Contesting feminisms, commercial femininities and the fashioning of adolescent girlhood in Wild Child (2008)

This article presents a detailed analysis of one film in the genre of adolescent romantic comedy, Nick Moore’s Wild Child (2008), and considers how the film can be read as a case study of postfeminist girlhood. In particular, it focuses on the film’s implicit construction of young women’s complicated engagement with feminist history, with the aim of answering the following questions: if much of second-wave feminist discourse dismissed femininity as an artificial, man-made product, and if ‘new feminisms’ oppose this political position by reclaiming and reconstituting femininity, then how is this divisive relationship enacted in contemporary Hollywood cinema? What is the role of consumer culture and fashion in the discordant performances of contesting feminisms and commercial femininities?