5 - Girlhood Luminosities and Topographical Politics: 17 Filles and Bande de filles

Summary

Frequent references to ‘post-feminism’ in contemporary public debate might imply that feminism is a completed and achieved project; but becoming a woman – the ambiguous and multifaceted process and state of girlhood – remains contested, a source of celebration and anxiety for which girls are simultaneously praised and denigrated. A post-feminist sensibility is cultivated and transmitted through popular cultural products such as films, television programmes, books, advertising, and social media. It encourages an attitude to feminism which sees it as a common-sense approach to issues of equal pay and political suffrage, while denying its relevance to contemporary social problems. Girls and women are exhorted to enjoy their femininity, characterised by an intense interest in bodily surveillance, and beauty culture is packaged as empowering and agentic rather than punishing or oppressive. Girls are caught in flux in a system that simultaneously praises them for aiming for power and achievement, while containing them within very narrow ideas about how girls should look, behave, and perform. The contradictory girl-philia and girl-phobia of this cultural imperative of feminine agency has been discussed in the burgeoning academic canon of girl studies (Driscoll 2002; Harris 2004; McRobbie 2009; Projansky 2014). So far, however, critics have tended to concentrate their study of girls and their media representation on a narrow Anglo-American corpus of film and television texts. In the context of France, there is still much work to be done interrogating the political specificity of the girl in national debates concerning such ostensibly adult-focused issues as integration, radicalism, corruption, and influence, but also her filmic representation.

France has recently produced a series of films by female auteurs that offer a close and sympathetic engagement with girls. In this chapter, I concentrate on two films whose titles draw attention to their interest in the feelings and experiences of girlhood: 17 Filles (Delphine and Muriel Coulin, 2011) and Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma, 2014). Both films make use of devices to give geographical specificity to this exploration of girlhood, such as location shooting, the directors’ local knowledge, and non-professional actors recruited from the area where they are filmed. Such specificity, argues Catherine Driscoll, ‘produces and evaluates styles of girlhood and distinctions between types of girl’ (2008: 78) in ways that, without specific attention to place and space, tend to be grouped under the less diversified term of ‘girl culture’.