Through analysis of visual and literary texts, “Relating Sideways: Visual Culture and Women’s Bonds, 1970-2020” constructs a historical narrative that challenges the assumption that women’s lives and relationships naturally bend toward romance and procreation, a normative lifespan that follows the function capitalism has needed women to perform in consumption and reproduction. This dissertation examines films, including Cheryl Dunye’s "The Watermelon Woman" as well as Claudia Weill’s "Girlfriends"; television shows, including Sherry Coben’s sitcom "Kate and Allie" and Fatimah Asghar and Sam Bailey’s web series "Brown Girls"; and one novel, Toni Morrison’s "Sula," that depict relationships between women that pose alternatives to heterofuturist trajectories. I refer to such bonds as “sideways relationships.” By focusing on scenes and passages that take place in domestic spaces—the foyer, the domestic archive, the bedroom, the staircase—I argue that such depictions are ambivalent, as these texts often use heterofuturist visual rhetoric to legitimize primary relationships between women who are not biologically related or sexually involved. By situating these texts within fluctuating ideas about women’s liberation and civil rights in the US, the dissertation illuminates how broader political changes—as in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), Roe v. Wade (1973, overturned in 2022), and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974)—have created opportunities for women to shift from depending on men to depending on other women. Ultimately, the dissertation considers what is lost when depictions of sideways relationships seek legibility in a context defined by the primacy of romance and procreation.

Creator

• Coyne, Kelly Marie

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-gh1x-de65

Subject

• Film studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16482
• etdadmin_upload_980087

Date created

• 2023-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright