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1981
Female Trajectory in Film and Media
  • ISSN: 1601-829X
  • E-ISSN: 2040-0586

Abstract

This article follows the transformation of Estella into Cruella de Vil from the movie , directed by Craig Gillespie, from a screenplay by Dana Fox and Tony McNamara, and a story by Aline Brosh McKenna, Kelly Marcel and Steve Zissis. This transformative process is analysed through two perspectives. The first one is the sociocultural and political background of London in the 1970s, during the rise of the punk aesthetic and its anti-elite subversive resistance ideology. The second interpretative line requires the theoretical background from the book by Jack Halberstam – extraordinary academic work focused on analysing the political, social and economic technologies and fears that are in the background of the production of the monstrous body. Through the analysis, I will also refer to the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Lacan, etc. These two interpretative lines – the more general political and ideological technologies for producing the monster and the particular sociopolitical context in which the character Estella/Cruella is struggling – have proven equally important in the process of unravelling the societal, cultural and economic nets that create the monster, casting it out as a threat, but also in showing its potential to build a new system of power, that is a form of compromise between the former power and the resistance.

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2025-10-15
2026-04-19

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/content/journals/10.1386/nl_00055_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): boundaries; construction; ideology; monstrosity; Otherness; politics; power; resistance

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