2024 Abstracts and Biographies
Panel I: Girlhood and gendered spaces
Claudia Aguas (Universidad de Zaragoza) - Intersecting Spaces: The Dynamics of the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Lady Bird
Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017) is a coming-of-age film about Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a senior student at a Catholic high school in Sacramento, California. Like most coming-of-age films, it deals with issues such as the transition to adulthood, identity crisis, the first romantic experience or teenage rebellion against the rules. Yet, unlike them, the strained relationship between Christine and her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), takes centre stage. As has been argued, the bond between mothers and daughters is usually underrepresented on screen (Bolton, 2011) and in contemporary culture as a whole (Walters, 1992). However, Lady Bird addresses how these complexities shape and affect Christine’s identity. Therefore, her desperation to escape her hometown is only an attempt to find a place where she can forge an identity and a life of her own, far from her mother’s expectations.
Through an analysis of the intricate dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship in Lady Bird, this paper seeks to explore their impact on Christine while also highlighting the role of Sacramento as a catalyst of conflict. Lady Bird and Marion’s ineffective verbal communication contrasts with their acts of kindness towards each other. Despite inhabiting the same physical spaces, their arguments establish a paradoxical distance between them, underscoring the complexities of their bond. Their similarities and differences, grounded in generational conflict, cause constant tensions (Stone, 2022). It is in this conflict, in this rejection of her mother and the place where both live, that Christine is able to understand the meaning of home.
References:
Bolton, L. (2011). Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cornish, A. (2018) ‘Director Greta Gerwig on the Parallels between Her Life and Lady Bird’, NPR, 19 February, online, https://www.npr.org/2018/02/19/587121715/-em-lady-bird-em-director-great-gerwig.
Gerwig, G. (2022). Lady Bird Screenplay Book, New York: A24.
Stone, R. (2022). Lady Bird: Self-determination for a New Century. London: Routledge. Walters, S. D. (1992). Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Biography
Claudia Aguas is a PhD student in Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She holds a BA in English Studies from the University of Zaragoza. She also completed an MA in Film Screenplay and TV Series from the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain. Her research interests include transnational stardom, the representation of motherhood in contemporary cinema, and gender studies. Besides this, and often relatedly, she is a screenwriter working mostly on animated feature films.
Triana Domínguez Quesada (Universidad de Sevilla) - Reclaiming Space(s) for the Disobedient Body in Dumplin’ directed by Anne Fletcher (2018)
Over the decades, violence has been exerted upon those corporealities which divert from the established standards of beauty. The fat female body has been historically marginalized and demonized, its negative connotations affecting fat individuals from a very early stage in life. Fat teenagers are stigmatized, relegating them to the margins of society (Bordo 1993). Dumplin’, directed by Anne Fletcher, tells the story of a fat teenager struggling to find her worth in a deeply fatphobic environment. This work analyzes the ‘fat teenage experience’ and the negotiation of social and politically charged spaces where the female body is both restricted and constructed, such as beauty contests and pageants. The main character helps resignify fatness through transgression and reimagine societal rules around femininity while also reappropriating the non-place and creating an alternative space for the dissident (Augé, 1992). This new territory is based on the acceptance of failure as a natural part of growth and the rejection of a perfectionist mindset that threatens diversity, exploration, and creativity in youth (Halberstam, 2011). Finally, this film reiterates the crucial role of community and representation as metaphorical and metaphysical spaces which defy the normative narratives of happiness and success (Ahmed 2010; Berlant 2011).
Biography
I’m Triana Domínguez Ǫuesada, and I graduated in 2021 in English Studies, obtaining a masters in Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Seville in 2022. My main interests are gender studies and the representation of the non-normative body in literature in English. I participated in the XIX Congreso Internacional del Grupo de Investigación Escritoras y Escrituras 2022, the VIII Congreso Universitario Internacional I+G 2022, and the Seminario Internacional Saliendo del Archivo 2022. I am currently pursuing a Ph.D at the University of Seville, focused on the representation of the fat female body in literature in English.
Sophie Tallis (Australian National University) - Turf Wars and Club Houses: Girl Gangs and the Transnational Spaces of Contemporary French Girlhood on Screen
Examining the recent trend of French girl gang films, this paper interrogates the relationship between criminal girl gangs and their occupation of space in the French-Canadian Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (Laurent Cantet, 2012) and the French-Kosovar The Hill Where Lionesses Roar (Luàna Bajrami, 2022). Focussing specifically on this trend within the transnational French cinema context, in which typical boundaries of identity are questioned, these films reveal the integral connection between space, mobility and identity for both girls and gangs within French conceptions of identity, in France and abroad.
Where these girl protagonists find themselves constrained by surveillant forces which limit their geographic and social movement, the girl gang emerges as a form of rebellion, with gangs and girls both seeking to control space as a means of asserting their identity. This paper argues that by claiming space as a collective, girls in gangs are able to adopt elements of typically male behaviour, which permits their movement and the development of new identities outside of hegemonic identity structures, even if they are unable to completely free themselves from the oppressive structures of their environment and republican models of identity.
Biography
Sophie Tallis is a PhD Candidate in Screen Studies at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the representation of gender and sexuality in contemporary francophone cinema, with her thesis examining the relationship between girlhood and nationalism in recent French cinema. She has presented her research in academic and public circles including the Australian Society for French Studies Conference, the Alliance Française French Film Festival, and the National Film and Sound Archive.
Panel II: Developments in teen media
Eduardo Barros Grela (Universidade da Coruña) - Misfits in the End of the F***ing World: Marginal Spaces in British Teenage Cultures
The production of “teen television series” has vastly proliferated in the British and American media production during the last two decades. Headed by captivating Stranger Things (2016-), examples of television series centered on the problematic environments of childhood and youth are countless in the American end, with Glee or A Series of Unfortunate Events representing two of the most noteworthy titles. The European panorama—and British television in particular—is not less relevant. Several productions focusing on young characters have attracted viewers’ attention, thus becoming representative of first-rate critical reactions toward television fiction centered on youth and childhood (Skins, Sex Education, Derry Girls, and My Mad Fat Diary would be some of the most celebrated examples).
The significance of these shows is enhanced by their concentration on topics that are frequently associated with distinctive preoccupations experienced by teenagers, such as dysfunctional families, mental disorders, gender and sexuality, bullying, or death. The aim of this presentation is to discuss how these issues are represented—and probably amplified—in marginal environments. Young individuals identified as members of marginalized groups replicate many of the concerns experienced by the audiences of these shows, and create a critical distance with the intended viewers. With this in mind, this presentation looks at how two British television series speak to their audiences through the resignification of spaces, one of them by using a grotesque and humoristic tone to address the aforementioned teenage issues (Misfits), and the other one by creating a road trip narrative through the eyes of a social misfit and a popular yet self-loathing teenage girl to explore the limits of youth (The End of the F***ing World).
Biography
Eduardo Barros-Grela teaches American Studies, Film, and Cultural Studies. He is interested in inorganic bodies and spaces, visual studies, and the dialectics of representation and performance. Recent publications include studies of space in the areas of American Studies, contemporary film and literature.
Celina Hofstadt (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and Université Paris Cité) - Beach Boys: The Navigation of Place by the Young Male Protagonists in The O.C. and Outer Banks
For many fans of television series, they represent a beloved place to return to again and again. While in the broadcast television era, returns to these television places were only possible at specific times, today’s streaming platforms offer complete freedom of travel. In order to experience a specific place, viewers follow characters as they navigate and use the space. In the case of teen television, these characters are young protagonists whose navigation of space is circumscribed by their specific situation in society. In my paper, I am analysing two teen series that are located in a beach setting: The O.C. (2003-2007) and Outer Banks (2020-). Both shows, as the titles indicate, have a strong emphasis on the location. Both follow a teenaged male protagonist who must navigate life without his family. In both cases, this means a navigation of both natural and human-made spaces and their accessibility according to one’s economic situation. The two shows, however, being from different decades, have different formats and arguably different aims. While The O.C. shows its protagonist adapt to a lifestyle of wealth on the California coast, Outer Banks shows the natural surroundings as a way for the protagonist to escape society. By drawing on ecocriticism, television studies, as well as studies on the concept of the teenager, my paper will investigate how the young protagonists are shown to navigate the spaces available to them, and how this in turn promotes a navigation of space to their (young) audience.
Biography
I am currently completing the European Joint Master’s Programme in English and American Studies at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and Université Paris Cité. I earned my bachelor’s degree in North American Studies and Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. My research interest lies at the intersection of storytelling, place, and identity, and I am particularly interested in how a particular navigation of social and natural spaces is promoted in teen television. This conference paper is part of a broader research on the way that teenagers use spaces in American teen television (especially in beach and island settings,) conducted for my master’s thesis.
Beatriz Oria (Universidad de Zaragoza) - Oops!… I Did It Again: the Resurgence of the Teenpic in the Streaming Era
This presentation explores the resurgence of the teenpic during the late 2010s and early 2020s thanks, in part, to the popularization of streaming services. After the genre’s commercial decline following its 1980s peak, the 2010s witnessed a revitalization further bolstered towards the end of the decade by the widespread adoption of streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, or Max. In the so-called "post-theatrical era" (San Filippo, 2021), the teenpic is carving a lucrative niche, emerging as a potent vehicle for inclusive storytelling that portrays characters of diverse races, genders, sexual orientations, and cultural backgrounds. Apart from its emphasis on previously underrepresented identities, this paper analyzes how the genre employs individualized character portrayals and nuanced representations of intimacy to offer fresh perspectives on well-trodden subjects, all of which is contributing to rekindling its cultural relevance.
Biography
Beatriz Oria is Associate Professor of Film Studies and English at the University of Zaragoza. Her essays have been published in Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and Journal of Film and Video, among others. She is the author of Talking Dirty on ‘Sex and the City’: Romance, Intimacy, Friendship (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), and co-editor of Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2015). She has recently contributed articles to Imagining “We” in the Age of “I:” Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 2021); “Happily Ever After”: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age (Wayne State UP, 2021); and Screening the Crisis: US Cinema and Social Change in The Wake of the 2008 Crash (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Panel III: Rural spaces
Gregory Pritsas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) - Milky Way: A Representation of Rural Adolescence
This presentation examines the representation of youth in the Greek miniseries Milky Way (2023), which revolves around the coming-of-age journey of 17-year-old Maria, who discovers she is pregnant by her ten-year-older boyfriend. Teaming up with her classmate Jo, who identifies as queer, Maria navigates the challenges of pregnancy and the decision to terminate it, despite opposition from her partner, family, and conservative religious society.
The presentation delves into the portrayal of adolescence in the series, particularly in correspondence with the oppressive spaces the protagonists interact with in their rural, highly religious village. The village they inhabit is showcased as regressive, highly religious and narrow-minded, therefore the spaces the main characters interact with are bound with the decisions adults take against their own wishes. Thus, the aforementioned decisions must abide by the rules of the institutions controlled by adults (family, marriage, church).
However, despite being constrained by societal norms and adult decisions, the narrative grants agency to the main characters, allowing them to reinterpret, reconfigure and adapt to their surroundings.
Finally, this presentation examines how the miniseries illustrates the urban space by temporarily situating the protagonists in Athens in order to formulate a contradiction between the urban and the rural.
Biography
Gregory Pritsas is an MA postgraduate of Film and Television Studies and an independent researcher, preparing his postdoctoral research proposal.. My main research interests include the expansive research of Greek television on both fiction and reality narratives, transnational queer television and the queering of pop culture readings.
Fernando Sánchez López (The Ohio State University) - The Ineffectiveness of Moral Censorship and Visions of Upward Mobility: Rural Youth in El camino (Ana Mariscal, 1964)
The case study of this presentation is the film El camino (Ana Mariscal, 1964). In it, we closely follow the life of a group of children in a Spanish village during the 1960s. More specifically, its protagonist, Daniel “El Mochuelo”, is forced by his parents to emigrate to the city in order to prosper economically, so we witness his last days in the village. The film is committed to depicting rural life in a detailed and ambivalent manner, where the role of children provides us with essential insights to understand the historical period.
In this paper, I argue how the youth in El camino is the crossroads between modernity and tradition: a new generation of Spaniards who do not accept the moral control of institutions and who question ideas of upward mobility in the era of the so-called “developmentalism”. Both Daniel and his friends are framed in a censorious community structure governed by the power of the Church and a disciplinary education. However, the numerous examples of moral imposition that appear in the film fail in the face of a young generation that maintains its agency within the rural space. On the other hand, the final emigration of the protagonist evidences the inevitability of supposed economic progress that forcibly displaces individuals. Daniel’s “success”, hand in hand with the tragedy of one of his friends, puts on the table the arbitrariness of socioeconomic development, by relativizing stigmatizing visions of the rural and the urban.
Biography
Fernando Sánchez López is a PhD student in the Iberian Studies program at The Ohio State University, specializing in Film Studies. He holds a B.A. in English Studies and a M.A. in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of Salamanca. His current research focuses with special emphasis on the role of film genres and their ambiguous global-local dichotomy in the current Spanish audiovisual, although he has written on various issues. He has published academic articles in journals such as Secuencias: Revista de historia del cine, Transnational Screens, Doxa Comunicación or Filmhistoria online, among others.
Leah Wang (University of Leeds) - Youth in the 1990s Rural Space in China: the Educational Experiences in Going to School with Father on My Back (1998)
During the reform era of the 1990s in China, popular films addressed the profound social and economic changes affecting young people's lives, including the impact of key economic and educational policies for those in rural areas. This paper examines the 1998 film Going to School with Father on My Back to explore its portrayal of the challenges faced by rural children from impoverished families amidst rapid social and economic transformations.
While China experienced significant economic and educational developments in the 1990s, rural students continued to encounter obstacles in accessing quality education due to disparities in economic development and the persistent poverty prevalent in rural areas. Through the experiences of characters like Shi Wa and his sister, the film captures the struggles of rural youth as they navigate the complexities of school and family life in economically disadvantaged rural spaces.
This paper analyzes Going to School with Father on My Back through the lens of the 'coming of age' genre, highlighting how the film portrays the resilience and personal growth of rural young people amidst adversity. It emphasizes the importance of family bonds and personal development in overcoming challenges and shaping one's identity in rural China during the reform era.
By examining this popular Chinese youth film, the paper contributes to discussions on the intersection of economic and educational policies and the lived experiences of rural youth in China's rural spaces. It engages with the symposium's focus on representations of youth on screen and their interactions with spaces, from the perspective of youth in rural spaces, offering insights into the portrayal of rural education during the early stages of economic transformation in the 1990s.
Biography
Dr Leah Wang is a Lecturer in Intercultural Studies and Film at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research interests include film and television representation, contemporary Chinese cinema, economic and educational policy, popular culture, and film memory.
Panel IV: Youth on the move
Andrés Buesa (Universidad de Zaragoza) - Growing Up Off-The-Grid: Nature, Mobility, and the Home in Contemporary Film
Bringing together geographical approaches to the domestic with scholarship on the cinematic child, this paper examines the representations of homemaking in three contemporary films about alternative modes of life in nature --Vie Sauvage (Cédric Kahn, 2014), Captain Fantastic (Matt Ross, 2016), and Leave No Trace (Debra Granik 2018). The three films depict fathers who decide to raise their children off the grid, away from a consumer-capitalist society that they consider damaging for the kids. As journeys through different models of domesticity (stable and mobile, individual and communal, off-the-grid and within society), these films resituate the spatial dynamics of the home beyond the confines of the house.
The woods are presented as the natural space of childhood, the place where children truly belong. Home, built in the relation between outdoor and indoor spaces, is seen to have more permeable boundaries than the walls of the house. At the same time, though, the affinity child-nature assumes rootedness as a precondition for the existence of a home, and it deems mobility as incompatible with processes of homemaking. The linkage of home with spatial fixity and stability, this paper contends, replicates contemporary discourses that privilege local modes of belonging over the potential for “ecological connectedness” implicit in mobility (Heise 2008, 55).
Biography
Andrés Buesa is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. His project explores the uses of the cinematic child, in 21st century world cinema, as a vehicle for discourses on contemporary mobility. His work has been published in the international journals Atlantis (2022), New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film (2023), Sociology Lens (2023), and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas (2024; forthcoming).
Anesa Muslimovic Ortega (Universitat de València) - Navigating Identity on the Bosnian Road: Exploring Female Bodies, Coming of Age, and Gendered Spaces in Ena Sendijarević’s Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019)
Taking the representation of the female bodies and ethnic hybridity as a starting point, this paper explores the intersection between issues of ethnic youth migration, coming of age, and gendered spaces in Ena Sendijarević’s debut film Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019). Sendijarević’s narrative offers a compelling exploration of the intersection between ethnic identities, youth migration, coming of age, and gendered spaces. By analyzing Bosnian-Dutch Alma’s interactions with both male and female travelers in an unfamiliar environment—as Bosnia is—to her, this paper proposes an in-depth exploration of Alma’s migration journey as a catalyzer for her examination of gendered spaces and how her body is approached within them. Drawing on close readings of key scenes and symbolic elements, Alma’s moments of empowerment and vulnerability shed light on her changing relationship with her own body and those of others she meets along the way, breaking down the complexities of female embodiment and bodily autonomy. In striving to retrieve her agency through her decision-making and actions, instances where her assertion of control and challenge of patriarchal societal expectations and norms of the deepest Bosnian geography will be displayed. Additionally, the paper highlights how the female main character’s journey contributes to her coming-of-age process, as she grapples with questions of hybridity. The main conclusion to be drawn is that the road serves as a metaphorical pathway for Alma's coming-of-age journey, allowing her to confront her own desires, fears, and uncertainties. Along the way, her body becomes a site of struggle, empowerment, and negotiation, reflecting broader societal expectations and norms surrounding female embodiment and bodily autonomy.
Biography
Anesa Muslimovic Ortega is a first-year Ph.D. candidate in North American diasporic literature at the Department of English and German Philology, University of Valencia. She received her bachelor’s degree in English Studies at the same University in 2022, where she later pursued a Master’s degree in Creative and Humanistic Translation. Her research interests include diasporic literature and media representations, specifically focusing on white ethnicities in the contemporary North American context, trauma studies, the politics of nostalgia and mobility, and migration. Her thesis explores first and second-generation literary and audiovisual productions of the Bosnian diaspora, particularly addressing mobility, identity reconstruction, and affective displacement in memoirs and bildungsroman crafted after the Bosnian war (1992-1995).
Frances Smith (University of Sussex) - The hotel room in contemporary youth cinema
Since the release of Bande de Filles/Girlhood (Sciamma, 2014), in which four girls lip-synch to Rihanna’s “Diamonds” in a bland hotel room in Paris, the hotel room has become a space that girls make their own. As Sciamma’s film demonstrated, despite its seeming dullness the hotel room offers an affective space for youth, and, in common with Sciamma’s depiction of hermetically-sealed spaces, one in which identity can find expression.
This paper considers two more recent examples of British youth cinema, namely Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) and How to Have Sex (Molly Manning-Walker, 2023). Both films depict hotel rooms within holiday resorts and their affective engagement with those spaces. The rooms in both cases are spaces of freedom – in the latter film, the characters are away from home for the first time – as well as constraint, with the lack of privacy afforded characters in both films.
This paper works in dialogue not only with studies in tourism, but also with earlier comedic depictions of British youth abroad, such as the sex quest TV-spinoff films The Inbetweeners Movie (Ben Palmer, 2011) to Kevin and Perry Go Large (Ed Bye, 2000), as well as with Sciamma’s work mentioned at the outset. Here I consider the ways in which the hotel room functions as a feminised, affective and transnational space, as both a refuge and a site of peer and familial expectation.
Biography
Dr Frances Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Bande de Filles (Routledge, 2020) as well as co-author (with Niall Richardson) of Trans Representations of Contemporary Popular Cinema (Routledge, 2022). Alongside several published works on French and US youth cinemas, including a special issue of French Screen Studies on the films of Céline Sciamma, she is series editor of the Cinema and Youth Cultures book series, published by Routledge.
Plenary Session
Prof. Pamela Robertson Wojcik (University of Notre Dame) - Making Space for Runaway Youth: Hitchhikers and Homeless Kids in US Cinema
This paper discusses runaway youth in United States 1970s hitchhiking films and 1980s films about homelessness. These films point to a population of mobile and placeless youth who are quite prominently represented in film, but who do not fit most conceptions of youth or youth film. The 1970s films show hitchhiking as a countercultural lifestyle and yoke female hitchhiking to not only transgressive sexuality and criminality but also freedom, stitching together anxieties related to the counterculture, voluntary precarity, runaway youth, and women’s liberation. 1980s runaway films more often show homeless runaways clustered in cities, caught in bureaucratic circuits of juvenile justice and social services, on the one hand, and drug dealing and prostitution, on the other. In both, adults are represented as inadequate or abusive; but where the hitchhikers represent a generational counterculture, the 1980s runaways form a multicultural urban subculture defined by life on the street, non-domestic forms of family, and negative relations to expectations around teen life such as school and family.
Biography
Pamela Robertson Wojcik is the Andrew v. Tackes Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, a Guggenheim fellow, and former President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is author of Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise (2020), Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction (2016), The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (2010), and Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (1996).
Panel V: Children's creativity, onscreen and beyond
Krista Calvo (Northumbria University) - Los Niños Tienen Miedo: Safe Spaces with Violent Borders in Issa Lopez’s Tigers Are Not Afraid
Horror cinema is a reactionary medium often used to reflect political and social attitudes, using gore and shock value to purvey timely commentary. This is true of the American stranger danger horrors; films such as The Monster Squad (1987), The Gate (1987), and The Stepfather series (1987-1991) comment on the effects that Reagan era cultural conservatism had on child safety, child autonomy and the nuclear family. I argue that the horror films of Latin America have a similar motive, and speak for an extremely vulnerable, marginalised population of individuals. Using the Mexican horror film Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017) as a case study, this paper aims to highlight how Issa Lopez’s film acts as a reactionary device to reflect the vulnerability of the real-world children in a country where youth protection policies are lacking despite children representing a third of the population. This paper also aims to highlight how the film uses horror to amplify the dangerous spaces that marginalised children are forced to inhabit when growing up in geographies facing ongoing political and social conflict. It will also explore the creative ways these children navigate conflict to create safe spaces of their own despite living under constant duress within violent borders.
Biography
Krista Calvo is a Mestize PhD researcher and lecturer at Northumbria University studying child autonomy in Reagan era American horror cinema. She has a background in forensic osteology from University College London where she studied child maltreatment in forensic and archaeological contexts and has also conducted research on child migration at the US/Mexico border with the Undocumented Migrant Project. She recently published a video essay for MAI: Doing Women’s Global Horror under the AHRC Fellowship Grant entitled And Grown Ups Awake: Childhood grief and the uncanny feminine in the short films of Sofia Carrillo.
Marko Djurdjic (York University) - Show It Out Loud: Media Literacy and the Embodied Kidspectator
As an anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal response, embodied learning antagonizes normative approaches to education, media literacy, and criticism that seek to disavow affect and diminish the importance and value of the body. In my paper, I detail the research I conducted using embodied spectatorship with a group of child spectators—or “Kidspectators.” Rooted in film phenomenology, embodied spectatorship promotes the use of expressive, nonverbal gestures, movements, and reactions in the interpretation and reception of films, positioning the corporeal as critical.
This paper will demonstrate 1) how embodied spectatorship informs children’s film interpretation and reception; 2) the enthusiasm and engagement it generated amongst the participants; and 3) how these embodied expressions can be applied as media literacy. During our two research sessions, the Kids were tasked with responding to two films (Inside Out and Turning Red, respectively) through nonverbal means. They drew pictures, impersonated characters, and mimicked animals, all relevant expressions of their bodies and themselves! Their responses engaged with both the films, and the spaces, codes, and tools of the cinema, thus reflecting the totality of their cinematic experience. Legitimizing these responses increased engagement and encouraged responsive agency, which ranged from silent contemplation to all-out chaos.
In recognizing this embodied and affective totality as experiential and critical, this differentiated approach positions embodied media literacy as a visual, physical, and imaginative practice, one which encourages a more holistic response to film pedagogy and allows us to interrogate dominant models that privilege verbo- and logo-centric approaches “over other communicative modes.” (Johnson & Vasudevan, 2012).
Biography
Marko Djurdjić (pronounced JOOR-JICH) is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. His work is rooted in film, media literacy, and embodiment. He has a BA from McGill University, a BEd from the University of Toronto, and an MA from York university. His wide-ranging research interests include “middle brow” entertainment, Football Sundays™, and complex carbohydrates. He currently writes for Exclaim!, a free cultural newspaper in Toronto, and That Shelf, an online entertainment publication. He also plays in a band with his partner. They rock...probably.
Xanthe Pajarillo (University of Birmingham) - The Subversive Space of Child Horror Filmmakers: Emily Hagins and Pathogen (2006)
Despite many adults and parents deeming the horror genre inappropriate, many children find pleasure in engaging with horror (Lester, 2021, p. 4). Furthermore, there is a burgeoning community of children who create horror themselves, notably Emily Hagins who directed her first horror feature film at 12-years-old.
This paper investigates the under-studied topic of children as horror filmmakers, by presenting Hagins’ zombie film, Pathogen (2006) and the documentary Zombie Girl: The Movie (2009), which chronicles her experiences on-set. It investigates how children directing horror is a subversive and transformative act. By focusing on Hagins’ ability to adapt to a role in an adult-dominated field, it explores how the filmmaking space becomes a coming-of-age milestone. Hagins asserts herself as a leader among adults and peers, develops self-awareness, and navigates the challenges of inexperience with an ambitious vision. Her desire to create a zombie film situates it in a complex framework, as a subgenre with conventions not intended for children.
The primary aim of this paper is to answer the questions: what does horror authored by children look like? 2) what tensions arise during the production process? and 3) how does this inform research in children's horror?
Reference:
Lester, C. (2021). Horror films for children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Biography
Xanthe Pajarillo is a University of Birmingham PhD student, filmmaker and podcaster with a focus in children’s horror and children as horror filmmakers. She received her BFA in Photography and Media from California Institute of the Arts and MFA in Film and Television Production from USC School of Cinematic Arts. Her thesis combines traditional and by-practice research methods to investigate the evolving definition of the children’s horror genre, through the lens of children’s opinions and contributions to horror. www.xanthepajarillo.com
Panel I: Girlhood and gendered spaces
Claudia Aguas (Universidad de Zaragoza) - Intersecting Spaces: The Dynamics of the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Lady Bird
Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017) is a coming-of-age film about Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a senior student at a Catholic high school in Sacramento, California. Like most coming-of-age films, it deals with issues such as the transition to adulthood, identity crisis, the first romantic experience or teenage rebellion against the rules. Yet, unlike them, the strained relationship between Christine and her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), takes centre stage. As has been argued, the bond between mothers and daughters is usually underrepresented on screen (Bolton, 2011) and in contemporary culture as a whole (Walters, 1992). However, Lady Bird addresses how these complexities shape and affect Christine’s identity. Therefore, her desperation to escape her hometown is only an attempt to find a place where she can forge an identity and a life of her own, far from her mother’s expectations.
Through an analysis of the intricate dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship in Lady Bird, this paper seeks to explore their impact on Christine while also highlighting the role of Sacramento as a catalyst of conflict. Lady Bird and Marion’s ineffective verbal communication contrasts with their acts of kindness towards each other. Despite inhabiting the same physical spaces, their arguments establish a paradoxical distance between them, underscoring the complexities of their bond. Their similarities and differences, grounded in generational conflict, cause constant tensions (Stone, 2022). It is in this conflict, in this rejection of her mother and the place where both live, that Christine is able to understand the meaning of home.
References:
Bolton, L. (2011). Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cornish, A. (2018) ‘Director Greta Gerwig on the Parallels between Her Life and Lady Bird’, NPR, 19 February, online, https://www.npr.org/2018/02/19/587121715/-em-lady-bird-em-director-great-gerwig.
Gerwig, G. (2022). Lady Bird Screenplay Book, New York: A24.
Stone, R. (2022). Lady Bird: Self-determination for a New Century. London: Routledge. Walters, S. D. (1992). Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Biography
Claudia Aguas is a PhD student in Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She holds a BA in English Studies from the University of Zaragoza. She also completed an MA in Film Screenplay and TV Series from the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain. Her research interests include transnational stardom, the representation of motherhood in contemporary cinema, and gender studies. Besides this, and often relatedly, she is a screenwriter working mostly on animated feature films.
Triana Domínguez Quesada (Universidad de Sevilla) - Reclaiming Space(s) for the Disobedient Body in Dumplin’ directed by Anne Fletcher (2018)
Over the decades, violence has been exerted upon those corporealities which divert from the established standards of beauty. The fat female body has been historically marginalized and demonized, its negative connotations affecting fat individuals from a very early stage in life. Fat teenagers are stigmatized, relegating them to the margins of society (Bordo 1993). Dumplin’, directed by Anne Fletcher, tells the story of a fat teenager struggling to find her worth in a deeply fatphobic environment. This work analyzes the ‘fat teenage experience’ and the negotiation of social and politically charged spaces where the female body is both restricted and constructed, such as beauty contests and pageants. The main character helps resignify fatness through transgression and reimagine societal rules around femininity while also reappropriating the non-place and creating an alternative space for the dissident (Augé, 1992). This new territory is based on the acceptance of failure as a natural part of growth and the rejection of a perfectionist mindset that threatens diversity, exploration, and creativity in youth (Halberstam, 2011). Finally, this film reiterates the crucial role of community and representation as metaphorical and metaphysical spaces which defy the normative narratives of happiness and success (Ahmed 2010; Berlant 2011).
Biography
I’m Triana Domínguez Ǫuesada, and I graduated in 2021 in English Studies, obtaining a masters in Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Seville in 2022. My main interests are gender studies and the representation of the non-normative body in literature in English. I participated in the XIX Congreso Internacional del Grupo de Investigación Escritoras y Escrituras 2022, the VIII Congreso Universitario Internacional I+G 2022, and the Seminario Internacional Saliendo del Archivo 2022. I am currently pursuing a Ph.D at the University of Seville, focused on the representation of the fat female body in literature in English.
Sophie Tallis (Australian National University) - Turf Wars and Club Houses: Girl Gangs and the Transnational Spaces of Contemporary French Girlhood on Screen
Examining the recent trend of French girl gang films, this paper interrogates the relationship between criminal girl gangs and their occupation of space in the French-Canadian Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (Laurent Cantet, 2012) and the French-Kosovar The Hill Where Lionesses Roar (Luàna Bajrami, 2022). Focussing specifically on this trend within the transnational French cinema context, in which typical boundaries of identity are questioned, these films reveal the integral connection between space, mobility and identity for both girls and gangs within French conceptions of identity, in France and abroad.
Where these girl protagonists find themselves constrained by surveillant forces which limit their geographic and social movement, the girl gang emerges as a form of rebellion, with gangs and girls both seeking to control space as a means of asserting their identity. This paper argues that by claiming space as a collective, girls in gangs are able to adopt elements of typically male behaviour, which permits their movement and the development of new identities outside of hegemonic identity structures, even if they are unable to completely free themselves from the oppressive structures of their environment and republican models of identity.
Biography
Sophie Tallis is a PhD Candidate in Screen Studies at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the representation of gender and sexuality in contemporary francophone cinema, with her thesis examining the relationship between girlhood and nationalism in recent French cinema. She has presented her research in academic and public circles including the Australian Society for French Studies Conference, the Alliance Française French Film Festival, and the National Film and Sound Archive.
Panel II: Developments in teen media
Eduardo Barros Grela (Universidade da Coruña) - Misfits in the End of the F***ing World: Marginal Spaces in British Teenage Cultures
The production of “teen television series” has vastly proliferated in the British and American media production during the last two decades. Headed by captivating Stranger Things (2016-), examples of television series centered on the problematic environments of childhood and youth are countless in the American end, with Glee or A Series of Unfortunate Events representing two of the most noteworthy titles. The European panorama—and British television in particular—is not less relevant. Several productions focusing on young characters have attracted viewers’ attention, thus becoming representative of first-rate critical reactions toward television fiction centered on youth and childhood (Skins, Sex Education, Derry Girls, and My Mad Fat Diary would be some of the most celebrated examples).
The significance of these shows is enhanced by their concentration on topics that are frequently associated with distinctive preoccupations experienced by teenagers, such as dysfunctional families, mental disorders, gender and sexuality, bullying, or death. The aim of this presentation is to discuss how these issues are represented—and probably amplified—in marginal environments. Young individuals identified as members of marginalized groups replicate many of the concerns experienced by the audiences of these shows, and create a critical distance with the intended viewers. With this in mind, this presentation looks at how two British television series speak to their audiences through the resignification of spaces, one of them by using a grotesque and humoristic tone to address the aforementioned teenage issues (Misfits), and the other one by creating a road trip narrative through the eyes of a social misfit and a popular yet self-loathing teenage girl to explore the limits of youth (The End of the F***ing World).
Biography
Eduardo Barros-Grela teaches American Studies, Film, and Cultural Studies. He is interested in inorganic bodies and spaces, visual studies, and the dialectics of representation and performance. Recent publications include studies of space in the areas of American Studies, contemporary film and literature.
Celina Hofstadt (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and Université Paris Cité) - Beach Boys: The Navigation of Place by the Young Male Protagonists in The O.C. and Outer Banks
For many fans of television series, they represent a beloved place to return to again and again. While in the broadcast television era, returns to these television places were only possible at specific times, today’s streaming platforms offer complete freedom of travel. In order to experience a specific place, viewers follow characters as they navigate and use the space. In the case of teen television, these characters are young protagonists whose navigation of space is circumscribed by their specific situation in society. In my paper, I am analysing two teen series that are located in a beach setting: The O.C. (2003-2007) and Outer Banks (2020-). Both shows, as the titles indicate, have a strong emphasis on the location. Both follow a teenaged male protagonist who must navigate life without his family. In both cases, this means a navigation of both natural and human-made spaces and their accessibility according to one’s economic situation. The two shows, however, being from different decades, have different formats and arguably different aims. While The O.C. shows its protagonist adapt to a lifestyle of wealth on the California coast, Outer Banks shows the natural surroundings as a way for the protagonist to escape society. By drawing on ecocriticism, television studies, as well as studies on the concept of the teenager, my paper will investigate how the young protagonists are shown to navigate the spaces available to them, and how this in turn promotes a navigation of space to their (young) audience.
Biography
I am currently completing the European Joint Master’s Programme in English and American Studies at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and Université Paris Cité. I earned my bachelor’s degree in North American Studies and Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. My research interest lies at the intersection of storytelling, place, and identity, and I am particularly interested in how a particular navigation of social and natural spaces is promoted in teen television. This conference paper is part of a broader research on the way that teenagers use spaces in American teen television (especially in beach and island settings,) conducted for my master’s thesis.
Beatriz Oria (Universidad de Zaragoza) - Oops!… I Did It Again: the Resurgence of the Teenpic in the Streaming Era
This presentation explores the resurgence of the teenpic during the late 2010s and early 2020s thanks, in part, to the popularization of streaming services. After the genre’s commercial decline following its 1980s peak, the 2010s witnessed a revitalization further bolstered towards the end of the decade by the widespread adoption of streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, or Max. In the so-called "post-theatrical era" (San Filippo, 2021), the teenpic is carving a lucrative niche, emerging as a potent vehicle for inclusive storytelling that portrays characters of diverse races, genders, sexual orientations, and cultural backgrounds. Apart from its emphasis on previously underrepresented identities, this paper analyzes how the genre employs individualized character portrayals and nuanced representations of intimacy to offer fresh perspectives on well-trodden subjects, all of which is contributing to rekindling its cultural relevance.
Biography
Beatriz Oria is Associate Professor of Film Studies and English at the University of Zaragoza. Her essays have been published in Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and Journal of Film and Video, among others. She is the author of Talking Dirty on ‘Sex and the City’: Romance, Intimacy, Friendship (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), and co-editor of Global Genres, Local Films: The Transnational Dimension of Spanish Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2015). She has recently contributed articles to Imagining “We” in the Age of “I:” Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 2021); “Happily Ever After”: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age (Wayne State UP, 2021); and Screening the Crisis: US Cinema and Social Change in The Wake of the 2008 Crash (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Panel III: Rural spaces
Gregory Pritsas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) - Milky Way: A Representation of Rural Adolescence
This presentation examines the representation of youth in the Greek miniseries Milky Way (2023), which revolves around the coming-of-age journey of 17-year-old Maria, who discovers she is pregnant by her ten-year-older boyfriend. Teaming up with her classmate Jo, who identifies as queer, Maria navigates the challenges of pregnancy and the decision to terminate it, despite opposition from her partner, family, and conservative religious society.
The presentation delves into the portrayal of adolescence in the series, particularly in correspondence with the oppressive spaces the protagonists interact with in their rural, highly religious village. The village they inhabit is showcased as regressive, highly religious and narrow-minded, therefore the spaces the main characters interact with are bound with the decisions adults take against their own wishes. Thus, the aforementioned decisions must abide by the rules of the institutions controlled by adults (family, marriage, church).
However, despite being constrained by societal norms and adult decisions, the narrative grants agency to the main characters, allowing them to reinterpret, reconfigure and adapt to their surroundings.
Finally, this presentation examines how the miniseries illustrates the urban space by temporarily situating the protagonists in Athens in order to formulate a contradiction between the urban and the rural.
Biography
Gregory Pritsas is an MA postgraduate of Film and Television Studies and an independent researcher, preparing his postdoctoral research proposal.. My main research interests include the expansive research of Greek television on both fiction and reality narratives, transnational queer television and the queering of pop culture readings.
Fernando Sánchez López (The Ohio State University) - The Ineffectiveness of Moral Censorship and Visions of Upward Mobility: Rural Youth in El camino (Ana Mariscal, 1964)
The case study of this presentation is the film El camino (Ana Mariscal, 1964). In it, we closely follow the life of a group of children in a Spanish village during the 1960s. More specifically, its protagonist, Daniel “El Mochuelo”, is forced by his parents to emigrate to the city in order to prosper economically, so we witness his last days in the village. The film is committed to depicting rural life in a detailed and ambivalent manner, where the role of children provides us with essential insights to understand the historical period.
In this paper, I argue how the youth in El camino is the crossroads between modernity and tradition: a new generation of Spaniards who do not accept the moral control of institutions and who question ideas of upward mobility in the era of the so-called “developmentalism”. Both Daniel and his friends are framed in a censorious community structure governed by the power of the Church and a disciplinary education. However, the numerous examples of moral imposition that appear in the film fail in the face of a young generation that maintains its agency within the rural space. On the other hand, the final emigration of the protagonist evidences the inevitability of supposed economic progress that forcibly displaces individuals. Daniel’s “success”, hand in hand with the tragedy of one of his friends, puts on the table the arbitrariness of socioeconomic development, by relativizing stigmatizing visions of the rural and the urban.
Biography
Fernando Sánchez López is a PhD student in the Iberian Studies program at The Ohio State University, specializing in Film Studies. He holds a B.A. in English Studies and a M.A. in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of Salamanca. His current research focuses with special emphasis on the role of film genres and their ambiguous global-local dichotomy in the current Spanish audiovisual, although he has written on various issues. He has published academic articles in journals such as Secuencias: Revista de historia del cine, Transnational Screens, Doxa Comunicación or Filmhistoria online, among others.
Leah Wang (University of Leeds) - Youth in the 1990s Rural Space in China: the Educational Experiences in Going to School with Father on My Back (1998)
During the reform era of the 1990s in China, popular films addressed the profound social and economic changes affecting young people's lives, including the impact of key economic and educational policies for those in rural areas. This paper examines the 1998 film Going to School with Father on My Back to explore its portrayal of the challenges faced by rural children from impoverished families amidst rapid social and economic transformations.
While China experienced significant economic and educational developments in the 1990s, rural students continued to encounter obstacles in accessing quality education due to disparities in economic development and the persistent poverty prevalent in rural areas. Through the experiences of characters like Shi Wa and his sister, the film captures the struggles of rural youth as they navigate the complexities of school and family life in economically disadvantaged rural spaces.
This paper analyzes Going to School with Father on My Back through the lens of the 'coming of age' genre, highlighting how the film portrays the resilience and personal growth of rural young people amidst adversity. It emphasizes the importance of family bonds and personal development in overcoming challenges and shaping one's identity in rural China during the reform era.
By examining this popular Chinese youth film, the paper contributes to discussions on the intersection of economic and educational policies and the lived experiences of rural youth in China's rural spaces. It engages with the symposium's focus on representations of youth on screen and their interactions with spaces, from the perspective of youth in rural spaces, offering insights into the portrayal of rural education during the early stages of economic transformation in the 1990s.
Biography
Dr Leah Wang is a Lecturer in Intercultural Studies and Film at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research interests include film and television representation, contemporary Chinese cinema, economic and educational policy, popular culture, and film memory.
Panel IV: Youth on the move
Andrés Buesa (Universidad de Zaragoza) - Growing Up Off-The-Grid: Nature, Mobility, and the Home in Contemporary Film
Bringing together geographical approaches to the domestic with scholarship on the cinematic child, this paper examines the representations of homemaking in three contemporary films about alternative modes of life in nature --Vie Sauvage (Cédric Kahn, 2014), Captain Fantastic (Matt Ross, 2016), and Leave No Trace (Debra Granik 2018). The three films depict fathers who decide to raise their children off the grid, away from a consumer-capitalist society that they consider damaging for the kids. As journeys through different models of domesticity (stable and mobile, individual and communal, off-the-grid and within society), these films resituate the spatial dynamics of the home beyond the confines of the house.
The woods are presented as the natural space of childhood, the place where children truly belong. Home, built in the relation between outdoor and indoor spaces, is seen to have more permeable boundaries than the walls of the house. At the same time, though, the affinity child-nature assumes rootedness as a precondition for the existence of a home, and it deems mobility as incompatible with processes of homemaking. The linkage of home with spatial fixity and stability, this paper contends, replicates contemporary discourses that privilege local modes of belonging over the potential for “ecological connectedness” implicit in mobility (Heise 2008, 55).
Biography
Andrés Buesa is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. His project explores the uses of the cinematic child, in 21st century world cinema, as a vehicle for discourses on contemporary mobility. His work has been published in the international journals Atlantis (2022), New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film (2023), Sociology Lens (2023), and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas (2024; forthcoming).
Anesa Muslimovic Ortega (Universitat de València) - Navigating Identity on the Bosnian Road: Exploring Female Bodies, Coming of Age, and Gendered Spaces in Ena Sendijarević’s Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019)
Taking the representation of the female bodies and ethnic hybridity as a starting point, this paper explores the intersection between issues of ethnic youth migration, coming of age, and gendered spaces in Ena Sendijarević’s debut film Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019). Sendijarević’s narrative offers a compelling exploration of the intersection between ethnic identities, youth migration, coming of age, and gendered spaces. By analyzing Bosnian-Dutch Alma’s interactions with both male and female travelers in an unfamiliar environment—as Bosnia is—to her, this paper proposes an in-depth exploration of Alma’s migration journey as a catalyzer for her examination of gendered spaces and how her body is approached within them. Drawing on close readings of key scenes and symbolic elements, Alma’s moments of empowerment and vulnerability shed light on her changing relationship with her own body and those of others she meets along the way, breaking down the complexities of female embodiment and bodily autonomy. In striving to retrieve her agency through her decision-making and actions, instances where her assertion of control and challenge of patriarchal societal expectations and norms of the deepest Bosnian geography will be displayed. Additionally, the paper highlights how the female main character’s journey contributes to her coming-of-age process, as she grapples with questions of hybridity. The main conclusion to be drawn is that the road serves as a metaphorical pathway for Alma's coming-of-age journey, allowing her to confront her own desires, fears, and uncertainties. Along the way, her body becomes a site of struggle, empowerment, and negotiation, reflecting broader societal expectations and norms surrounding female embodiment and bodily autonomy.
Biography
Anesa Muslimovic Ortega is a first-year Ph.D. candidate in North American diasporic literature at the Department of English and German Philology, University of Valencia. She received her bachelor’s degree in English Studies at the same University in 2022, where she later pursued a Master’s degree in Creative and Humanistic Translation. Her research interests include diasporic literature and media representations, specifically focusing on white ethnicities in the contemporary North American context, trauma studies, the politics of nostalgia and mobility, and migration. Her thesis explores first and second-generation literary and audiovisual productions of the Bosnian diaspora, particularly addressing mobility, identity reconstruction, and affective displacement in memoirs and bildungsroman crafted after the Bosnian war (1992-1995).
Frances Smith (University of Sussex) - The hotel room in contemporary youth cinema
Since the release of Bande de Filles/Girlhood (Sciamma, 2014), in which four girls lip-synch to Rihanna’s “Diamonds” in a bland hotel room in Paris, the hotel room has become a space that girls make their own. As Sciamma’s film demonstrated, despite its seeming dullness the hotel room offers an affective space for youth, and, in common with Sciamma’s depiction of hermetically-sealed spaces, one in which identity can find expression.
This paper considers two more recent examples of British youth cinema, namely Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) and How to Have Sex (Molly Manning-Walker, 2023). Both films depict hotel rooms within holiday resorts and their affective engagement with those spaces. The rooms in both cases are spaces of freedom – in the latter film, the characters are away from home for the first time – as well as constraint, with the lack of privacy afforded characters in both films.
This paper works in dialogue not only with studies in tourism, but also with earlier comedic depictions of British youth abroad, such as the sex quest TV-spinoff films The Inbetweeners Movie (Ben Palmer, 2011) to Kevin and Perry Go Large (Ed Bye, 2000), as well as with Sciamma’s work mentioned at the outset. Here I consider the ways in which the hotel room functions as a feminised, affective and transnational space, as both a refuge and a site of peer and familial expectation.
Biography
Dr Frances Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Bande de Filles (Routledge, 2020) as well as co-author (with Niall Richardson) of Trans Representations of Contemporary Popular Cinema (Routledge, 2022). Alongside several published works on French and US youth cinemas, including a special issue of French Screen Studies on the films of Céline Sciamma, she is series editor of the Cinema and Youth Cultures book series, published by Routledge.
Plenary Session
Prof. Pamela Robertson Wojcik (University of Notre Dame) - Making Space for Runaway Youth: Hitchhikers and Homeless Kids in US Cinema
This paper discusses runaway youth in United States 1970s hitchhiking films and 1980s films about homelessness. These films point to a population of mobile and placeless youth who are quite prominently represented in film, but who do not fit most conceptions of youth or youth film. The 1970s films show hitchhiking as a countercultural lifestyle and yoke female hitchhiking to not only transgressive sexuality and criminality but also freedom, stitching together anxieties related to the counterculture, voluntary precarity, runaway youth, and women’s liberation. 1980s runaway films more often show homeless runaways clustered in cities, caught in bureaucratic circuits of juvenile justice and social services, on the one hand, and drug dealing and prostitution, on the other. In both, adults are represented as inadequate or abusive; but where the hitchhikers represent a generational counterculture, the 1980s runaways form a multicultural urban subculture defined by life on the street, non-domestic forms of family, and negative relations to expectations around teen life such as school and family.
Biography
Pamela Robertson Wojcik is the Andrew v. Tackes Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, a Guggenheim fellow, and former President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is author of Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise (2020), Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction (2016), The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (2010), and Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (1996).
Panel V: Children's creativity, onscreen and beyond
Krista Calvo (Northumbria University) - Los Niños Tienen Miedo: Safe Spaces with Violent Borders in Issa Lopez’s Tigers Are Not Afraid
Horror cinema is a reactionary medium often used to reflect political and social attitudes, using gore and shock value to purvey timely commentary. This is true of the American stranger danger horrors; films such as The Monster Squad (1987), The Gate (1987), and The Stepfather series (1987-1991) comment on the effects that Reagan era cultural conservatism had on child safety, child autonomy and the nuclear family. I argue that the horror films of Latin America have a similar motive, and speak for an extremely vulnerable, marginalised population of individuals. Using the Mexican horror film Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017) as a case study, this paper aims to highlight how Issa Lopez’s film acts as a reactionary device to reflect the vulnerability of the real-world children in a country where youth protection policies are lacking despite children representing a third of the population. This paper also aims to highlight how the film uses horror to amplify the dangerous spaces that marginalised children are forced to inhabit when growing up in geographies facing ongoing political and social conflict. It will also explore the creative ways these children navigate conflict to create safe spaces of their own despite living under constant duress within violent borders.
Biography
Krista Calvo is a Mestize PhD researcher and lecturer at Northumbria University studying child autonomy in Reagan era American horror cinema. She has a background in forensic osteology from University College London where she studied child maltreatment in forensic and archaeological contexts and has also conducted research on child migration at the US/Mexico border with the Undocumented Migrant Project. She recently published a video essay for MAI: Doing Women’s Global Horror under the AHRC Fellowship Grant entitled And Grown Ups Awake: Childhood grief and the uncanny feminine in the short films of Sofia Carrillo.
Marko Djurdjic (York University) - Show It Out Loud: Media Literacy and the Embodied Kidspectator
As an anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal response, embodied learning antagonizes normative approaches to education, media literacy, and criticism that seek to disavow affect and diminish the importance and value of the body. In my paper, I detail the research I conducted using embodied spectatorship with a group of child spectators—or “Kidspectators.” Rooted in film phenomenology, embodied spectatorship promotes the use of expressive, nonverbal gestures, movements, and reactions in the interpretation and reception of films, positioning the corporeal as critical.
This paper will demonstrate 1) how embodied spectatorship informs children’s film interpretation and reception; 2) the enthusiasm and engagement it generated amongst the participants; and 3) how these embodied expressions can be applied as media literacy. During our two research sessions, the Kids were tasked with responding to two films (Inside Out and Turning Red, respectively) through nonverbal means. They drew pictures, impersonated characters, and mimicked animals, all relevant expressions of their bodies and themselves! Their responses engaged with both the films, and the spaces, codes, and tools of the cinema, thus reflecting the totality of their cinematic experience. Legitimizing these responses increased engagement and encouraged responsive agency, which ranged from silent contemplation to all-out chaos.
In recognizing this embodied and affective totality as experiential and critical, this differentiated approach positions embodied media literacy as a visual, physical, and imaginative practice, one which encourages a more holistic response to film pedagogy and allows us to interrogate dominant models that privilege verbo- and logo-centric approaches “over other communicative modes.” (Johnson & Vasudevan, 2012).
Biography
Marko Djurdjić (pronounced JOOR-JICH) is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. His work is rooted in film, media literacy, and embodiment. He has a BA from McGill University, a BEd from the University of Toronto, and an MA from York university. His wide-ranging research interests include “middle brow” entertainment, Football Sundays™, and complex carbohydrates. He currently writes for Exclaim!, a free cultural newspaper in Toronto, and That Shelf, an online entertainment publication. He also plays in a band with his partner. They rock...probably.
Xanthe Pajarillo (University of Birmingham) - The Subversive Space of Child Horror Filmmakers: Emily Hagins and Pathogen (2006)
Despite many adults and parents deeming the horror genre inappropriate, many children find pleasure in engaging with horror (Lester, 2021, p. 4). Furthermore, there is a burgeoning community of children who create horror themselves, notably Emily Hagins who directed her first horror feature film at 12-years-old.
This paper investigates the under-studied topic of children as horror filmmakers, by presenting Hagins’ zombie film, Pathogen (2006) and the documentary Zombie Girl: The Movie (2009), which chronicles her experiences on-set. It investigates how children directing horror is a subversive and transformative act. By focusing on Hagins’ ability to adapt to a role in an adult-dominated field, it explores how the filmmaking space becomes a coming-of-age milestone. Hagins asserts herself as a leader among adults and peers, develops self-awareness, and navigates the challenges of inexperience with an ambitious vision. Her desire to create a zombie film situates it in a complex framework, as a subgenre with conventions not intended for children.
The primary aim of this paper is to answer the questions: what does horror authored by children look like? 2) what tensions arise during the production process? and 3) how does this inform research in children's horror?
Reference:
Lester, C. (2021). Horror films for children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Biography
Xanthe Pajarillo is a University of Birmingham PhD student, filmmaker and podcaster with a focus in children’s horror and children as horror filmmakers. She received her BFA in Photography and Media from California Institute of the Arts and MFA in Film and Television Production from USC School of Cinematic Arts. Her thesis combines traditional and by-practice research methods to investigate the evolving definition of the children’s horror genre, through the lens of children’s opinions and contributions to horror. www.xanthepajarillo.com
