Amanda Greer

McGill University, English & Cultural Studies, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow

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Amanda Greer is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, working on a project titled, “A Strange, Quiet World: Antisocial Aesthetics in Contemporary Girlhood Cinemas.” She received her PhD in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto. Her dissertation research developed a theory of cinematic form as pedagogy of adolescent gender in a corpus she terms the “mid-century guidance counsellor cinema.” This work was supported by a SSHRC Bombardier Doctoral Fellowship, a Doctoral Excellence Award, and the Vivienne Poy Chancellor’s Fellowship.

Her work has been published in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Film Criticism, and Sound Studies. From 2018-2022, she served as Assistant Production Editor for JCMS, for which she received the SCMS Distinguished Service Award—Collective.

Passionate about teaching, she has a forthcoming article in Teaching Media and has previously worked as a Graduate Educational Developer with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation, running pedagogy workshops and reading groups. She is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, and currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Critical Media Pedagogies Scholarly Interest Group.

Please get in touch to chat about teen films, pedagogy, and/or girlhood in media!
Supervisors: Ara Osterweil
Phone: 1-647-212-3290

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Papers by Amanda Greer

Mother feels best : mobilizing negative maternal affect as postfeminist critique in contemporary horror cinema

A small child is getting ready for school. His mother dresses him, pulling his jacket over his sh... more A small child is getting ready for school. His mother dresses him, pulling his jacket over his shoulders. He tries to hug her, emitting a satisfied sigh; she pushes him away. "Don't do that!" she cries. This sequence occurs at the beginning of Jennifer Kent's horror film, The Babadook (2014), a film that perfectly embodies contemporary horror's capacity to critique postfeminist mothering through its use of affect and the Final Mom figure. Although the horror genre's conventional representations of motherhood portray the institution as monstrous and abject, as in Carrie (1976) and The Brood (1979), a recent spate of horror films has demonstrated a more nuanced approach to mothering. Drawing from Carol Clover's seminal Final Girl figure, this thesis locates a powerful and critically productive figure in these films: the Final Mom. This figure, though dissatisfied with mothering and domestic life, must defend her family against a threatening force, often with no help from others. These figures exist in a postfeminist world where New Momist parenting is expected and celebrated. This form of parenting demands that all mothers fulfill a contradiction: give yourself over completely to mothering (sacrificing one's individual identity), while remaining sexually attractive and achieving success at work. This thesis explores how the horror genre's new Final Mom figure critiques postfeminist mothering's impossible expectations through mobilizing negative maternal affects. Employing a tripartite model of affect theory, in which affect is seen to travel between narratives, character bodies, and film form itself, this thesis argues that Final Mom horror films use negative maternal affects to critique and denaturalize postfeminist mothering structures. Irritation occupies a critical role in The Babadook, while envy will be discussed in relation to We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). iii These under-discussed, unpleasant affects will provide in-depth cultural critiques of contemporary mothering's unfulfillable expectations, proving their politically productive potentials. What's more, unpleasant affects like irritation and envy are emphasized as natural components of mothering, rather than shameful. This thesis exposes the Final Mom's potential to celebrate mothering's "bad" feelings, to accept these affects as natural to all mothering experiences.

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Murder, she spoke: the female voice's ethics of evocation and spatialisation in the true crime podcast

Sound Studies, 2017

The female voice in cinema has been discussed throughout film sound theory as persistently de-aco... more The female voice in cinema has been discussed throughout film sound theory as persistently de-acousmatised, denied the power of narrative creation and relegated to onscreen, visual space. This paper will contrast this visual containment of female vocalisations with that of the female-hosted podcast, in which nothing is or can be seen. The podcast offers alternative routes of resistance for the female acousmetre, allowing her to maintain her disembodied status. This is poignantly evident in the popular true crime podcast, My Favorite Murder, in which the acousmatic female hosts counter crime film and television's reliance on images of violated female bodies with purely aural recountings. Through their anti-ocularcentric reliance on the aurally evocative, rather than the visually manifested, these female voices transform themselves and the victims of their discussions into haunting spectres that force listeners to imaginatively reconstruct scenes of female-directed violence, while acknowledging the ethics of their complicity in the propagation and popularisation of these narratives. Thus, the true crime podcast is one potential site of doubled resistance against the de-acousmatisation of female voices and the visualisation of mutilated female bodies; this resistance leads to an ethics of the spectral, a Derridean mourning without end. Seeing/not-seeing "To see or not to see the sound's source: it all begins here", Michel Chion writes in the prologue to his canonical work of film sound theory, The Voice in Cinema (1999, 4). This play of visuality, the oscillation between seeing and not-seeing, which corresponds to the ocular-centric binary of knowing and not-knowing, has come to dominate subsequent discussions of film sound. This beginning, the seeing or not-seeing, builds to Chion's cornerstone concept of the acousmetre, "a kind of talking and acting shadow" to which we cannot attribute a body (1999, 21). The acousmetre has power over the listener-viewer, the power of its own self-knowledge , control over its own revelation. In Chion's words, the acousmetre is "an invitation to the loss of the self, to desire and fascination". It is omniscient, panoptic, ubiquitous and omnipotent (24). Thus, in cinema, the acousmetre as a disembodied voice both frustrates and titillates the viewer. It comes as no surprise, then, that the act of de-acousmatisation,

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'I'm not your mother!': maternal ambivalence and the female investigator in contemporary crime television

New Review of Film and Television, 2016

Contemporary crime television in the early twenty-first century demonstrates a fixation with mate... more Contemporary crime television in the early twenty-first century demonstrates a fixation with maternal identities relating to professional, working women. Its writers, their protagonists and supporting characters, have become obsessed with maternal ambivalence, specifically, conflicting feelings of love and hate that mothers feel toward their children. Since motherhood is not simply an unquestionable part of female identity, but an institution naturalized through dominant patriarchal structures, the female investigator figure in crime TV is a particularly rich subject in the exploration of maternal ambivalence and how it plays out in crime TV representation of motherhood. Close examination of Broadchurch, Happy Valley, and The Fall, featuring strong maternal (or staunchly non-maternal) figures, demonstrates the professional-domestic conflation in the female investigator figure, using several maternal character tropes (e.g. grieving mother, Mama Bear), to effectively explore, stabilize, and even vilify maternal ambivalence. While certain programs condemn the professional woman as a neglectful mother, others allow for a more nuanced exploration of maternal ambivalence, treating maternal identity as a complex and imposing abstraction. These programs' exploration of the female investigator suggests what it means to mother in a world where women are expected to juggle and navigate between numerous identities with ease and grace.

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