What can a “chick flick” tell us about the way we understand love, gender and intimacy?
Often dismissed as lightweight entertainment, films about women, romance and relationships have played an important role in shaping how we imagine love, relationships and the roles we’re expected to play within them. From the screwball comedies of Hollywood’s golden age to the romantic comedies of the 1990s and today’s growing focus on female friendship, the genre has continually evolved alongside changing social attitudes.
In this episode, Sarah Griffith chats with Professor Diane Negra about the history and evolution of the chick flick. They explore what happens when traditional formulas of romance, marriage and the happy ending become less certain, why the genre is repeatedly declared dead, and what films including His Girl Friday, Trainwreck and How to Be Single reveal about changing ideas of intimacy, independence and femininity.
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Diane Negra
Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she has held guest professorship appointments at Brown University, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Reims, Aristotle University in Thessaloniki and Tel Aviv University. She is the author, editor or co-editor of thirteen books including What a Girl Wants?: The Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (2008), The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture (2006) and Extreme Weather and Global Media (with Julia Leyda, 2015). Her work in media, gender and cultural studies has been widely influential and recognized with a range of research awards and fellowships, including an award from the Government of Japan that led to a lecture tour in that country. For five years she served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Television and New Media.
In 2022 Professor Negra was elected to a three-year term as Co-Chair of the Interacademy Partnership. She is Chair of the Royal Irish Academy’s Working Group on Culture and Heritage and has served on the Interacademy Partnership Working Group on Predatory Journals and Conferences. In 2016 she was appointed by the US Ambassador to Ireland to the Irish Fulbright Commission Board. In 2019 she was elected Chair of the Commission.
Professor Negra’s work is increasingly animated by a sense of concern about the ways that neoliberal technologization is diminishing our common humanity. She is in the early stages of a book on bureaucracy, civility, and rage in the service economy whose working title is “In Order to Serve You Better:" Affect, Authority and Antagonism in The New Cultures of Customer Service. Her other current project is Interregnum: Hollywood Film Between the Financial Crisis and Covid-19.
A dual citizen academic trained at the University of Texas at Austin, Professor Negra has been based in the UK and Ireland since 2002.
