Representing Romance: Reading/Writing/Fantasy and the "Liberated" Heroine of Recent Hollywood Films

Watching rape: film and television in postfeminist culture

“…While Trial by Jury and Rob Roy represent rape as an instigator of women's (latent) independence, other films represent rape as a potential result of women's already fully developed independent behavior. In these examples a woman begins the narrative as self-determined, resists an early romantic union, faces potential rape as a result of her determination to remain independent, and then recognizes her own latent desire for romance at the end of the film, a narrative trajectory that Mimi White (1989) explicitly calls postfeminist. 16 For example, in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Marion Ravenwood refuses to do what Indiana Jones says, instead choosing to make her own decisions.…”

New Dreams, Old Endings: Searching for "A Whole New World" in Disney Second-Wave Animated Romance Films

“…Both romance and Disney scholars acknowledge the essential nature of heterosexuality in the conventional romance narrative (Byrne and McQuillan 1999;Butler 1990;Do Rozario 2004;Modleski 1982;Radway 1984;Rich 1982;Towbin et al 2003;White 1989). Towbin et al (2003) conducted a study revealing that marginalized groups in Disney animated features are portrayed negatively, rarely, or not at all.…”

“…This rejection of femininity differentiates the new heroine, or similarly Disney princess, from the original. In her study of blockbuster romance films that emerged in the 1980s 6 Mimi White (1989) argues that the films all follow a "both/and" logic where "romance and marriage are represented as available and satisfying choices for a female protagonist who is able, nonetheless, to break out of conventional roles and exercise dependence no matter what her initial status seems to be" (White 43). Cynthia Erb (1995) likewise summarizes these contradictory tensions:…”

“…Jasmine's eventual prevail over the law and her father, and Belle's joint discovery of love and escape from her town, resounds Mimi White's (1989) description of the new heroine who "is not forced to submit to conflicting or restrictive choices" (45).…”

“…Despite the potential subversive homosexuality within the Disney romance, by eradicating explicit same-sex desire, Disney clearly illustrates its belief that only one type of love leads to happily-ever-after, and any other type is not possible in the new world. The strict heterosexual romance narrative fulfilled at the end of these films draws yet another connection to the work of Mimi White (1989) who posits that, like Hollywood films of the "new heroine" in the 1980s, these Disney romances "express contradictory tensions, as they emphasize the positivity of the heterosexual romantic couple which is at once an avowedly fictional model and the goal of the filmic fiction" (41).…”