Notice Board

The Institute for Child & Youth Studies and the Women Scholars' Speaker Series
Presents:

“Let’s Go Anyway:” Mischief-Making as Girl Empowerment and Development in Precarious Girlhood Cinema
by Desirée de Jesus

Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2020
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: AH100 (Andy's Place)

Light lunch provided

This talk examines the role that mischief plays in the experiences and development of the precarious girl child and teenager in post-recessionary girlhood cinema. Whether cast as the inevitable result of idleness and failures in surveillance or as the unintended outcome of an overly curious and imaginative mind, girlish mischief and the ways that we determine the recuperative potential of mischievous girls are often entangled with classed and racialized ideals of normative femininity and citizenship. This talk explores how the treatment of the mischievous girl figure in a corpus of films released after the 2008 Global Recession reimagine misbehaviour as a temporary vehicle of self-empowerment and liberation from the confines of marginalized social identities.

Desirée de Jesus recently completed a Ph.D. in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. Her writing has been published in Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, Another Gaze, The Montreal Gazette, The Journal of Popular Culture, and others. Her research has been supported through various awards, namely the Concordia Public Scholars program, the Soroptimist Foundation of Canada, the Bourse d'études Hydro-Quèbec de l'Université Concordia, the Glay Sperling Scholarship, and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).