Books by Whitney Monaghan
This book takes up the queer girl as a represented and rhetorical figure within film, television ... more This book takes up the queer girl as a represented and rhetorical figure within film, television and video. In 1987, Canada’s Degrassi Junior High featured one of TV’s first queer teen storylines. Contained to a single episode, it was promptly forgotten within both the series and popular culture more generally. Cut to 2016 – queer girls are now major characters in films and television series around the globe. No longer represented as subsidiary characters within forgettable storylines, queer girls are a regular feature of contemporary screen media. Analysing the terms of this newfound visibility, Whitney Monaghan provides a critical perspective on this, arguing that a temporal logic underpins many representations of queer girlhood. Examining an archive of screen texts that includes teen television series and teenpics, art-house, queer and independent cinemas as well as new forms of digital video, she expands current discourse on both queer representation and girls’ studies by looking at sexuality through themes of temporality. This book, the first full-length study of its kind, draws on concepts of boredom, nostalgia and transience to offer a new perspective on queer representation in contemporary screen media.
Book Chapters by Whitney Monaghan
Chapter within the edited collection ‘Queer Sexualities: Diversifying Queer, Queering Diversity.’... more Chapter within the edited collection ‘Queer Sexualities: Diversifying Queer, Queering Diversity.’ This chapter examines the ways in which queer
narratives work within film to challenge normative understandings of temporality in story telling. In this chapter, Whitney Monaghan uses the narrative techniques of nostalgia in the film Butterfly to destabilise modalities that force queer sexuality to assume a retrospective position (usually one taken by youth). The chapter argues that queer temporalities in the film offer a futurity that destabilises not only dominant discourses of queer sexuality but also ways of reading film and normative story telling.
Journal Articles by Whitney Monaghan
While queer teens have long occupied a marginal place in screen culture, recent technological dev... more While queer teens have long occupied a marginal place in screen culture, recent technological developments have created an expanse of new spaces for representation. No longer limited to the traditional screens of the cinema and television, gender and sexual diversity now seems to be represented abundantly via online platforms. Investigating a series of queer-themed mash up videos sourced from YouTube, this article illuminates how the practices of the fan-led archive can shed new light on personal investment in queer representation. Reading several mashup videos through Ann Cvetkovich’s “archives of feeling”, this article draws attention to the creator’s desire to hold on to those fleeing moments of screen queerness. Within this article, mashup videos are thus positioned as a means of archiving queer ephemerality.
Through analysis of the fan culture of South of Nowhere, this essay opens up the complex worlds o... more Through analysis of the fan culture of South of Nowhere, this essay opens up the complex worlds of reception and fandom, positioning queer girl fans as "identity scavengers."
Conference Presentations by Whitney Monaghan
Presented at: New Directions in Screen Studies, Monash University, June 2015
With the developmen... more Presented at: New Directions in Screen Studies, Monash University, June 2015
With the development of new screen technologies, once marginalised queer characters are now no longer limited to cinema or television screens. Representations of queerness now seem abundant on video remix, and video blog reign supreme.
With a focus on mash up in particular, this paper will consider some implications of these new forms of representation by aligning them with Ann Cvetkovich will draw attention to a desire to hold on to the fleeting moments of screen queerness embedded within, and position such videos as archives of queer ephemerality.
Presented at: The XVIIth Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (FHAANZ) Confe... more Presented at: The XVIIth Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand (FHAANZ) Conference, Brisbane, July 2015.
For early film theorist Bela Belazs, the close up was the essence of cinema and the key to its specificity; it was, in short, the thing that marked cinema as ontologically unique. This paper focuses on iconic cinematic close ups, but explores them through film frames and animated .gifs on popular micro blogging platform and social networking website Tumblr. Often capturing only a single gesture—a smile, sharp intake of breath, or the subtle shift in a character’s gaze—animated .gifs offer a different spectatorial pleasure to the traditional cinema screen. Gesturing back to the cinematic moments viewed through Edison’s Kinetoscope in the late 1800s, the prevalence of animated .gifs on Tumblr offers the possibility for screen criticism to return to the novelty of early cinema and draw attention, once again, to the micro elements of the screen.
Reading animated .gifs through Balazs’ film criticism, the paper draws attention to a “polyphonic play of features” in these moving images and works toward positioning Tumblr as an archive of the close up.
presented at: Deletion | Deviation, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, February 2015.
Sca... more presented at: Deletion | Deviation, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, February 2015.
Scarlett Johansson was once the darling of indie cinema. Captivating audiences both on and off the screen, she was also twice named the “sexiest woman alive” by Esquire magazine. More recently, however, critics have dubbed her both “the new queen of sci-fi” and “the face of female horror.” Popular discourse such as this speaks to a rupture in Johansson’s star persona. Treating this persona as a text that can be interpreted, this paper reads both Johansson’s recent performances and the extra-textual commentaries surrounding them to examine ScarJo not as a unified entity, but rather as a perversely shifting image: from indie darling, to sex symbol to cold icon of the post-human.
In three recent films Johansson has portrayed strikingly similar figures. In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), she voiced Samantha, the helpful operating system turned force of artificial intelligence. A similar narrative is played out in Luc Besson’s Lucy (2014), wherein Johansson portrays a drug mule turned hyper intelligent super-being. In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), Johansson’s Laura is an alien being, sent to earth to seduce men and harvest their flesh. In all three of these films, Johansson’s performance is based upon what critics have described as “a certain blank quality” or opaqueness.
With a particular focus on Her, Under the Skin and Lucy, this paper will offer a reading of Johansson’s shifting star persona. In doing so, it will argue that the pleasure, and thus perversity, of viewing these films is that they also provide the spectator with an opportunity to watch this shift being enacted.
Interactive Futures, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, December 2014.
Women and the Silent Screen VII: Performance and the Emotions, University of Melbourne, Melbourne... more Women and the Silent Screen VII: Performance and the Emotions, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, September-October 2013.
Workshops & Seminars by Whitney Monaghan
Presented at: Under Construction Postgraduate Seminar Series, Monash University, June 2015
Film ... more Presented at: Under Construction Postgraduate Seminar Series, Monash University, June 2015
Film and television dominantly represents queer girls through a temporal metaphor, ‘a passing phase,’ through which queerness and futurity are rendered incongruous. With girls’ queer experiences, feelings, and intimacies typically represented only within a liminal moment of youth, the figure of the queer girl has come to embody the structuring logics of heteronormative temporality. Such logics valorise what Lee Edelman describes as “reproductive futurism” by ensuring that queerness is valued only as a temporary phase on the way toward normative heterosexual adult identity.
This paper considers these issues through three recent films that explicitly deal with the issue of queer girls growing up: Life Partners (Susanna Fogel, 2014), Appropriate Behaviour (Desiree Akhavan, 2014) and Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Keniche, 2013). In questioning what happens to queer girls as they grow up, this paper comments upon the ways that these representations offer a different understanding of human development, sexuality, and girlhood in which neither queerness nor ‘girlness’ must be outgrown. Films such as Life Partners, Appropriate Behaviour and Blue is the Warmest Color remind us, as Kathryn Bond Stockton argues, that “there are ways of growing that are not growing up” and, as Deleuze and Guattari write in Thousand Plateaus: “girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes.” As this paper argues, it is not only the queerness of the queer girl that can remain part of her subjectivity as she moves into the future, but also something of her radical ‘girlness.’
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Books by Whitney Monaghan
Book Chapters by Whitney Monaghan
narratives work within film to challenge normative understandings of temporality in story telling. In this chapter, Whitney Monaghan uses the narrative techniques of nostalgia in the film Butterfly to destabilise modalities that force queer sexuality to assume a retrospective position (usually one taken by youth). The chapter argues that queer temporalities in the film offer a futurity that destabilises not only dominant discourses of queer sexuality but also ways of reading film and normative story telling.
Journal Articles by Whitney Monaghan
Conference Presentations by Whitney Monaghan
With the development of new screen technologies, once marginalised queer characters are now no longer limited to cinema or television screens. Representations of queerness now seem abundant on video remix, and video blog reign supreme.
With a focus on mash up in particular, this paper will consider some implications of these new forms of representation by aligning them with Ann Cvetkovich will draw attention to a desire to hold on to the fleeting moments of screen queerness embedded within, and position such videos as archives of queer ephemerality.
For early film theorist Bela Belazs, the close up was the essence of cinema and the key to its specificity; it was, in short, the thing that marked cinema as ontologically unique. This paper focuses on iconic cinematic close ups, but explores them through film frames and animated .gifs on popular micro blogging platform and social networking website Tumblr. Often capturing only a single gesture—a smile, sharp intake of breath, or the subtle shift in a character’s gaze—animated .gifs offer a different spectatorial pleasure to the traditional cinema screen. Gesturing back to the cinematic moments viewed through Edison’s Kinetoscope in the late 1800s, the prevalence of animated .gifs on Tumblr offers the possibility for screen criticism to return to the novelty of early cinema and draw attention, once again, to the micro elements of the screen.
Reading animated .gifs through Balazs’ film criticism, the paper draws attention to a “polyphonic play of features” in these moving images and works toward positioning Tumblr as an archive of the close up.
Scarlett Johansson was once the darling of indie cinema. Captivating audiences both on and off the screen, she was also twice named the “sexiest woman alive” by Esquire magazine. More recently, however, critics have dubbed her both “the new queen of sci-fi” and “the face of female horror.” Popular discourse such as this speaks to a rupture in Johansson’s star persona. Treating this persona as a text that can be interpreted, this paper reads both Johansson’s recent performances and the extra-textual commentaries surrounding them to examine ScarJo not as a unified entity, but rather as a perversely shifting image: from indie darling, to sex symbol to cold icon of the post-human.
In three recent films Johansson has portrayed strikingly similar figures. In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), she voiced Samantha, the helpful operating system turned force of artificial intelligence. A similar narrative is played out in Luc Besson’s Lucy (2014), wherein Johansson portrays a drug mule turned hyper intelligent super-being. In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), Johansson’s Laura is an alien being, sent to earth to seduce men and harvest their flesh. In all three of these films, Johansson’s performance is based upon what critics have described as “a certain blank quality” or opaqueness.
With a particular focus on Her, Under the Skin and Lucy, this paper will offer a reading of Johansson’s shifting star persona. In doing so, it will argue that the pleasure, and thus perversity, of viewing these films is that they also provide the spectator with an opportunity to watch this shift being enacted.
Workshops & Seminars by Whitney Monaghan
Film and television dominantly represents queer girls through a temporal metaphor, ‘a passing phase,’ through which queerness and futurity are rendered incongruous. With girls’ queer experiences, feelings, and intimacies typically represented only within a liminal moment of youth, the figure of the queer girl has come to embody the structuring logics of heteronormative temporality. Such logics valorise what Lee Edelman describes as “reproductive futurism” by ensuring that queerness is valued only as a temporary phase on the way toward normative heterosexual adult identity.
This paper considers these issues through three recent films that explicitly deal with the issue of queer girls growing up: Life Partners (Susanna Fogel, 2014), Appropriate Behaviour (Desiree Akhavan, 2014) and Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Keniche, 2013). In questioning what happens to queer girls as they grow up, this paper comments upon the ways that these representations offer a different understanding of human development, sexuality, and girlhood in which neither queerness nor ‘girlness’ must be outgrown. Films such as Life Partners, Appropriate Behaviour and Blue is the Warmest Color remind us, as Kathryn Bond Stockton argues, that “there are ways of growing that are not growing up” and, as Deleuze and Guattari write in Thousand Plateaus: “girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes.” As this paper argues, it is not only the queerness of the queer girl that can remain part of her subjectivity as she moves into the future, but also something of her radical ‘girlness.’
narratives work within film to challenge normative understandings of temporality in story telling. In this chapter, Whitney Monaghan uses the narrative techniques of nostalgia in the film Butterfly to destabilise modalities that force queer sexuality to assume a retrospective position (usually one taken by youth). The chapter argues that queer temporalities in the film offer a futurity that destabilises not only dominant discourses of queer sexuality but also ways of reading film and normative story telling.
With the development of new screen technologies, once marginalised queer characters are now no longer limited to cinema or television screens. Representations of queerness now seem abundant on video remix, and video blog reign supreme.
With a focus on mash up in particular, this paper will consider some implications of these new forms of representation by aligning them with Ann Cvetkovich will draw attention to a desire to hold on to the fleeting moments of screen queerness embedded within, and position such videos as archives of queer ephemerality.
For early film theorist Bela Belazs, the close up was the essence of cinema and the key to its specificity; it was, in short, the thing that marked cinema as ontologically unique. This paper focuses on iconic cinematic close ups, but explores them through film frames and animated .gifs on popular micro blogging platform and social networking website Tumblr. Often capturing only a single gesture—a smile, sharp intake of breath, or the subtle shift in a character’s gaze—animated .gifs offer a different spectatorial pleasure to the traditional cinema screen. Gesturing back to the cinematic moments viewed through Edison’s Kinetoscope in the late 1800s, the prevalence of animated .gifs on Tumblr offers the possibility for screen criticism to return to the novelty of early cinema and draw attention, once again, to the micro elements of the screen.
Reading animated .gifs through Balazs’ film criticism, the paper draws attention to a “polyphonic play of features” in these moving images and works toward positioning Tumblr as an archive of the close up.
Scarlett Johansson was once the darling of indie cinema. Captivating audiences both on and off the screen, she was also twice named the “sexiest woman alive” by Esquire magazine. More recently, however, critics have dubbed her both “the new queen of sci-fi” and “the face of female horror.” Popular discourse such as this speaks to a rupture in Johansson’s star persona. Treating this persona as a text that can be interpreted, this paper reads both Johansson’s recent performances and the extra-textual commentaries surrounding them to examine ScarJo not as a unified entity, but rather as a perversely shifting image: from indie darling, to sex symbol to cold icon of the post-human.
In three recent films Johansson has portrayed strikingly similar figures. In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), she voiced Samantha, the helpful operating system turned force of artificial intelligence. A similar narrative is played out in Luc Besson’s Lucy (2014), wherein Johansson portrays a drug mule turned hyper intelligent super-being. In Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), Johansson’s Laura is an alien being, sent to earth to seduce men and harvest their flesh. In all three of these films, Johansson’s performance is based upon what critics have described as “a certain blank quality” or opaqueness.
With a particular focus on Her, Under the Skin and Lucy, this paper will offer a reading of Johansson’s shifting star persona. In doing so, it will argue that the pleasure, and thus perversity, of viewing these films is that they also provide the spectator with an opportunity to watch this shift being enacted.
Film and television dominantly represents queer girls through a temporal metaphor, ‘a passing phase,’ through which queerness and futurity are rendered incongruous. With girls’ queer experiences, feelings, and intimacies typically represented only within a liminal moment of youth, the figure of the queer girl has come to embody the structuring logics of heteronormative temporality. Such logics valorise what Lee Edelman describes as “reproductive futurism” by ensuring that queerness is valued only as a temporary phase on the way toward normative heterosexual adult identity.
This paper considers these issues through three recent films that explicitly deal with the issue of queer girls growing up: Life Partners (Susanna Fogel, 2014), Appropriate Behaviour (Desiree Akhavan, 2014) and Blue is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Keniche, 2013). In questioning what happens to queer girls as they grow up, this paper comments upon the ways that these representations offer a different understanding of human development, sexuality, and girlhood in which neither queerness nor ‘girlness’ must be outgrown. Films such as Life Partners, Appropriate Behaviour and Blue is the Warmest Color remind us, as Kathryn Bond Stockton argues, that “there are ways of growing that are not growing up” and, as Deleuze and Guattari write in Thousand Plateaus: “girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes.” As this paper argues, it is not only the queerness of the queer girl that can remain part of her subjectivity as she moves into the future, but also something of her radical ‘girlness.’
What is “complexity” in the context of discussing performance? It is not just found in the conventional sense of actors performing characters but also in reality television where “being yourself” becomes a self-conscious performance.
Provoked by Johansson’s appearances in Her, Under the Skin, Lucy and Ghost in the Shell, the contributors to this symposium consider how Johansson’s star persona inflects these films and their execution of sf themes and ideas. We propose that Johansson’s recent body of work invites us to consider how stardom influences genre. We posit Johansson as a figure of notable semiotic richness and potential that can further sf’s philosophical aims and aid its instrumentality as a genre. In doing so, we trace how the glamour, fantasy and idealism of celebrity collides with the science, speculation and extrapolation of sf.