“Those girls are vicious little monsters”: reading subversive femininities in Yellowjackets
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Provoking questions about morality and civility, survival narratives which feature young adults often offer new visions of social organisation by positing extreme scenarios of isolation and breakdown. In Showtime’s Yellowjackets, the survivor-protagonists are framed as monstrous, but also as disruptive “others” with the potential to unravel regulatory systems. By resisting gendered mythologies, the survivor-protagonists are associated with varying expressions of autonomy and agency, and an amplified sense of difference and abjection. In considering the subversive potential of an all-female Lord of the Flies, this paper explores how the central characters of Yellowjackets gain power by accessing and enacting forms of “otherness” in violent and radical ways. It argues that by rejecting the norms used to relegate women to the margins, the Yellowjackets profoundly unsettle, even corrupt, traditional conceptions of femininity and idealised visions of girlhood.
Source: Feminist Media Studies
Institutions: Deakin University, Charles Sturt University
Language: English
Topic: Gender, Feminism, and Media
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4403544464