Family Archives and Female Spaces of Intimacy

Chapter 5 wonders about women who have been excluded from the act of writing their own anthology to present a reading of gendered literacy and female friendship through an anthology collected in the library of the Urdubadi family of bureaucrats and poets. I argue that the anthology is a family archive, in which the sociology of the household where it was produced is rendered legible. The decisive role of a female family member, the Urdubadi widow, whose pilgrimage to Mecca is recorded in this anthology, divulges her love for a female companion who was forced to leave Isfahan because of rumors circulating about their friendship. An empathetic community comes into view, established through a ritual of sisterhood. A selection of Muhammad Qasim’s paintings executed for a female clientele brings the visual into dialogue with the verbal, enhancing our understanding of the meanings of female friendships.

Emergent Feminisms and Racial Discourses of Televisual Girlfriendship

This chapter focuses on the cycle’s integration of emerging feminist discourses and its disruption of the postfeminist sensibility by interrogating its focus on female friendship. It highlights how the centrality of female friendship demonstrates the cycle’s liberal politics and therefore its appeal to upscale liberal or progressive audiences. The close, complex, honest relationships between main female friends on these shows, like Abbi and Ilana on Broad City, Gretchen and Lindsay on You’re the Worst, Quinn and Rachel on UnReal, or Rebecca and Paula on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, allow them a critical self-awareness to interrogate gender norms, whiteness, and millennial culture. But the cycle’s incredibly insular and encouraging friendships also obscure racial politics and diversity by recentering whiteness and celebrating a particularly narrow type of liberal feminist girl culture that also frequently centralizes white fragility. Thinking through the critical humor and other modes of political discourse of these friendships within the context of television’s racist and postfeminist roots, this chapter situates these representations of female friendships in the context of contemporary empowerment rhetoric to interrogate the potential and limitations of television’s representational politics in this era of the reemerging or mainstreaming of feminism.

The Woman’s Director and Women’s Friendships

Chapter 1 focuses on white, privileged women through an exploration of female friendships. The dominance of heteronormative romance is fractured by bonds between women, even when they are more tangential than central. Through the critical work of Karen Hollinger, the chapter offers close readings centered on character and narrative in Girls on the Town (1931), Our Betters (1932), The Women (1939), and Rich and Famous (1981), thus studying representations of female friendship from the beginning to the end of Cukor’s career. The chapter concludes with a coda on The Chapman Report (1962), a film about women’s sex lives that forecloses almost entirely the possibility of friendship between women.

What Price Hollywood?

A prolific director of classic Hollywood cinema, George Cukor was known for his romantic comedies and dramas and his work with difficult leading ladies. For such work, he was labeled a “woman’s director.” He did build or enhance the careers of many strong, independent actresses, including Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Judy Holliday, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe. However, the tag was also derogatory, referencing the fact of Cukor’s homosexuality. He was also called an “actor’s director,” for he emphasized his connections with his stars to draw out compelling performances even within his less effective films. Taking a queer feminist approach to these labels, the director, and his directing style, this volume explores issues of gender and sexuality within groups of Cukor pictures. Chapters reach across and among eras and genres to study small groups of films by theme, nuanced by ethnicity, class, and race. Topics covered include female friendships, the male alcoholic, domesticity and ethnic assimilation, gender performance, drag acts, and queer musical excess.

Introduction

This chapter establishes connections between Brookner’s novels A Friend from England (1987), A Misalliance (1986), Brief Lives (1990), Undue Influence (1998), Falling Slowly (1999) and Hotel du Lac (1984); her French Romantic art criticism in The Genius of the Future, Romanticism and its Discontents and Soundings; andthe queer nineteenth-century literary canon of the Romantics, Decadents and aesthetes including Stendhal, Baudelaire, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Karl-Joris Huysmans. It outlines the strange behaviour of the solitary yet homosocial ‘Brooknerine’ and her female friendships in the domestic fiction, and the mixed responses of Brookner’s early reception from 1980-2010 frequently organised by gender, temporal and heterosexual normativity which tethers behaviour to a unilateral historical context. Alternatively, Brookner’s performative Romanticism is delineated as a queer cross-historical, intertextual, temporal literary practice which combines nineteenth-century and contemporary behaviours, tropes, narrative devices and temporal periods to expand historical context and subject to cross gender and historical temporalities. The book’s queer lesbian, intertextual, cross-historical methodology is illuminated, along with its performing cast of Romantic personae of the military man, analysand, queer, aesthete, dandy, flâneur, degenerate and storyteller.