Puberty Blues—then and now: diffracting semblances of being girl in Australia

Abstract

This paper attempts a diffractive analysis that reads Bruce Beresford’s Australian populist film Puberty Blues (1981) through the more recent (2012) Channel 10 eight-part series television of the same title. The purpose of this experimental analysis is to notice ways both of these filmic artefacts re/enact gendered semblances performatively, co-creating binary gender relations through Baradian intra-actions with a virtual audience (in the perpetual present). This paper is not a historical account of the texts and/or a review of the substantial literature connected to either text or television/film production in Australia. It attempts to conduct a non-representational analysis as a reading through of the texts with each other. What is significant is the process of examining “how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter” (Karen Barad 2007, 30) during inter-action with filmic text and viewer. This manoeuvre posits that by re/turning events as iterative interactions visibility of materiality in the making may be rendered visible. By understanding intra-active processes educators may be able to frustrate delimiting accounts of girlhood as just the way it is and rather utilise these texts to open up other imaginaries of affirmative difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• new materialism
• intra-action
• Puberty Blues
• girl

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful advice regarding this paper.

Notes

1. Teresa De Lauretis (1984) makes the distinction between speaking of woman as referent, as image, and women as material subjects situated in history. These terms will be adopted and extended in this paper to include the term girl as a material subject situated in history.

2. Barad’s (2007) quantum understanding of superposition or diffraction (interference) of waves is where waves are disturbances (forces of matter) not determinable things (matter) that interfere with matter (form). Diffraction, as analysis, is specifically “accounting for how practices matter” (90). Practices require scrutiny and interference in order to allow other possibilities not yet thought.

3. Big M was a brand of flavoured milk that was founded in Victoria, Australia, in 1977–1978 that through voyeuristic advertising portrayed a beach culture of objectified bikini-clad girls that toted the “Big M girl.” See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmIZGyjk0q0

4. The Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Award for Best Television Drama Series 2013, Logie Awards: most popular new female talent Brenna Harding, 2013.

5. Five male cadets at the Australian Defence Force Academy watched on Skype as, in a room nearby, Daniel McDonald secretly filmed the sex he instigated with unknowing air force cadet known as “Kate” on March 29, 2011. The matter went public and senior military officers and their supporters embarked on a smear campaign against the young woman who was labelled a slut and had to leave the defence force.