Oops, I did it again: An evaluation of girl subjectivity in children's films, 1989--2000

This dissertation explores the construction of girl subjectivity in children's film from 1989--2000, including American and international, Hollywood and independent, comedies and anime. In the 1990s, the idea of the girl shifted in American cultural consciousness through "girl power" and "Riot Grrrl" movements; likewise, "girl films" became commercially profitable. Yet while contemporary discourse about girls may appear to affirm her subject status, this dissertation demonstrates that cinematic representations do not celebrate girl subjectivity so much as contain and compromise it.; This dissertation argues that cinematic representations simultaneously encourage and undercut girl subjectivity. It traces representations of girl characters from infancy to adolescence to elucidate different expressions of subjectivity: reading, seeing, storytelling, writing, and flying. The introductory chapter investigates the retroactive reconstruction of adolescent traumas by adult women and the final chapter explores adolescent girls who fly. Representations of adolescence frame this dissertation because at that time girls forgo their subjectivity to become fantasy objects for male subjects. And because the term "girl" in popular culture signifies an adolescent, the subjectivity of girl children is left unexamined. This dissertation investigates representations of both girl children and adolescents and finds the same problem: girl subjectivity is bound by a cultural contradiction that limits its possibilities for enactment. Girl characters assert their subjectivity only to end up as objects in relation to male subjects.; This dissertation offers a psychoanalytic framework to evaluate how this happens and why. While it engages psychoanalytic, feminist, and post-structural theorists, it primarily employs the work of Jessica Benjamin who emphasizes that the experience of the other is informed by fantasy and reality. Following Benjamin, I show how representations of girls are based in an oedipal boy's fantasy in which the boy, feeling powerless in relation to the mother, performs a reversal so that she represents the discarded aspects of his self---passive, weak, small---and he becomes active, powerful, big. Benjamin's emphasis on the relational construction of girl subjectivity through identification with a "third figure," one who helps the child create a communicative (symbolic) space within the dyad, compels us to rethink how girls construct their subjectivity.