Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Riding in Cars as Girls : Discourses of Victimhood, Power and Agency in Beneath Clouds and American Honey
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'While cars have long been associated with masculinity and youth within cinema – through a now long established tradition of the road movie – the representation of girls and/with cars is less common and often problematic. Here, I argue that an analysis of the ways in which girls are shown to interact with cars within two independent road movies can reveal much about discourses of victimhood, power and agency. In these films, girls are rarely shown to be at the wheel themselves, instead they are driven by men; these experiences as passengers are shown to be complex and fraught with danger. However, through these representations the audience are invited to recognise and acknowledge pervasive discourses of victimhood and, in so doing, a new space is created. This new discourse is one which both acknowledges victimhood, but at the same time recognises the resilience and agency of young women.'  (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Studies in Australasian Cinema vol. 13 no. 1 2019 16543072 2019 periodical issue

    'Welcome to the first issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema for 2019.

    'This issue comprises two articles which deal with the paradoxical themes at work in politicised representations of gender and sexuality. In ‘Riding in cars as girls: discourses of victimhood, power and agency in Beneath Clouds and American Honey’, Samantha Cater places Australian film Beneath Clouds in a relationship with the US road movie American Honey. In doing so, the article foregrounds the overlapping themes of passivity, victimisation and objectification of young women on the one hand, and notions of resilience agency and self-determination on the other. Likewise, in charting the visibility of gay and lesbian representation/production in Australian film in the 1970s, Jessie Matheson’s ‘“about gays by gays”: The politics of representation in early Australian gay film culture, 1971–1982’, reveals the twin imperatives of developing queer film culture: challenging and subversive, on the one hand, but bound in many ways by aesthetic and industrial demands of acceptability and intelligibility.'  (Editor's Introduction)

    2019
Last amended 16 May 2019 09:58:30
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