Karen Boyle

The pornography debates: Beyond cause and effect

This article examines the limitations of the effects model for feminist anti-pornography work. As a contribution to the on-going debate about the nature of pornography and its relationship to violence against women, this article aims firstly to identify why traditional effects research, which attempts to establish a causal relationship between pornography and violent behaviour, is a dubious ally for anti-pornography feminism. Secondly, the enduring implications of the effects model for feminist anti-pornography politics are explored. It is argued that anti-pornography feminists need to reject the effects model and return to the crucial question of how some pornographies are produced and consumed in ways that are abusive to women.

I Love You, Man: Gendered narratives of friendship in contemporary Hollywood comedies

This article begins with a simple observation: there are very few contemporary Hollywood films in which women are shown becoming friends. This is in contrast to the “bromance,” in which new connections between men are privileged, yet this pattern has gone largely unremarked in the literature. This article has two aims: to sketch this pattern and explore reasons for it through comparing the “girlfriend flick” and “bromance.” To do this, we first discuss those rare occasions when women do become friends on screen, using Jackie Staceys work to understand the difficulties this narrative trajectory poses for Hollywood. This raises questions about the relationship between the homosocial and homosexual which set up our comparison of female and male friendship films and provides the rationale for our focus on the beginnings of friendships as moments where tensions around gendered fascinations are most obvious. The films discussed are Baby Mama, Step Brothers, I Love You, Man, Funny People, Due Date, and Crazy, Stupid, Love. The differences we identify hinge on issues of gendered representability and identification which have long been at the heart of feminist film scholarship.

Courting consumers and legitimating exploitation: the representation of commercial sex in television documentaries

The explosion of sexually explicit imagery in popular culture in recent years has been widely noted. On television, this has led to the birth of a new genre, a pornography-documentary hybrid. This article examines the kind of stories about sex that have emerged in this new generic space at the beginning of the twenty-first century and makes the case for retaining a central focus on gender as a relational matrix in feminist responses to both television and pornography. The article begins by sketching the classic feminist positions on pornography and considering how recent shifts in pornography research have limited the nature of feminist enquiry in a way that is broadly consistent with the normalising of pornography in mainstream culture. This provides the context for an analysis of docuporn that examines the stories the genre tells about commercial sex, arguing that, in the absence of an on-screen “john,” these programmes court the viewer as a present and future consumer, negating the gendered inequalities and exploitation that make commercial sex, in its currently dominant forms, possible.

Portrait of A Serial Killer: Intertextuality and gender in the portrait film

This article presents a feminist analysis of the serial killer portrait film—a cycle of contemporary low-budget films featuring serial killer protagonists. Although unusual within serial killer cinema for their frustration of identification and suspense, portrait films remain locked into wider popular discourses around serial murder, particularly in their intertextual aspects. In the portrait film, this results in a tautological construction of the serial killer (he kills because he is a killer, he is a killer because he kills) that places him not only beyond understanding but also outside society and, so, unconnected to normative constructions of masculinity.

The boundaries of porn studies on Linda Williams' Porn Studies

This paper centres around Porn Studies (ed. Linda Williams, 2004: Duke University Press). It examines the disciplinary terrain set out in this volume and the broader implications for the way in which we think about pornography in an academic context. Firstly, I explore the implications of the shift away from feminist debates about the nature, existence and regulation of pornography that this volume and others have called for. Secondly, I discuss the ‘porn’ of porn studies: how do we define it, what is included and excluded by our definitions, and what are the implications of this definitional practice? Finally, I turn to the ‘study’ of porn studies to consider the ethical and pedagogical consequences of canonising porn within the classroom and academic publishing.

What's in a name? Theorising the inter-relationships of gender and violence

This article explores the representational practices of feminist theorising around gender and violence. Adapting Liz Kelly’s notion of the continuum of women’s experiences of sexual violence, I argue that ‘continuum thinking’ can offer important interventions which unsettle binaries, recognise grey areas in women’s experiences and avoid ‘othering’ specific communities. Continuum thinking allows us to understand connections whilst nevertheless maintaining distinctions that are important conceptually, politically and legally. However, this is dependent upon recognising the multiplicity of continuums in feminist theorising – as well as in policy contexts – and the different ways in which they operate. A discussion of contemporary theory and policy suggests that this multiplicity is not always recognised, resulting in a flattening of distinctions which can make it difficult to recognise the specifically gendered patterns of violence and experience. I conclude by considering how focusing on men’s behaviour might offer one way of unsettling the contemporary orthodoxy which equates gender-based violence and violence against women.

Women, men and news: It's life, Jim, but not as we know it

In the twenty-teens, there are increasing numbers of women occupying executive positions in politics, business and the law but their words and actions rarely make the front page. In this article, we draw on data collected as part of the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) and focus on England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. Since the first GMMP in 1995, there has been a slow but steady rise in the proportion of women who feature, report or present the news (now at 24 per cent), but that increase is a mere 7 per cent over 20 years. Not only is there a problem with visibility but our data also suggest that when women are present, their contributions are often confined to the realm of the private as they speak as citizens rather than experts and in stories about health but not politics. Just over a third of the media professionals we coded were women and older women are almost entirely missing from the media scene. Citizens and democracy more generally are poorly served by a news media which privileges men’s voices, actions and views over the other 51 per cent of the population: we surely deserve better.

Watch with baby: Cinema, parenting and community

This article examines the experiences of women attending dedicated screenings in one Glasgow cinema with their babies. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with 25 women, the article explores the possibilities of pleasure that exist in this context, arguing that watching with baby is most consistently experienced as pleasurable when women are able to reconcile their expectations as adult cinema-goers with their new roles as mothers. Pleasure depends less on film choice than on the possibilities for community and for intimacy that are created in the reconfigured cinema space. The emphasis on the cinema space, its organization and the relationships made possible within it is reminiscent of historical accounts of cinema-going and poses something of a challenge to more contemporary accounts of audiences organized around film texts. This study also begins to consider the ways in which this particular leisure practice fits with — and occasionally conflicts with — discourses of ‘good’ parenting in women’s accounts.

Tout(e) Varda: the DVD collection as authorworld

Abstract In 2012, Ciné-Tamaris released Tout(e) Varda, a DVD box set spanning filmmaker Agnès Varda’s 60-year career to that date. Although relatively unusual in the degree of control Varda seems to have had in curating the collection, this box set is a logical development of Varda’s work of the 2000s in which she has increasingly interrogated her oeuvre and career. This article argues for the significance of the collection – and the paratextual material it includes – for an analysis of Varda and her work. But it also seeks to position the analysis within the wider context of DVD scholarship, where – despite a recurring concern with both the commercial and didactic functions of auteurism – the authorial collection has attracted little attention. An analysis of Tout(e) Varda points to the importance of considering the formal qualities of paratextual material as well as their thematic concerns. Tout(e) Varda offers not a definitive commentary on Varda’s work, but rather extends its formal and thematic preoccupations, albeit in ways which are at times contradictory, constructing Varda as both an unreliable curator and unreliable narrator.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Gender, sexism and press coverage of the Jimmy Savile case

In 2012—less than 12 months after his death—television personality Jimmy Savile was revealed to have been a prolific sexual abuser of children and young adults, mainly girls and women. This study advances research on the gendering of violence in news discourse by examining press coverage in the period leading up to Savile’s unmasking. It investigates the conditions in which Savile’s predatory behaviour—widely acknowledged in his lifetime—finally became recast as (child sexual) abuse. Specifically, it challenges the gender-blind analyses of media coverage which have typified academic responses to date, arguing that Savile’s crimes—and the reporting of them—need to be understood in the broader context of everyday sexism: a contemporary, as well as an historic, issue.