Filmic Tomboy Narrative and Queer Feminist Spectatorship
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UNHAPPY MEDIUM: FILMIC TOMBOY NARRATIVE AND QUEER FEMINIST SPECTATORSHIP A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Lynne Stahl May 2015 © 2015 Lynne Stahl ALL RIGHTS RESERVED UNHAPPY MEDIUM: FILMIC TOMBOY NARRATIVE AND QUEER FEMINIST SPECTATORSHIP Lynne Stahl, Ph.D. Cornell University, 2015 ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates the ways in which American discourses of gender, sexuality, and emotion structure filmic narrative and the ways in which filmic narrative informs those discourses in turn. It approaches this matter through the figure of the tomboy, vastly undertheorized in literary scholarship, and explores the nodes of resistance that film form, celebrity identity, and queer emotional dispositions open up even in these narratives that obsessively domesticate their tomboy characters and pair them off with male love interests. The first chapter theorizes a mode of queer feminist spectatorship, called infelicitous reading, around the incoherently “happy” endings of tomboy films and obligatorily tragic conclusions of lesbian films; the second chapter links the political and sexual ambivalences of female-centered sports films to the ambivalent results of Title IX; and the third chapter outlines a type of queer reproductivity and feminist paranoia that emerges cumulatively in Jodie Foster’s body of work. Largely indebted to the work of Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Sara Ahmed, this project engages with past and present problematics in the fields of queer theory, feminist film criticism, and affect studies—questions of nondichotomous genders, resistant spectatorship and feminist potential within linear narrative, and the chronological cues that dominant ideology builds into our understandings of gender, sexuality, narrative, and emotions. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Lynne Stahl was born and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. She attended Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she double majored in English and Hispanic Studies and graduated with honors. She earned her M.A. in English in 2012 and her Ph.D. in 2015, both from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In many ways, the acknowledgments section has proven the most difficult part of this dissertation to write; I am indebted to far more people in far more ways than I can list here. My parents and siblings have always supported my endeavors, and I grateful first and foremost to them. To all the marvelous instructors of language, film, and literature I've been lucky enough to encounter dating back to junior high school—especially Mary Chapman, Stu Strecker, Sam Rabiola, Keri Austin-Janousek, Genny Love, George Butte, Claire García, and Lisa Gunn: thank you for your inspiration and dedication. Thanks also to Tania Modleski for her humbling generosity and encouragement as well, of course, as her exemplary scholarship. Cornell's funding, from both the English Department and the Knight Institute, kept me comfortably afloat and supplied a wealth of students whose questions, insights, and various antics have enriched the dissertation and greatly enlivened the time across which I wrote it. The English Department Roundtable and numerous peers between Goldwin Smith and Schwartz have provided valuable feedback, discussion, and occasional commiseration over books and beers alike. The Mellon Writing Group of which I was honored to be a part gave incisive, multidisciplinary feedback at the very earliest stages of this project; many thanks to Sara Warner again as well as to Lucinda Ramberg, Masha Raskolnikov, Camille Robcis, and Dag Woubshet for engaging with those amorphous scribblings. I thank Amy Villarejo, Nick Salvato, and Sara Warner for their tremendously generous and generative feedback over the past six years, and words cannot express my gratitude for their input, guidance, encouragement, and above all patience throughout my time at Cornell. My infinite gratitude goes to Adrienne Wilson for years of love and friendship and for keeping me sane in the face of various turbulences (and for herself remaining sane in the face of my various turbulences). Begrudging thanks, too, to Zeke and Zoe, whose persistent demands for ear scratches, belly rubs, and games of frisbee kept me from ever disappearing entirely into my work and reminded me of the importance of more mundane diversions. To this point, the Ithaca Avengers Rugby Team has provided a much-needed outlet and introduced me to some of the best people I know. Debra Hoke and Annemarie Farrell have consistently made me recognize and challenge my own assumptions; I thank them both for impelling me away from complacency. Thanks to Corinna Lee, Rose Casey, and Adin Lears for sharing conversation, camaraderie, integrity, and a predilection for absurd internet videos. Avery Slater has been a constant purveyor and instigator of confidence, humor, and self-improvement—and the best friend I could ask for. Finally, thanks to all of those with sufficient interest in this project (or affection for its author) to read it. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgments iv List of Figures vi Introduction: Tomboys Untamed 1 Chapter One: All Hard Feelings: Tomboys, Lesbians, and Frustrated Spectatorship 34 Chapter Two: Fair and Foul: The Politics of Ambivalence in Female-Centered Sports Films 77 Chapter Three: Chronic Tomboys: Temporality, Survival, and Paranoia in Jodie Foster’s Films 130 Afterword: To the Bitter End and Beyond 182 Works Cited 193 Filmography 201 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: Little Darlings Film Poster 58 Figure 1.2: Randy and Angel 62 Figure 3.1: “The Good Mother” 139 Figure 3.2: “The Bad Mother” 140 Figure 3.3: Meg and Sarah I 155 Figure 3.4: Meg and Sarah II 156 Figure 3.5: Meg and Sarah III 156 Figure 3.6: Meg, Close-up 160 Figure 3.7: Rynn, Publicity Image 160 vi INTRODUCTION Tomboys Untamed “She’s gonna ruin my wedding!” shrieks Leona Threadgoode of her tomboy sister Idgie, whose refusal to put on a dress—and the protuberant bathos of whose grimy skinned knees render the delicate frock absurd when she finally does—evidently imperils not only her own trajectory towards heterosexual adulthood but that of everyone around her. Leona flies into this hysterical refrain once again, moments later, when Idgie launches herself at a neighborhood boy who mocks her ungainly appearance. The film Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), Jon Avnet’s adaptation of Fannie Flagg’s 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, recounts the story of this disruptive tomboy and her journey into what may or may not be lesbian adulthood. Idgie is spunky, athletic, resourceful, and endearingly rough around the edges; she wears men’s clothing, supports herself financially, and shuns the idea of marriage. She also falls in love with another woman, and the film’s portrayal of the ensuing partnership led the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to bestow upon it the 1992 award for Outstanding Film in Wide Release, intended to recognize “fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community and the issues that affect our lives.”1 Tomatoes has drawn criticism from academic and popular audiences alike for its alleged erasure of the lesbian relationship between its two protagonists, which the novel treats more explicitly; when actress Sheila James Kuehl presented the award at GLAAD’s ceremony, she wryly remarked, “If you don’t believe us, read the book.”2 1 http://www.glaad.org/mediaawards/22/selections 2 Lu Vickers, “Fried Green Tomatoes: Excuse me, did we see the same movie?,” Jump Cut (1994). 25-30. 1 However ambiguous Tomatoes may be in depicting lesbian sexuality, it articulates an unequivocally queer political stance through its marked disinterest in heterosexual reproductivity. For a film that critic Jeffrey Lyons effusively claims “makes you feel good about life,” Tomatoes certainly goes out of its way to inundate “you” with images of death, destruction, and decrepitude in its opening scenes. In fact, these initial moments—up to and including Leona’s jeopardized wedding—more closely resemble a Hitchcockian thriller than the heartwarming melodrama-cum-female-buddy film that Lyons and others make it out to be: a camera rushing frantically over train tracks, a procession of run-down buildings in a deserted rural area, and the ghastly image of a dilapidated car rising from the depths of a swamp as if in homage to Psycho’s final scene. Nor does this morbidity end when the narrative commences. We enter a nursing home, where an overweight couple visit a violently senile relative. Chased off by her inhospitable in- law, the wife, Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates), chats instead with another elderly resident, one Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy), who proceeds immediately to regale her hapless interlocutor (now munching an evocatively coprolitic chocolate bar) with stories of saline enemas and gallbladder removals. As their conversation takes a less visceral turn—but no more towards life and the future—Ninny introduces the film’s interior storyline, set in 1930s Alabama. This narrative revolves around her sister Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson), the alleged wedding- wrecker, and Idgie’s sustained intimacy with a woman named Ruth Jamison (Mary-Louise Parker); from the very beginning of this storyline and others, the tomboy throws a wrench into the operations of heterosexuality, normative temporality, and linear narrative itself.