Overview

What is ‘fun’ about the Hollywood version of girlhood? Through re-evaluating notions of pleasure and fun, The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film forms a study of Hollywood girl teen films between 2000-2010. By tracing the aesthetic connections between films such as Mean Girls (Waters, 2004), Hairspray (Shankman, 2007), and Easy A (Gluck, 2010), the book articulates the specific types of pleasure these films offer as a means to understand how Hollywood creates gendered ideas of fun. Rather than condemn these films as ‘guilty pleasures’ this book sets out to understand how they are designed to create experiences that feel as though they express desires, memories, or fantasies that girls supposedly share in common. Providing a practical model for a new approach to cinematic pleasures The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film proposes that these films offer a limited version of girlhood that feels like potential and promise but is restricted within prescribed parameters.

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9781501349010

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Reviews

This is a brilliant, beautifully written exploration of the complex feelings that emerge from hearing and seeing the contemporary girl teen film. Drawing on a wealth of examples, and framed within the dynamic turn to affect and sensorial aesthetics, Samantha Colling has given due weight to the cultural importance of these films and paratexts, the fun at the pulsating heart of their narratives, and the way girling and feeling conjoin and collide. Breathtaking. * Sean Redmond, Associate Professor in Screen and Design, Deakin University, Australia * Girls just want to have fun, and Samantha Colling shows us how. This lovely book thinks hard about the ways that recent teen girl films give their audiences pleasure and enjoyment. Colling opens up and enlivens a popular aesthetic mode that is all too often either ignored, or treated only with disparagement and condescension. * Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University, USA *

Author Information

Samantha Colling is Lecturer in Film and Media at Manchester School of Art and Research Degrees Development Tutor in the Arts and Humanities Graduate School, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

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