Girls gone wild: animality, female teenagers, and disidentification in contemporary European cinema

• Published in: New review of film and television studies Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 202 - 225
• Main Author: Ruiz-Poveda Vera, Cristina
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 02.01.2024; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Animality; Animals; coming-of-age; disidentification; European cinema; Females; Femininity; Oppression; posthumanism; Teenagers
• ISSN: 1740-0309; 1740-7923
• DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2024.2304604

Contemporary European cinema insistently depicts female teenagers in association with non-human animals. This article focuses on a group of films in which the teenage protagonists approach animality while closely surrounded by systems of exploitation of animals. The films Axolotl Overkill (Helene Hegemann, 2017), Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016), and Eastern (Piotr Adamski, 2019) feature female teenagers that experience oppression over their bodies. Animality appears both as part of their oppression and as a subversive alternative to negotiate their appointed social role as girls. The analyzed films explore narrative and aesthetic modes of disruption of the division between human/animal, as they articulate constructive encounters and even identification with the human and the non-human. Additionally, these films confront normative constructions of femininity through abject animality. Instead of 'becoming women', the protagonists embrace a more fluid transformation. These films propose ways of representing animals without participating in the traditional, spectacularizing gaze that reinforces the hierarchy of dominance of the human over the non-human. In this sense, this article contributes to the aim of animal (film) studies to rethink how visual culture represents the non-human. Lastly, these films appear more broadly as part of a larger tendency in contemporary European cinema inscribing animals in a critique of conventional femininity.