Post-Crisis, Post-Feminist: Reading Ada Colau as Female Celebrity Politician in Alcaldessa (Pau Faus, 2016)

Abstract

In this paper, through a close reading of the documentary film Alcaldessa (Pau Faus 2016), and with reference to a selection of media texts and interviews, I examine the ways in which Ada Colau has come to represent a type of post-crisis politician that unsettled the established political elites in Spain in the years following the crisis. This mediatized version of the new mayor of Barcelona is both dependent on her femininity but also limited by it. In a reading informed by celebrity studies and accounts of our mediatized relationships with public figures I consider this as part of a global media and political landscape which constructs politicians through recourse to personality, and which foregrounds, in certain media, biography rather than policy. I examine the ways in which the (contradictory) discourses of neoliberal postfeminism are challenged when a female politician seeks an autonomous political power and continued activism which threatens to undo the politics of neoliberalism that have ‘granted’ her this platform in the first place. I will use the documentary as a case study and examine its attempts to counteract or perhaps contradict this limiting view of Ada Colau which foregrounds her gender and her motherhood, but which in doing so establishes her femininity as a pivotal element of her continued political success.

RESUMEN

Este artículo analiza nítidamente la película documental de Pau Faus, Alcaldessa (2016) y los distintos textos mediáticos que tratan de la misma para investigar/revelar la representación de Ada Colau como un cierto tipo de figura política que ha desestabilizado, junto a otros, la política tradicional en España y Catalunya en una época post-crisis. Esas imágenes mediatizadas de la nueva alcaldesa de Barcelona abrazan su feminidad pero también se ven limitadas por cuestiones de género. Empleando un marco teórico que proviene de ‘celebrity studies’ y estudios previos sobre la relación que establecemos con personajes públicos, propongo que se puede situar estos discursos dentro de una tendencia global que prioriza la personalidad, la biografía y los detalles personales a su actuación política. Voy a examinar cómo se cuestionan los discursos posfeministas (que pueden resultar contradictorios) cuando una política busca poder, militancia y un continuo activismo que ponen en tela de juicio los mecanismos del marco neoliberal que le permitió acceder al poder en primer lugar. El documental ataca los textos mediáticos que únicamente se centran en las cualidades femeninas de Ada Colau y su papel como madre o mujer, sin embargo, al final deja claro que esa feminidad es fundamental para su continuado éxito político.

Keywords:

• Ada Colau
• Alcaldessa
• Pau Faus
• postfeminism
• neoliberalism
• celebrity

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Ada Colau
• Alcaldessa
• Pau Faus
• postfeminismo
• neoliberalismo
• celebridad

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Abigail Loxham is Lecturer in Hispanic Film at the University of Liverpool, having worked previously as a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the Universities of Manchester and Hull and as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia), where she is an honorary fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities. She has published on Spanish and Catalan cinema and television with particular interests in the intersections between memory, material culture and its representation in documentary cinema, and feminism and Spanish media. Her monograph Cinema at the Edges: New Readings of Julio Medem, Bigas Luna and José Luis Guerín is published by Berghahn Books.

Notes

1 Pablo Iglesias has made political allegory of HBO’s hugely successful Game of Thrones (Iglesias 2014).

2 Films such as Ciutat morta (Xavier Artigas, 2014) and Mercado de futuros (Mercedes Álvarez, 2011) are more exploratory and less explicitly linked to emerging political movements. The activist website El salmon contracorriente has produced a list of six documentaries about the crisis. See http://www.elsalmoncontracorriente.es/?Seis-documentales-sobre-la-crisis.