadly mismatched. In the interim however, she embodied a particular model of British (sometimes including inflections of Scottish and Irish) femininity that generated a persona characterised by noble, indomitable, altruistic, stoic figures with various literary, historical or contemporary origins ranging from Elizabeth Bennet in the 1940 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to the revered scientist Marie Curie in Madame Curie (1943). 1942 marked the apotheosis of the saleability of this persona, with the release of Mrs Miniver and Random Harvest displaying twofold her characteristic domestic home-front “spirit of the blitz” fortitude, the success of which made her MGM’s most significant female star at that time.
Books by Hannah Hamad
This book interrogates representations of fatherhood across the spectrum of popular U.S. film of ... more This book interrogates representations of fatherhood across the spectrum of popular U.S. film of the early twenty-first century. It situates them in relation to postfeminist discourse, identifying and discussing dominant paradigms and tropes that emerge from the tendency of popular cinema to configure ideal masculinity in paternal terms. It analyses postfeminist fatherhood across a range of genres including historical epics, war films, westerns, bromantic comedies, male melodramas, action films, family comedies, and others. It also explores recurring themes and intersections such as the rejuvenation of aging masculinities through fatherhood, the paternalized recuperation of immature adult masculinities, the relationship between fatherhood in film and 9/11 culture, post-racial discourse in representations of fatherhood, and historically located formations of fatherhood. It is the first book length study to explore the relationship between fatherhood and postfeminism in popular cinema.
Book Reviews by Hannah Hamad
Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies, Feb 2007
Conference Presentations by Hannah Hamad
As television attunes to the mood of post-recession audiences, a spate of “recession television” ... more As television attunes to the mood of post-recession audiences, a spate of “recession television” has emerged, deliberately thematising the current economic situation. Conscious incorporation of recession themed scenarios has taken place alongside concomitant nuances in the deployment of tropes of postfeminism. This paper explores the gendered tropes of recessionary culture in time travel police drama Ashes to Ashes (BBC 2008-2010), examining the relationship between how the recession has inflected the series (directly and indirectly) and the representation of gender. Specifically, it addresses the representational discourse of Ashes as a cipher for concerns and anxieties germane to the recession, how they are filtered through its early 1980s setting, and the related ways it articulates postfeminism, largely through the central character dynamic between emblematic postfeminist heroine Alex Drake and her foil, iconic figure of unreconstructed masculinity Gene Hunt.
The three seasons of Ashes were produced and broadcast contemporaneous with the timeframe of the recession experienced in Britain as an upshot of the global financial crisis, with the final episodes broadcast in the run-up to the 2010 general election that brought a post-recession change of government, heralded by the series, which presciently foreshadowed Cameron’s Britain through evocation of Thatcher’s Britain and the 1983 election. Productive parallels to be made between gendered tropes of recessionary culture in the diegesis and the extra-textual discursive realm were incorporated into electioneering campaign strategies with both the Labour and Conservative parties using gendered imagery from the series in respectively cautionary and celebratory capacities to articulate post-recession masculinity in the context of Britain’s economic dire straits.
The final season consciously acknowledges its recession era context, albeit largely suggestively, refracting its concerns through selective parallel depiction of the recession experienced in early 1980s Britain. Concerns germane to postfeminist culture have been embedded in the series throughout with a character dynamic pitting a figure of empowered postfeminist femininity against one of unashamedly unreconstructed masculinity, at once antagonistically and flirtatiously. However, commensurate with how the recession has inflected popular culture more broadly, this dynamic shifts over the seasons, as Ashes attempts to account for its status as a post-recession text. Alex’s centrality and her postfeminist dilemma (whether to enjoy the excesses offered by her time-shifted postfeminist fantasy, or to fight to return home and confront the reality of her time-pressured, high stress life as a professional single mother) gives way in latter episodes to a narrative arc culminating in the sanctification of manliness, with Alex becoming the foil to Gene’s rise to discursive prominence and elevation to the status of folk hero for a re-masculinized post-recession Britain.
Ashes over-determines the historicization of the cultural viability of postfeminist excess in terms of things like Alex’s sexual liberation and markers of self-production (excessively stylised hair, makeup and 80s fashions), culminating in a finale that sees her required to evince remorse for the postfeminist excesses she indulged in early episodes - a de facto apologia for the celebratory manner in which it mobilised a discourse of postfeminist femininity through her time-shifted characterisation.
This paper critically explores the centrality, visual aesthetic and over determined articulation ... more This paper critically explores the centrality, visual aesthetic and over determined articulation of discourses of whiteness in the contemporary Hollywood thrillers Whiteout (Dominic Sena, 2009) and 30 Days of Night (David Slade, 2007), paying particular attention to the manner in which whiteness has been gendered in these films. For example, via the idealized whiteness of the female investigator (Kate Beckinsale’s US Marshal Carrie Stetko in Whiteout and Melissa George’s Alaska Fire Marshal Stella Oleson in 30 Days of Night), versus the malevolent and troubling hyper-whiteness of the male antagonist characters (Alex O’Loughlin’s serial killer Russell Haden in Whiteout and Danny Huston’s vampire Marlow in 30 Days of Night). Both the serial killer and the vampire are, of course, stock figures of troubling white masculinity in over determined representations of whiteness in popular cinema and culture more broadly, but the over-determination of the extent to which their whiteness is made visible here is noteworthy.
Hence, contrary to the state of affairs critiqued by early critical conceptualisations of cinematic whiteness, in which whiteness was notable for its invisibility and default status relative to social identity formations that had been discursively culturally othered, whiteness in these films is notable instead for its hyper-visibility. This is exacerbated and accentuated by the “persistence” (Bernardi 2008, p xvii) of its visibility in the absence of natural light, in diegetic conceits germane to each, specifically the Alaskan setting of 30 Days of Night and Antarctic setting of Whiteout. I therefore address discourses of whiteness in these films with regard to gender and visual aesthetics, the alignment of whiteness with death (the first murder victim in Whiteout is significantly named ‘Weiss’), and its broad discursive over-determination.
References
Bernardi, Daniel. (2008) The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London and New York: Routledge.
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Papers by Hannah Hamad
priorities, shifted over time in tandem with the onset of recession, following the 2008 global financial crisis, and in line with tendencies of emergent recessionary media culture. In early episodes it over-determines the characterization of female detective protagonist Alex Drake as a postfeminist subject, drawing her to well-worn cultural scripts of femininity. Later this gives way to the discursive centralization of her boss, Gene Hunt, already an iconic figurehead of recidivist masculinity from the earlier Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–2007), one of several gendered responses to the drastically changed economic environment in which the series was produced and received.
Talks by Hannah Hamad
Books by Hannah Hamad
Book Reviews by Hannah Hamad
Conference Presentations by Hannah Hamad
The three seasons of Ashes were produced and broadcast contemporaneous with the timeframe of the recession experienced in Britain as an upshot of the global financial crisis, with the final episodes broadcast in the run-up to the 2010 general election that brought a post-recession change of government, heralded by the series, which presciently foreshadowed Cameron’s Britain through evocation of Thatcher’s Britain and the 1983 election. Productive parallels to be made between gendered tropes of recessionary culture in the diegesis and the extra-textual discursive realm were incorporated into electioneering campaign strategies with both the Labour and Conservative parties using gendered imagery from the series in respectively cautionary and celebratory capacities to articulate post-recession masculinity in the context of Britain’s economic dire straits.
The final season consciously acknowledges its recession era context, albeit largely suggestively, refracting its concerns through selective parallel depiction of the recession experienced in early 1980s Britain. Concerns germane to postfeminist culture have been embedded in the series throughout with a character dynamic pitting a figure of empowered postfeminist femininity against one of unashamedly unreconstructed masculinity, at once antagonistically and flirtatiously. However, commensurate with how the recession has inflected popular culture more broadly, this dynamic shifts over the seasons, as Ashes attempts to account for its status as a post-recession text. Alex’s centrality and her postfeminist dilemma (whether to enjoy the excesses offered by her time-shifted postfeminist fantasy, or to fight to return home and confront the reality of her time-pressured, high stress life as a professional single mother) gives way in latter episodes to a narrative arc culminating in the sanctification of manliness, with Alex becoming the foil to Gene’s rise to discursive prominence and elevation to the status of folk hero for a re-masculinized post-recession Britain.
Ashes over-determines the historicization of the cultural viability of postfeminist excess in terms of things like Alex’s sexual liberation and markers of self-production (excessively stylised hair, makeup and 80s fashions), culminating in a finale that sees her required to evince remorse for the postfeminist excesses she indulged in early episodes - a de facto apologia for the celebratory manner in which it mobilised a discourse of postfeminist femininity through her time-shifted characterisation.
Hence, contrary to the state of affairs critiqued by early critical conceptualisations of cinematic whiteness, in which whiteness was notable for its invisibility and default status relative to social identity formations that had been discursively culturally othered, whiteness in these films is notable instead for its hyper-visibility. This is exacerbated and accentuated by the “persistence” (Bernardi 2008, p xvii) of its visibility in the absence of natural light, in diegetic conceits germane to each, specifically the Alaskan setting of 30 Days of Night and Antarctic setting of Whiteout. I therefore address discourses of whiteness in these films with regard to gender and visual aesthetics, the alignment of whiteness with death (the first murder victim in Whiteout is significantly named ‘Weiss’), and its broad discursive over-determination.
References
Bernardi, Daniel. (2008) The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London and New York: Routledge.
priorities, shifted over time in tandem with the onset of recession, following the 2008 global financial crisis, and in line with tendencies of emergent recessionary media culture. In early episodes it over-determines the characterization of female detective protagonist Alex Drake as a postfeminist subject, drawing her to well-worn cultural scripts of femininity. Later this gives way to the discursive centralization of her boss, Gene Hunt, already an iconic figurehead of recidivist masculinity from the earlier Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–2007), one of several gendered responses to the drastically changed economic environment in which the series was produced and received.
The three seasons of Ashes were produced and broadcast contemporaneous with the timeframe of the recession experienced in Britain as an upshot of the global financial crisis, with the final episodes broadcast in the run-up to the 2010 general election that brought a post-recession change of government, heralded by the series, which presciently foreshadowed Cameron’s Britain through evocation of Thatcher’s Britain and the 1983 election. Productive parallels to be made between gendered tropes of recessionary culture in the diegesis and the extra-textual discursive realm were incorporated into electioneering campaign strategies with both the Labour and Conservative parties using gendered imagery from the series in respectively cautionary and celebratory capacities to articulate post-recession masculinity in the context of Britain’s economic dire straits.
The final season consciously acknowledges its recession era context, albeit largely suggestively, refracting its concerns through selective parallel depiction of the recession experienced in early 1980s Britain. Concerns germane to postfeminist culture have been embedded in the series throughout with a character dynamic pitting a figure of empowered postfeminist femininity against one of unashamedly unreconstructed masculinity, at once antagonistically and flirtatiously. However, commensurate with how the recession has inflected popular culture more broadly, this dynamic shifts over the seasons, as Ashes attempts to account for its status as a post-recession text. Alex’s centrality and her postfeminist dilemma (whether to enjoy the excesses offered by her time-shifted postfeminist fantasy, or to fight to return home and confront the reality of her time-pressured, high stress life as a professional single mother) gives way in latter episodes to a narrative arc culminating in the sanctification of manliness, with Alex becoming the foil to Gene’s rise to discursive prominence and elevation to the status of folk hero for a re-masculinized post-recession Britain.
Ashes over-determines the historicization of the cultural viability of postfeminist excess in terms of things like Alex’s sexual liberation and markers of self-production (excessively stylised hair, makeup and 80s fashions), culminating in a finale that sees her required to evince remorse for the postfeminist excesses she indulged in early episodes - a de facto apologia for the celebratory manner in which it mobilised a discourse of postfeminist femininity through her time-shifted characterisation.
Hence, contrary to the state of affairs critiqued by early critical conceptualisations of cinematic whiteness, in which whiteness was notable for its invisibility and default status relative to social identity formations that had been discursively culturally othered, whiteness in these films is notable instead for its hyper-visibility. This is exacerbated and accentuated by the “persistence” (Bernardi 2008, p xvii) of its visibility in the absence of natural light, in diegetic conceits germane to each, specifically the Alaskan setting of 30 Days of Night and Antarctic setting of Whiteout. I therefore address discourses of whiteness in these films with regard to gender and visual aesthetics, the alignment of whiteness with death (the first murder victim in Whiteout is significantly named ‘Weiss’), and its broad discursive over-determination.
References
Bernardi, Daniel. (2008) The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London and New York: Routledge.