Esmé FransenDoktorand
Om mig
Esmé is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at the Department of Media Studies. Her research interests include queer reception, queer female stardom, lesbian (in)visibility and audience-industry relations in Hollywood. Her dissertation, "MILFS, Memes, and Merry Pranksters: Lesbian Icons in Twenty-First Century Algorithmic Culture" investigates contemporary queer (female) visibility through the phenomenon of the contemporary lesbian icon.
Forskning
Description of PhD project
MILFs, Memes, and Merry Pranksters: Lesbian Icons in the Platform Economy
If the 90s were, as Entertainment Weekly dubbed it in 1995, the “gay 90s,” we may well consider the (ca.) mid-2010s onwards the age of the lesbian. Between ever-increasing queer female representation in film and television and a distinct visibility of queer female culture from a broader, often male-centric, gay culture in increasingly mainstream environment, the last decade and a half have marked a greatly heightened visibility of queer women in the mainstream. One manifestation of this has been in the form of the lesbian icon, which has shifted from a subcultural phenomenon to a status that mainstream Hollywood stars, both queer and heterosexual, have openly and eagerly started to embrace. This dissertation places the lesbian icon at the centre of an investigation of queer visibility in platform economies. Working with queer users’ dual definition of the lesbian icon as both/either a lesbian who is an icon or a woman who is an icon for lesbians, and with focused case studies of Jodie Foster, Kristen Stewart, Cate Blanchett and Natasha Lyonne’s star images, I explore the coming together of the queer politics of visibility, platform economies and film stardom/celebrity in the circulation of contemporary Hollywood stars as lesbian icons. This investigation goes both ways: on the one hand I consider how the visibility of the lesbian icon and her audience is shaped by political, socioeconomic and technological developments of the twenty-first century, but it also considers what this visibility does in sociopolitical and economic terms. Throughout, I suggest that the lesbian icon is always paradoxical, both relying on queer labour and queer reception strategies to become visible, but simultaneously shaping and controlling this visibility through its embedding in platform algorithms which prioritize profit over social change and benefit from visibility regardless of its social implications.
