Image of Reclaiming the Streets: Investigating Female Experience of Cinematic Urban Violence

Feminist Studies

Reclaiming the Streets: Investigating Female Experience of Cinematic Urban Violence

Download PDF

The spatial ideologies and narrative tropes of gendered victimhood, which are designed to
induce fear and anxiety, are routinely employed to govern and restrict female access to and experience
of urban spaces—both in cinematic depictions and in the real world. This paper explores how such tropes
are challenged and rewritten in three screen narratives based in urban landscapes: London in Happy-GoLucky (2008), Paris in Amélie (2001), and New York in Sex and the City (1998–2004). Contrary to the
ideologies of fear that routinely dominate urban narratives, I will argue that the texts under discussion
instead display the city as a space of potential female sexual, social, and spatial emancipation—most notably
achieved through employing the comedic genre to express the potentially subversive power of comedy in
overthrowing gender and social hierarchies. My primary focus will remain on the narrative techniques
that these texts employ to rewrite what I refer to as the “fear script” and to dismantle motifs of gendered
victimhood.

Detail Information
Publication Information
: Journal of Feminist Scholarship.,
Number of Pages
-
ISBN
-
Language
English
ISSN
6. https://digitalcommons.uri.ed
Subject(s)
violence
Feminism
gender studies
urban studies
flânerie
genre theory
television
film
Description
-
Citation
Other Information
Type
Article
Part Of Series
-
DOI Identifier
-
Related Publications

No Related Publications available

Comments