Browsing by Author "Havas, Julia"
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Item Open Access Beasts from the East: Fantasies of Eastern Europeanness in Brexit-era BBC Drama(2021) Martonfi, Anna; Havas, Julia; Gergely, GáborThis article interrogates the figure of the Eastern European itinerant in contemporary prestige BBC drama to draw attention to the figure’s role in the mobilisation of ideas of nationhood and foreignness in Brexit-era Britain. Demonstrated through critical analyses of vampire horror Dracula (BBC1, 2020), crime thriller Killing Eve (BBC America, 2018-), and 1950s-set medical drama Call the Midwife (BBC1, 2012-), we argue that such programmes that putatively celebrate British multiculturalism and diversity configure the Eastern European foreigner as a threat to idea(l)s of Britishness. In spite of their generic diversity, these series each deploy this figure in strikingly similar imaginaries of contagion, parasitism, backwardness, deviance and savagery, a feature left unexamined by critical and popular reception. Such treatment embeds these portrayals in discourses of white nationalism governing the relationship between core EU countries and post-socialist EU member states (Imre 2016, 110). The article argues, following Hage (2000), that this white nationalism seeks to manage national belonging by articulating the limits and rules of the national community as implicitly racialized terms of culture and space, overwriting specificities of ethnic/national background. The racialised configuration of nation expressed through the Eastern European foreigner in the examined series is connected to two underlying aspects of the BBC drama’s institutional and ideological position in the current political moment of increasing state-sanctioned nationalisms and isolationist politics across Europe and elsewhere. First, while in the Netflix era the British television industry is enmeshed in a crisis narrative that sees the BBC, Europe’s oldest and most respected public service broadcaster, in competition for digital territory with the streaming giant, Netflix carries a range of BBC programmes on its non-UK platforms under its ‘Originals’ banner. Thus, Netflix manages these programmes’ promotion of ‘Britishness’ as global cultural diversity overseas (Jenner 2018). Second, a range of this programming aligns itself with the current surge of Western intersectional feminist discourses mobilised in Anglophone prestige television by foregrounding female protagonists and authorship, the tropes of the ‘complex female character’, the female antiheroine (Buonanno 2017) and gender-inverted leading roles, as well as themes associated with discourses of contemporary popular feminism (Banet-Weiser 2018) such as women’s bodily autonomy, resilience, multicultural female camaraderie and queer desire. The channelling of xenophobia against the Eastern European in racialised terms through this foregrounded intersectional gender politics then updates in important ways the longstanding invisibility of Eastern Europeanness as marginalised subject position, theorised by Imre as located “somewhere in between civilization and barbarism as the West’s immediate and intermediary other” (2014, 118). Through close readings of these series, the article addresses manifestations of this representational trend in prestigious and popular BBC commodities in the streaming era. It queries how ideas around nationhood and identity politics expressed in the programmes telegraph renewed British anxieties of Eastern European infiltration, manifested in the 2016 vote to leave the EU. Further, the article highlights how this nationalism paradoxically springs from the BBC’s public service remit in the globalised streaming age.Item Embargo Bedrock Behind the Iron Curtain: Transcultural Shifts in the Hungarian Dubbed Version of The Flintstones (1960-66)(Society for Animation Studies, 2019-07-24) Havas, Julia; Martonfi, AnnaUS serial animation has had varying success on Hungarian television. Due to the form’s link to comedy and reliance on voice casting, its local appeal has largely depended on dubbing production’s transcultural integration of the two. The aim of this article is to map cultural shifts in the ways US animation has travelled to the Hungarian cultural context via dubbing, raising issues around authorship and cultural hierarchies. This transcultural focus takes a longitudinal approach, charting the historic development of US animation’s Hungarian dubbing through key case studies. It examines the foundational impact of the Hungarian dubbed version of The Flintstones (1960-1966), the ways this translation informed Hungarian animation’s cultural development and prestige, as well as its longstanding effect on dubbing practices of US animation through the case study of South Park (1997-). The analysis focuses on sociolinguistic aspects of translation, vocal performance, and contested notions of authorship that these translations and performances inform. Crucially, the article examines the transcultural aspects of US animated programmes’ travel to the Hungarian context by outlining the historical backdrop of socialist and post-socialist Hungary’s dubbing production practices, including political restrictions and censorship. It argues that examining these are necessary for understanding US animation’s sociocultural role in the country; which in turn informs wider discourses around transnational media texts’ reception, the translator’s discursive role as auteur, and vocal performance’s significance for the cultural mediation of transcultural animated texts.Item Open Access Dream On Princess: Cultural value, gender politics and the Hungarian film canon through the documentary Pretty Girls(Routledge, 2021-12-30) Havas, JuliaIn 1985, Hungary held its first post-World War II “Miss Hungary” beauty pageant, an event with the unspoken premise to symbolise communist authoritarianism’s decline and western capitalist culture’s growing influence in the country. Attracting unprecedented attention in popular and high culture, the contest’s reputation soon turned into public repudiation, initially due to the organisers’ reported exploitation of contestants behind the scenes, then following the widely publicised suicide of seventeen-year-old pageant winner Csilla Molnár on 10 June 1986. Beauty queen Molnár’s suicide instantly became a point of national trauma still resonating in Hungarian popular consciousness, in large part thanks to the intense cultural production that it (and the pageant itself) instantly inspired. The array of both high and low cultural artefacts about Molnár includes works of diverse genres from fine art to investigative reportage, poetry, popular music, and documentary filmmaking; sharing, alongside their topic and involvement in Molnár’s mythologization as martyr and fairy-tale princess, the fact that all were produced by male artists. Among these are: a sculpture by conceptual artist Gyula Pauer, Sándor Homonyik’s hit song Álmodj királylány (Dream on Princess, 1989), journalist Sándor Friderikusz’s oral history/investigative report book Isten óvd a királynőt! (God Save the Queen!, 1987); and crucially here, the documentary film Szépleányok by András Dér and László Hartai, which follows the contest’s events from its inception to the controversial creation process of the Pauer sculpture depicting a naked Molnár, to the organisers’ behind-the-scenes schemings, to the cultural reverberations of Molnár’s suicide. Mainly focusing on the documentary and its position in Hungarian public discourses as both historic evidence and artistic achievement, this chapter investigates notions of gender and authorship that are brought into sharp relief in the specific historic-cultural moment of Hungary’s cultural production shortly before and around the fall of communism. While, as western feminist scholarship has shown (Bronfen 1992), western patriarchal tropes around the beautiful female body/corpse as ideal topic of (male) artistic representation are evident in the case study, the analysis contextualises this tradition in late socialist Hungarian auteur cinema’s purported role in the ideological criticism of both the Hungarian socialist regime and western capitalism. If, as Banet-Weiser argues (1992) in relation to the US context, the beauty pageant is a unique site on which a particularly feminised ideal of national identity (“Miss Hungary”) is contested and packaged for consumer entertainment, how does the film’s (and its cultural surroundings’ then and since) political critique of the contest engage with its gender politics, including Molnár’s historic mythologization as prime victim of 1980s Hungary’s murky political and economic conditions?Item Open Access "I have a Particular Set of Skills that Not Every Detective Possesses. For Instance, I Am a Woman." Socialist Superwomanhood and Policing the Nation in "Linda" (1984-89)(2021) Havas, JuliaLinda was a hit crime procedural of late-socialist Hungary, its success reverberating transnationally upon its circulation across the Eastern Bloc (Pavlova 2016). It follows the eponymous young police detective who in her episodic crime fighting adventures deploys her Taekwondo mastery against Hungary’s criminal underworld. Inspired by Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies – themselves Westernisations of East Asian martial arts genres – series producer György Gát blended US-American, East Asian and Eastern European popular cultural influences. Linda’s resultant generic hybridity encapsulates late socialism’s politically-culturally transitional period: the episodic procedural / martial arts combination is channelled through Hungarian comedy traditions manifested in an ensemble cast recognisable from local cabaret and film/TV comedy, domesticating stock characters of American crime genres. But as detective heroine, Linda (Nóra Görbe) is marked by an overdetermined exceptionalism and nonconformity linked to her gender and its ambiguous corporeality. Androgynously slim and fit, sporting a mullet and little make-up, the threat of sexual violence follows her everywhere in her investigations, occasioning regular beatings-up of groups of men twice her size. For Imre (2016), she is a culmination of 1980s television’s socialist superwoman foreshadowing post-socialist postfeminism. I contextualise Linda in its temporal-territorial-ideological distance from Western/Anglophone feminist theorisations of transnational crime TV’s female detective, which examine the ‘deterritorialised’ feminisation of the genre’s ‘defective detective’ figure (Klinger 2018, Coulthard et al. 2018, Turnbull 2014). Avoiding a putatively emancipatory gesture of excavating nominally obscure media products/representations, I analyse Linda to demonstrate the female detective’s key-yet-conflicted role in mediating the police procedural’s relationship to gendered idea(l)s of national law enforcement as state-sanctioned policing of belonging. Drawing on Garland-Thomson’s (2011) concept of the misfit, I argue that extra/textual contexts like Linda’s femininity, physical prowess, and Görbe’s star narrative trouble the series’ articulation of this role, helping us nuance the ‘defective detective’ trope’s analysis in important ways.Item Embargo Netflix Feminism: Binge-watching Rape Culture in 'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt' and 'Unbelievable'(Edinburgh University Press, 2020-11) Havas, Julia; Horeck, TanyaFemale-centred serial programming that combines aesthetic exceptionalism and a rhetoric of progressive gender politics is a popular trend of Anglo-American television in the 2010s, tapping into a Zeitgeist of popular feminism as described by Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018). In some incarnations of the trend – and doubtlessly reflecting on the Trump and MeToo era – sexual violence, rape culture, and the psychological aftermaths of sexual abuse become focalised in ways that highlight the systemic nature of sexual violence and its key role in the makeup of the patriarchal social order; see, for example, the series Orange is the New Black, Jessica Jones, Alias Grace, Big Little Lies, The Handmaid’s Tale, 13 Reasons Why, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Fall, Unbelievable or Top of the Lake. As this list indicates, a large portion of this programming originates in “binge-able” Internet television, and is prominently featured on Netflix. Following from Susan Berridge’s (2017) observation, such prominence may speak to the allowances of the immersive binge-watching practice that Netflix encourages for its programming’s consumption, with the capacity to offer the viewer a sustained exploration of rape culture’s systemic nature, rather than treating sexual violence as a series of individualised and isolated incidents. This book chapter explores to what extent Netflix’s binge-able programming strategy and its effect on serialised narrative structures open up new avenues for interrogating rape culture in popular storytelling. Taking two Netflix original series (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Unbelievable) as case studies to analyse the binge-able serial format’s engagement with rape narratives, it also considers how this thematisation is shaped by factors such as the company’s branding logic, critical discourses around the cultural value of binge-watching, and the current political mainstreaming of feminist concerns around women’s bodily autonomy.Item Open Access Through the Gaps of My Fingers: Genre, Femininity, and Cringe Aesthetics in Dramedy Television(Sage, 2018-05-30) Havas, Julia; Sulimma, MariaConcentrating on the series “Girls” (2012–2017), “Fleabag” (2016), and “Insecure” (2016–), this article examines the female-centered dramedy as a current genre of U.S.-American television culture with specific investments in gendered value hierarchies. The article explores the format’s dominant narrative and aesthetic practices with specific focus on prestige dramedy’s “cringe” aesthetics. Cringe is increasingly mobilized as a mode of political expression following the format’s privileging of female subjectivities. As such, cringe is tasked with negotiating the tensions between drama and comedy on one hand and intersectional relations of identity politics on the other. Character “complexity,” embedded in ideological themes around identity, modifies the “comedy” in cringe and becomes associated with the more prestigious dramatic mode, this way governing the texts’ appeal to cultural value. The article demonstrates the ways the female-centered cringe dramedy expresses its politicization and “complexity” via disturbing gendered expectations of mediated femininity, and specifically body and sexuality politics.Item Embargo Tina Fey: "Quality" Comedy and the Body of the Female Comedy Author(University of Texas Press, 2017-12) Havas, JuliaThis book chapter examines the television authorship of comedy producer-performer Tina Fey. It takes Fey’s comedy as case study for the examination of the ways in which American “quality” TV comedy of the early 21 st century accommodates thematisations of gender politics and popular feminist discourses. Fey’s work is particularly relevant for this investigation, since her celebrity and comedy mobilise popular discourses around female authorship, liberal feminism, performance, and body politics in the context of American prestige comedy. In the chapter I unpack media controversies around her star text and comedy – particularly as presented in her series "30 Rock" (2006-2013) – which originated in her mobilisation of a “feminist” comic persona and in this persona’s reflection on the gendered dualism of comedy performance and authorship. As I argue, a discursive dichotomy of “writer” versus “performer” of female-centred comedy, much influenced by the postfeminist cultural paradigm, shapes and dominates Fey’s public image, helping to negotiate her presence in the higher echelons of American comedy.Item Embargo Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television(Wayne State University Press, 2022) Havas, JuliaThis book examines the emergence of the American post-millennial ‘feminist quality TV’ phenomenon. While American TV has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming’s cultural value, this book is the first sustained critical analysis of the 21st century resurgence of this tradition. Woman Up’s central argument is that post-millennial ‘feminist quality television’ springs from a rhetorical subversion of the (much-debated) masculine-coded ‘quality television’ culture on the one hand, and the dominance of postfeminist popular culture on the other. Post-millennial quality television culture promotes the idea of aesthetic-generic hierarchies among different types of scripted programming. Its development has facilitated evaluative academic analyses of television texts based on aesthetic merit, producing a corpus of scholarship devoted to pinpointing where value resides in programmes considered worthy of discussion. Other strands of TV scholarship have criticised this approach for sidestepping the gendered and classed processes of canonisation informing the phenomenon. Woman Up intervenes in this debate by re-evaluating such approaches and insisting that rather than further fostering or critiquing already prominent processes of canonisation, we need to interrogate the cultural forces underlying them. Via detailed analyses of four programmes emerging in the early period of the ‘feminist quality TV’ trend, namely 30 Rock (2006-2013), Parks and Recreation (2009-2015), The Good Wife (2009-2016), and Orange Is the New Black (2013-), this book demonstrates that such series mediate their cultural significance by combining formal-aesthetic exceptionalism and a politicised rhetoric around a ‘problematic’ postfeminism, thus linking ideals of political and aesthetic value. The book also demonstrates the necessity in television analysis of unpacking both the specific genderedness of television’s cultivation of aesthetic value, and the context of aesthetics and form in which the programmes’ political implications emerge.