Mandy Merck

Masked men: hacktivism, celebrity and anonymity

In her 1991 article ‘Signs of Melodrama’ Christine Gledhill provocatively claimed that the Hollywood star system descended from the stage melodrama’s ‘drive to realise in personal terms social and ethical forces’. The disguise is a melodramatic convention, concealing the true personality revealed in the narrative, as the melodrama reveals hidden moral truths. Approaching contemporary celebrity through this dramatic mode, this article considers the unmasking of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden in three recent films, We Steal Secrets, The Fifth Estate and Citizenfour. In true melodramatic style, the films’ presentation of state violence and surveillance is rapidly displaced by moral studies of these three ‘hacktivists’. Drawing on melodrama and genre studies as a methodological approach to studying these films, I trace the mask back to Alan Moore’s anti-melodrama V for Vendetta. This article proposes celebrity studies would be well served by paying closer attention to the political efficacy of celebrity’s opposite: anonymity.

Melodrama, Celebrity, The Queen

Abstract In the midst of Princess Margarets 1950s romance with Royal Air Force group captain Peter Townsend, Malcolm Muggeridge warned that the new celebrity coverage of the royal family would end in tears. But in 2006, Stephen Frears’ The Queen proved that tears could enhance the popularity of the British monarchy, creating what one film critic hailed as the most sophisticated public relations boost for the queen in 20 years. In this depiction of the fateful week after the death of Diana in 1997, docudrama—the fictionalized representation of real people and events—is trumped by melodrama, with its pathos, its appeal for moral recognition and its highly expressive mise en scène. The former (represented by actual news footage) is the genre of the films ‘queen of hearts’, Diana. The latter (represented by the dramatic fiction of screenwriter Peter Morgan) is that of its ‘queen of a nation’, Elizabeth II. In its opposition of two ambitious queens—one romantic, one worldly—the film echoes Friedrich Schillers 1800 proto-melodrama Mary Stuart. More than two centuries later, the older genre triumphs, rendering The Queens fictional world more vivid and affecting than the actual images of the real-life Diana. Much of this triumph can be attributed to Helen Mirren, who brings the prestige of her star persona to a monarch in danger of being overshadowed by the celebrity of her rival. In an unusually forthright discussion of royalty and celebrity, The Queen draws the two regimes of power together in a single figure, who finishes the film with a declamation on ‘glamour and tears’.

Desert Island Texts

The following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen ...

Prologue: Shulamith Firestone and Sexual Difference

Sexual difference, according to Jean Baudrillard, disappeared by the 1980s, supplanted by “a new game of sexual indifference.” The sexual revolution had left behind an agnosticism of identity and desire whose emblematic figure was the transsexual, neither masculine nor feminine and invulnerable to jouissance. This avatar of artifice was said to embody the destiny of our mutant species, whose anatomy and imago are endlessly subjected to technological and symbolic augmentation, diffraction, hybridization: “to become a prosthesis.”1 But if the transsexual was the postmodernist’s sequel to the symbolic order of sexual difference, post-structuralism conjured a prosthetic emblem of its own, not as Baudrillard had in the name of trans (or post) politics, but in an explicitly political challenge to “the law … which installs gender and kinship.”2 Plastic, transferable, expropriable, the lesbian phallus was wielded by Judith Butler to challenge the heterosexist hegemony of sexual difference itself. Theorized as the logical consequence of the Lacanian scheme it undermines, it was held to displace the masculine signification of the phallus and deprivilege anatomy as the site of power.

Integration, Intersex, and Firestone’s Dialectic

Seeking precedents for their struggle for equality, the feminists of the 1960s readily turned to the American civil rights movement. Simone de Beauvoir, the dedicatee of The Dialectic of Sex, had herself taken Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 study of “The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,” The American Dilemma, as a model for The Second Sex, noting Myrdal’s own “very interesting analogies between Negroes’ and women’s status.”1 And, like their nineteenth century abolitionist predecessors, a number of the founders of Women’s Liberation had been anti-racist activists early in the 1960s, while Black Power offered an even more militant model at their end. As Shulamith Firestone writes: the issue of racism now stimulated the new feminism: the analogy between racism and sexism had to be made eventually. Once people had admitted and confronted their own racism, they could not deny the parallel. And if racism was expungeable, why not sexism?2