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<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Call
for Papers: ‘Beyond the messy millennial woman: televising perfection,
imperfection and resilience’<span></span></span></b></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"><span> </span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Abstracts
are sought for a proposed special journal issue, for which strong interest has
been secured from a Q1 cultural studies journal.<span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"><span> </span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Special
issue editors: Dr Laura Minor (University of Salford) and Dr Claire Perkins
(Monash University)<span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"><span> </span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Deadline
for abstracts: March 28, 2024.<span></span></span></b></p>
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<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"><span> </span><span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Over
the past decade, ‘imperfection’ has emerged as one of the most recognisable
themes in Western television focused on and driven by women. Some of the most
popular, debated and acclaimed series that have found recent transnational
success centre on the lives of 'messy' millennials who are anxious, hedonistic,
emotionally chaotic, hetero-pessimistic and self-destructive – from <em>Girls</em> (2012-2017)
to <em>Fleabag</em> (2016-2019), <em>Broad</em> <em>City</em> (2014-2019),
and <em>This Way Up</em> (2019- ). Television has become a key
cultural form in foregrounding these representations, where increasing numbers
of series that feature female leads and creators and attract female audiences
are actively diverging from traditional, masculine notions of ‘quality’ TV
(Lagerwey, Leyda & Negra, 2016). As part of this shift, popular discourse
attending to the rise in female-driven content tends to value both creators and
their work as ‘feminist’ based simply on the perception of creative agency and
women-centred issues, thereby positioning contemporary television as both an
important and fraught space for evolving understandings of what feminism is and
does (Cattien 2019; Perkins & Schreiber 2019; McHugh 2023; Perkins et al
2023). <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"><span> </span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">As
a trope responding to the social conditions of gendered neoliberal capitalism
in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century, the ‘imperfect’
woman attempts to express dissatisfaction and exhaustion with contemporary
postfeminist imperatives to be confident, body positive, entrepreneurial and,
in Jia Tolentino's phrase, ‘always optimizing’ (2019). The<span> </span>‘affective dissonance’ (Dobson & Kanai,
2019) of her negative emotions holds the potential to challenge and critique
these conditions. However, like earlier postfeminist themes and tropes, this
figure ultimately works to govern women and feminine identities. As Angela
McRobbie has observed, discourses of imperfection might respond to the
unviability of a perfect aspirational model of femininity, but they ultimately
exist in a binary relationship to this model – allowing us to authentically
embrace ‘who we are’ only insofar as this presents an opportunity to repair and
recover through the strategy of resilience. As a technology of the self, the
imperfect is interwoven with the perfect in its neoliberal promise of
self-care, comprising what McRobbie calls a ‘dispositif for the management of
emerging feminisms’ (2020: 43). <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"><span> </span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">The
millennial creators of series featuring ‘imperfect’ women, who often appear as
their own protagonists, are seen as socially and politically conscious and the
first to come of age with the internet and technological devices at their
disposal. As an effect of this media saturation, millennials ‘create a sense of
irony about the very possibility for authentic communication’ (Kaklamanidou and
Tally, 2014: 4). This sensibility differs from the representation of
disaffected women/girls of Generation Z, who tend to be more vulnerable,
sincere and buoyant in their presentation and more afraid of being judged and ‘getting
it wrong’ (Gill 2023), i.e. Christine from Greta Gerwig's <em>Lady
Bird </em>(2017) or Kayla from Bo Burnham's <em>Eighth Grade </em>(2018).
‘Messy’ millennials have been described in academic literature and mainstream
media as ‘antiheroines’ (Tally, 2016), as well as ‘unruly’ (Rowe, 1995;
Petersen, 2017), ‘nasty’ (Robinson, 2016), ‘unlikeable’ (Rodgers, 2019) and ‘difficult’
(Pinedo, 2021). Yet these terms often simplify women's experiences by
emphasising their visibility, overlooking the regional distinctions and diverse
social identities that typify female-driven TV (see Minor, 2023 &
forthcoming). As a result, with the notable exception of key figures such as
Michaela Coel, Issa Rae and Mindy Kaling (see Sobande 2019), women who are
defined in these ways are, more often than not, white, middle-class,
cisheteronormative and American or British. <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">With
this special issue, we are calling for explorations of how the televised
imperfect woman and her expression of the perfect-imperfect-resilience
dispositif function both within and <em>beyond </em>this homogenised
model of ‘messiness’. Simidele Dosekun (2020) argues that postfeminism itself
is transnational, its subjects ‘scattered’ or ‘dispersed’ on television screens
across the globe. The postfeminist woman of colour is, therefore, not an ‘impossible
or derivative sight’, and by situating her as such, Dosekun argues that we
reify, recentre, and make white women the definition of postfeminism itself
(2020: 10). With this in mind, this special issue calls for investigations of
what this ‘imperfect’ figure can show about how gendered neoliberalism both
governs and damages women across a range of national and social contexts. Where
and how does she appear in television series that may not be prioritised for
global distribution and discussion? How does she convey specific concerns of
class, race, sexuality, gender identity and ability that are overlooked in a
dominant mode of imperfection that falls under the umbrella of what Taylor
Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey term ‘Horrible White People’ shows (2020)? Further,
how exactly does this figure – in all her permutations – present opportunities
and imperatives for resilience? How is this impression reinforced through media
discourses and paratexts? Are there instances where such figures are able to
escape or subvert the perfect-imperfect-resilience dispositif? In exploring these
questions, we call for a range of methodological strategies, including textual
analysis, media industries studies, authorship approaches and audience
evaluation. <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Possible
areas for discussion include: <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> -
imperfection and intersectionality <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> -
updated models of feminine 'unruliness' <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> -
postfeminism and whiteness <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> -
imperfection beyond the 'dramedy' <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> -
imperfect women in national and regional communities <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> -
global iterations of 'imperfection' <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> -
imperfect women and disability <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> -
imperfect women and neurodivergence <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> -
imperfect women and ageing <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"><span> </span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Please
submit a 350 word abstract and 100 word bio by March 28 2024 to: </span></b><span lang="EN-GB"><a href="mailto:beyondmessymillennials@gmail.com" style="color:rgb(5,99,193);text-decoration:underline"><b>beyondmessymillennials@gmail.com</b></a><b><span style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"><span></span></span></b></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"><span> </span></span></b></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Once
abstracts have been received a full proposal will be submitted to the
interested journal by end of April 2024. <span></span></span></b></p>
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<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> <span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><u><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">References </span></u><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"> <br></span></p><p style="margin:0cm;line-height:115%;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)"><br></span><br></p><ul><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Cattien,
Jana. 'When 'feminism' becomes a genre: Alias Grace and "feminist"
television'. <em>Feminist Theory</em> 20.3 (2019). <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Dosekun,
Simidele. <em>Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and
Transnational Culture</em>. Illinois: University of Illinois Press,
2020. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Gill,
Rosalind. <em>Perfect: Feeling Judged on Social Media</em>. Cambridge:
Polity, 2023. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Kaklamanidou,
Betty and Tally, Margaret. 'Introduction: The Twenty-First Century Generation
and the ABC Family Brand.' In <em>The Millennials on Film and Television:
Essays on the Politics of Popular Culture</em>, edited by Betty Kaklamanidou
and Margaret Tally, 1-14. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company,
2014. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Lagerwey,
Jorie, Julia Leyda and Diane Negra. 'Female-Centered TV in an Age of
Precarity'. <em>Genders</em> 1.1 (2016). <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">McRobbie,
Angela. <em>Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender,
Media and the End of Welfare</em>. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">McHugh,
Kathleen. 'Genre as Feminist Platform: Diagnosis, Anger and Serial TV'. <em>Television
and New Media</em> 24.5 (2023). <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Minor,
Laura. 'Alma's (Not) Normal: Normalising Working-Class Women in/on BBC TV
Comedy'. <em>Journal of British Cinema and Television. </em>20.2
(2023). <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Minor,
Laura. <em>Reclaiming Female Authorship in UK & Irish Television
Comedy</em>. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Nygaard,
Taylor and Jorie Lagerwey. <em>Horrible White People: Gender, Genre and
Television's Precarious Whiteness. </em>NY: NYU Press, 2020. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Perkins,
Claire and Schreiber, Michele. 'Independent women: from film to
television'. <em>Feminist Media Studies</em> 19.7 (2019). <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Perkins,
Claire and Jodi Brooks, Janice Loreck, Pearl Tan, Jessica Ford, Rebecca J.
Sheehan. ‘Doing film feminisms in an age of popular feminism’. <i>Australian
Feminist Studies </i>113 (2023). <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Petersen,
Anne Helen. <em>Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud. The Rise and Reign of the
Unruly Woman. </em>New York: Scribner UK, 2017. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Pinedo,
Isabel C. <em>Difficult Women on Television Drama: The Gender Politics of
Complex Women in Serial Narratives</em>. London & New York: Routledge,
2021. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Robinson,
Joanna. 'The Nasty Women of TV Comedy Have Arrived Just in Time'. Accessed
November 16, 2023.
<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/10/samantha-bee-obama-female-anger-tv-comedy">https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/10/samantha-bee-obama-female-anger-tv-comedy</a>. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Rodgers,
Barry. 'Contemporary TV Shows Are Bringing out the Unlikeable Side of Female
Leads'. Accessed November 16, 2023.
<a href="https://www.grazia.co.in/people/contemporary-tv-shows-are-bringing-out-the-unlikeable-side-of-female-leads-4016.html">https://www.grazia.co.in/people/contemporary-tv-shows-are-bringing-out-the-unlikeable-side-of-female-leads-4016.html</a>. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Rowe,
Kathleen. <em>The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter</em>.
Texas: Texas University Press, 1995. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Sobande,
Francesca. 'Awkward Black girls and post-feminist possibilities: Representing
millennial Black women on television in Chewing Gum and Insecure'<em>. Critical
Studies in Television</em> 14.4 (2019). <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Tally,
Margaret. <em>The Rise of the Anti-Heroine in TV's Third Golden Age.</em> Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. <span></span></span></li><li>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="color:rgb(14,16,26)">Tolentino,
Jia. 'Always Be Optimizing'. <i>Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion</i>.
NY: Random House, 2019. <span></span></span></li></ul>
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</div><br><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Dr Claire Perkins<div><div>Director, Bachelor of Media Communication</div><div><br></div><div>School of Media, Film & Journalism</div><div>Room B436, Caulfield Campus</div><div>Monash University</div><div>Victoria 3145</div><div>AUSTRALIA</div><div>+61 3 9903 1239<br></div><div><a href="mailto:claire.perkins@monash.edu" target="_blank">claire.perkins@monash.edu</a></div><div><br></div><div>Website: <a href="https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/claire-perkins" target="_blank">https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/claire-perkins</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>Series co-editor, <i><a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-screen-serialities-html.html" target="_blank">Screen Serialities</a> </i>(Edinburgh UP)<br></div></div><div><br></div><div><font color="#000000"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">We acknowledge the Traditional Owners, and Elders past and present, </span><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">of all the lands on which Monash University operates.</span></font><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>