Hyper-femininity as radical resistance: re-envisaging the starlet through a feminist practice of solidarity in It’s Sophie! (2018)

This article challenges the often-derided role of the young and apparently naive ‘starlet’ figure in film and stage performance. My engagement with the concept of the starlet originates from Laura Mulvey’s influential psychoanalytical feminist essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1989 [1975]), which investigated women on screen in the classical Hollywood era as objects of a misogynistic gaze. My definition of the starlet builds on this work and identifies her as a conventionally yet unattainably glamorous and attractive young woman, who is groomed and policed by patriarchal structures. Mulvey explains how, within the patriarchy of the Hollywood studio system, the ‘determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly’ (1989: 16). This article analyses how my performance practice seeks new ways of resisting and deconstructing the male gaze to produce innovative alternatives to heteronormative femininity. Specifically, I examine It’s Sophie! (2018), which presents a starlet who explodes the idea of a fixed masculinised archetype. The starlet personae in It’s Sophie! engage in subversive hyper-femininities through endurance-based posing that serves to explore their magnified sexuality and monstrous potential. This article presents wonderous and worrying states of unbridled femininity that directly challenge the masculinised gaze.