"Playing with Dolls: Girls, Fans, and the Queer Feminism of Velvet Goldmine"
"Playing with Dolls" argues for a reframing of the critical view on Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine that places the women at the center. Female characters play relatively marginal roles, yet their omission misses the film’s overarching point about the performativity of gender and the fluidity of sexual identity and identification. The film can be read via the mise en abyme of a scene in which schoolgirls act out a romantic scene between two of their male pop idols, the film’s main characters. By focusing on the female fan, the talk teases out the complexities of the film’s portrayals of female-gay alliances and conflicts, situating them within the film’s fictional settings of the glam 70s and the bleak 80s.
Julia Leyda is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She has published widely in cinema and television studies, particularly around issues of gender, class, and race. She is a co-founder of the NTNU Environmental Humanities research group. Her most recent book is The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (co-edited with Joshua Paul Dale, Joyce Goggin, Anthony P. McIntyre, and Diane Negra, Routledge, 2017). Her current research centers on 21st-century US screen cultures and climate change narratives (cli-fi).
Please find the poster here...
Entrance is free and open to the public.
This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies and CIMIG - Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz.
Department of American Studies Graz
Institut für Amerikanistik
Attemsgasse 25/II
A-8010 Graz
Tel. +43/316/380-2465
amerikanistik(at)uni-graz.at