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Girl Meets Girl: Lesbian Romantic Comedies and the Public Sphere
McWilliam, Kelly Ann (2006). Girl Meets Girl: Lesbian Romantic Comedies and the Public Sphere PhD Thesis, School of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland.
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n01front_McWilliam.pdf
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n01front_McWilliam.pdf |
application/pdf |
2.02MB |
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n02content_McWilliam.pdf
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n02content_McWilliam.pdf |
application/pdf |
1.94MB |
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| Author(s) |
McWilliam, Kelly Ann
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| Thesis Title |
Girl Meets Girl: Lesbian Romantic Comedies and the Public Sphere
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| School, Centre or Institute |
School of English, Media Studies and Art History
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| Institution |
University of Queensland
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| Publication date |
2006
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| Thesis type |
PhD Thesis
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| Supervisor(s) |
Dr. Jane Stadler
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| Abstract/Summary |
Six decades after the romantic comedy emerged as a Hollywood genre in 1934, the first romantic comedies with a central lesbian couple, including Marita Giovannis Bar Girls and Rose Troches Go Fish, were released in 1994. This study argues that Bar Girls and Go Fish represent the first in a group of films whose numbers and similarities enable their consideration as a romantic comedy sub-genre, namely the lesbian romantic comedy. This study identifies and analyses this sub-genre. It contends that these films have emerged as the predominant (and perhaps only) form of mainstream lesbian feature film in the United States of America in the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s. Yet, despite their relative prominence for more than a decade, they remain vastly under-examined areas in scholarship on both film genre and lesbian culture. This project aims to contribute to these areas by producing the first full-length survey of the sub-genre and the first study of any length to focus exclusively on it. This study concentrates on ten lesbian romantic comedies: Bar Girls (1994), Go Fish (1994), Maria Maggentis The Incredibly True Adventure of 2 Girls in Love (1995), Kelli Herds Its in the Water (1996), Julia Dyers Late Bloomers (1996), Emma-Kate Croghans Love and Other Catastrophes (1996), Heidi Arnesens Some Prefer Cake (1997), Anne Wheelers Better than Chocolate (1999), Jamie Babbits But Im a Cheerleader (1999), and Helen Lesnicks A Family Affair (2001). While this project employs textual analysis as its primary methodology to examine these films, these analyses take place more broadly within a public sphere framework. Consistent with a wider shift in analyses of lesbian and gay cultural products, this framework allows a consideration of the larger public stakes of lesbian romantic comedies and, in particular, their introduction of lesbian content into a heterocentric genre. Specifically, this project argues that the introduction of lesbian contentor the replacement of boy meets girl with girl meets girldestabilises the genre in significant ways, but that the genre itself equally restricts the representation of lesbianism possible within it. Ultimately, this project proposes a reading of lesbian romantic comedies as conservative and progressive, conventional and subversive, but as nonetheless complex texts that offer a range of pleasures and readings to their audiences and a range of challenges to the genre itself. Such a reading reveals the complexity and negotiation inherent in these films position as independent films presenting culturally and politically marginal content in a mainstream genre.
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