Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture, ed. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz and Stacy Rusnak, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
This chapter uses critical race theory to analyze how Get Out simultaneously engages and subverts... more This chapter uses critical race theory to analyze how Get Out simultaneously engages and subverts horror film tropes to depict the disposability of black life in post-racial America, in the process, extending Clover’s figure of the Final Girl beyond its original theoretical and empirical limitations. Its central image is the ‘sunken place,’ a form of social death depicted as a void within which black subjectivity is constricted and isolated while a white person controls his/her fate. The chapter explores how the film and promotional strategies construct both black subjectivity and the moral monsters that would systematically degrade a class of human beings without remorse. Its racial politics falls on the critical cross line between Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Uploads
Papers by Isabel Pinedo
Drawing on examples from The Killing, Orange is the New Black, Big Little Lies, Wentworth, Outlander, Westworld, Being Mary Jane, Queen Sugar, Vida, and other television dramas with a focus on complex female characters, this book illustrates how female creative control in key production roles (direct authorship) together with industrial imperatives and a conducive cultural context (indirect authorship) are necessary to produce feminist texts. Placed within the larger context of a rise in feminist activism and political participation by women; the growing embrace of a feminist identity; and the ascendance of post-feminism, this book reconsiders the unfinished nature of feminist struggle(s) and suggests the need for a broader sweep of economic change.