🗓️When: Monday 10 November, 2-3pm
📍Where: 407 Babel Building, The University of Melbourne
– Parkville Campus
Coming-of-Age as Carnival:
Screening Girlhood in Contemporary Francophone Cinema
Sophie Tallis
In this paper I examine contemporary French girlhood films to argue that the experience of French girlhood is a carnivalesque one. By carnivalesque I refer to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival as a period of social upheaval (1968), characterised by a celebration of the grotesque and the inversion of hierarchies, which is followed by a return to the status quo. Drawing upon a corpus of French and francophone films released in the 2010s and 2020s, I argue that such films construct girlhood as a period of liminality in which cultural and behavioural norms can be contested in a (frequently) socially acceptable period of experimentation and rebellion. However, rather than this liminality leading to a meaningful challenge of societal power structures, francophone girlhood films typically appear to end with a reinstating of normative identities as the protagonists move into womanhood, recalling the defining feature of the carnivalesque as concluding with a return to the status quo. Subsequently, the question emerges as to whether these films that centre around adolescent explorations of identity and the contestation of social norms in girlhood ultimately present such rebellion as meaningful or reductive. For in her liminal state, a girl can test boundaries of acceptability, however, I argue that should these challenges to normativity cross the border into adulthood, an incompatibility arises between French republican concepts of acceptable ‘liberation’ and true bodily autonomy. This paper asks whether this new movement of francophone girlhood films challenge or reinforce traditional coming-of-age narratives, and how they answer the question of what it is to ‘do’ girlhood successfully.
Sophie Tallis is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. Her thesis examines representations of feminine adolescent bodies in contemporary French and francophone cinema. More broadly her research interests include girlhood cinema, gender and sexuality on screen, transnational film and contemporary French culture. Her work has been published in French Screen Studies, the Australian Journal for French Studies, and Sacreblue!, among other venues. She also teaches in the Screen Studies, English, and Gender programs at ANU and is currently the HDR representative for the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.