This book provides a contemporary review of the social practices and representations of flirting. In the wake of #Me Too, flirting has become entangled with stories of harassment and abuse that have generated both outrage and confusion. Nevertheless, this book argues that negotiating intimacy has always been an ambiguous social practice that can be risky and fraught, and examines how the presiding perception of flirting is constructed in contemporary cultural media. The book interrogates the relation between flirting and scandal, the kinds of scripts available in popular culture, and relations to feminism and other current social theories around gender and sexuality. It asks the questions; how can desire be declared? How can playfulness be understood? And what kind of language is available to speak about these complexities? Drawing from a range of media forms such as public scandal, reality television, and teen film,
Flirting in the Era of #Me Too argues that contemporary flirting is both provocative and conservative in its negotiation of an assemblage of shifting values, and considers possibilities for social innovation and change in light of these competing tensions.
Innehållsförteckning
1. Introduction: Flirting, Scandal, Intimacy.- 2. #Me Too: Scandals and the Concept of Flirting.- 3. Playing with Scripts: Social Experiments and Reality Television.- 4. Flirting on Film: Boundaries and Consent, Visibility and Performance.- 5. Conclusion: Uncertain Times for Flirting.
Om författaren
Alison Bartlett is Associate Professor at The University of Western Australia, Australia. She is the author of two books, on Australian literature and on maternal cultures, and has edited another four with the most recent being
Things That Liberate: An Australian Feminist Wunderkammer (2013).
Kyra Clarke is Lecturer in Media Studies at Massey University, New Zealand. She is the author of
Affective Sexual Pedagogies in Film and Television (2017) and has published in journals including
Feminist Media Studies,
Continuum, and
Sex Education.
Rob Cover is Associate Professor at The University of Western Australia, Australia. He is Chief Investigator on Australian Research Council projects
Queer Generations (2015-2018) and
Aus Queer Screen (2018-2020) and is author of four recent books, including
Emergent Identities: New Sexualities, Gender and Relationships ina Digital Era (2018).