Suchergebnisse

Acknowledgements -- Introduction: defining femininity -- The binds of femininity -- Feminism lost in the feminine body -- Feminism without anti-femininity -- The invisible femme -- The feminist femme -- Feeling femme -- Conclusion: what is queer about femininity? -- References -- Index.

This article takes up references to breasts as a key case study to examine white Western feminist debate around embodiment and objectification. Tracking shifting understandings of 'the gaze' in these accounts, we find that objectification is often rendered singular, ahistorical and, increasingly, individually internalised. The history of these approaches to objectification helps to explain why during the early 2000s, theorisations of feminist politics-lost were often rhetorically located alongside discussions of surgically modified breasts as a symbol of a new era of 'fake' feminism. In contrast, the 2010s saw several feminist movements premised on exposure of flesh and claims to individual recuperation of bodily autonomy. This article contends that both of these perspectives rely on a notion, built over successive eras of white Western feminist thought, that political work can and ought to be done through the body as a site of representational politics. This article subsequently offers a brief insight into how we might queer our approach to breasts to better account for the messiness of experiences of the flesh, considering the personal as political, while not investing in the body as the site where politics must be enacted.

This article explores the queer practices of a subgroup of One Direction fans known as Larries. The Larries believe that former One Direction boyband members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson (referred to by the portmanteau 'Larry Stylinson') were, or are, in a relationship. This article draws on a digital ethnography with the Larry fandom conducted on Twitter across 2018 and argues that their digital practices involve queer reading strategies to disrupt heterosexual narratives and create space for queer desire. While Larries are invested in the 'reality' of the ship, we also suggest that their fan practices are oriented towards challenging dominant heterosexual logics. Larries do not simply seek representations of queer desire in popular culture but rather, through shipping Larry, create a community online that celebrates queer sexuality, whether actualized in popular culture or not. Our findings challenge typical representations of fangirls as heteronormatively 'boy-crazy'. Far from understanding fangirls as a single monolithic group primarily motivated by heterosexual longing, this article argues that Larries encourage us to rethink gender, desire, the queer potential of fan practices and even the relationship between power and 'truth' in a 'post-truth' world.

Like other fangirls, fans of former boyband One Direction ("Directioners") have often been represented in media discourse as obsessive and hysterical, with fan behaviour interpreted as longing for heterosexual intimacy with band members. Subverting this heteronormative framing, a group of Directioners known as "Larries" have built a sub-fandom around imagining a relationship ("ship") between two of the band members, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. Representation of the Larry fandom has gone beyond pathologizing fangirls to framing their shipping practice in terms of "fake news." The conspiracy theory panic around Larries misses the complex ways that subtext and queer reading are mobilized within the fandom to invoke feelings of queer intimacy and belonging. Drawing on a digital ethnography conducted on Twitter with Larries, we argue that these fans engage in queer reading strategies to explicitly imagine and interrupt dominant heterosexual narratives, and thus queer the figure of the fangirl.