Shelley Cobb
Biographic Data
| ID | 3674146 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shelley Cobb |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shelley |
| FAMILY NAME | Cobb |
| SIGNATURE | COBB S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southampton |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1153-8482 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Adaptation, authorship and the critical conversations of Little Fires Everywhere
This article argues for an understanding of contemporary women’s television as a twenty-first century iteration of Lauren Berlant’s concept of the ‘intimate public’ of femininity, by analysing how the production, content, and reception of Little Fires Everywhere participate in the high visibility of popular feminism by invoking intersectionality and women’s empowerment. It does this first through the collective and collaborative female authorship…
Gender Equality in British Film-making
Introduction
What about the Men? Gender Inequality Data and the Rhetoric of Inclusion in the US and UK Film Industries
This article argues that cis, hetero, abled, middle-class, white men – as a group and as an identity category – are the structuring absence of inequality discourse and, as a consequence, it is ‘diverse’ persons who bear both the burden of and any hope for changing the film industry. By ‘re-reading’ gender inequality data, diversity initiatives and inclusion rhetoric, this article shows the ways in which they elide men's domination of the film ind…
Histories of now
The research project ‘Calling the Shots: Women and contemporary film culture in the UK, 2000–2015’ investigates contemporary women's film history through two primary routes: the statistical analyses of the numbers of women in six key above-the-line professions (director, writer, producer, executive producer, cinematographer and editor), and interviews with 50 women in those same roles (by August 2018 we had interviewed 58). This paper focuses spe…
Friends Reconsidered
With the passing in 2014 of the twentieth anniversary of its debut episode, the iconic millennial sitcom Friends retains a rare cultural currency and remains a crucial reference point for understanding the concerns of Generation X. This special issue, therefore, interrogates the contemporary and historical significance of Friends as a popular sitcom that reflected and obfuscated American fin de siècle anxieties at the time, and considers the last…
I’d Like Y’all to Get a Black Friend”
When Aisha Taylor joined the Friends cast in as Charlie Wheeler, she crossed a prime-time boundary—the segregation of American television shows by race. At the same time, Charlie had to be co-opted into the show’s gender dynamics. This article argues that Charlie epitomizes the ongoing postracial politics of respectability and hyper-class mobility that construct black women’s limited entry into postfeminist womanhood, as well as into the, still, …
Post Weinstein
“Harvey Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades:” so ran the headline to Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s October 5 2017 New York Times article, which broke the story of the Miramax
Data and Responsibility
This article addresses how feminist interrogations of research methods and knowledge claims have an important role to play in the collection and dispersion of quantitative data. Taking the contemporary film industry as a historical formation, and seeking to identify and understand patterns of continued gendered inequality, it considers the methodological and ethical dilemmas we have experienced as feminist researchers gathering and presenting qua…
‘I hate to be the feminist here…’
Numerous accounts in recent years have announced (often zealously) the death of the chick flick, a genre whose output has conspicuously slowed since a peak in the 1990s. We analyse here two recent hits from the ‘post-epitaph’ phase in order to understand the kinds of generic updates such films are attempting and how they place women in regard to changing gender norms and the conditions of neoliberal capitalism. We find that in Trainwreck (2015) a…
The 90s are officially over
In this piece we consider the intersection of relationships, nostalgia, and generational identities as struc- turing elements in celebrity culture, through a small sample of high-profile Gen X examples
Is this what a feminist looks like? Male celebrity feminists and the postfeminist politics of 'equality
Additional informationNotes on contributorsShelley CobbShelley Cobb is Lecturer in Film and English at the University of Southampton, UK. She is the author of Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and has published on women directors, celebrity culture, chick-flicks, film adaptation, and breast cancer culture. She is the Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded researc…
Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers
Breast cancer, breast surgery, and the makeover metaphor
This paper discusses cosmetic breast surgery in relation to reconstructive surgery of the mastectomized breast. We will show how both kinds of surgery participate in what we are calling “the makeover metaphor,” because both can be seen as an aesthetic practice. We are interested in tracing some of the ways that women undergoing both procedures experience a disconnect between the rhetoric and the experience. We argue that the makeover metaphor ove…
Post Weinstein
“Harvey Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades:” so ran the headline to Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s October 5 2017 New York Times article, which broke the story of the Miramax
Is this what a feminist looks like? Male celebrity feminists and the postfeminist politics of 'equality
Additional informationNotes on contributorsShelley CobbShelley Cobb is Lecturer in Film and English at the University of Southampton, UK. She is the author of Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and has published on women directors, celebrity culture, chick-flicks, film adaptation, and breast cancer culture. She is the Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded researc…
Breast cancer, breast surgery, and the makeover metaphor
This paper discusses cosmetic breast surgery in relation to reconstructive surgery of the mastectomized breast. We will show how both kinds of surgery participate in what we are calling “the makeover metaphor,” because both can be seen as an aesthetic practice. We are interested in tracing some of the ways that women undergoing both procedures experience a disconnect between the rhetoric and the experience. We argue that the makeover metaphor ove…
Histories of now
The research project ‘Calling the Shots: Women and contemporary film culture in the UK, 2000–2015’ investigates contemporary women's film history through two primary routes: the statistical analyses of the numbers of women in six key above-the-line professions (director, writer, producer, executive producer, cinematographer and editor), and interviews with 50 women in those same roles (by August 2018 we had interviewed 58). This paper focuses spe…
Breast cancer, breast surgery, and the makeover metaphor
This paper discusses cosmetic breast surgery in relation to reconstructive surgery of the mastectomized breast. We will show how both kinds of surgery participate in what we are calling “the makeover metaphor,” because both can be seen as an aesthetic practice. We are interested in tracing some of the ways that women undergoing both procedures experience a disconnect between the rhetoric and the experience. We argue that the makeover metaphor ove…
Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers
Is this what a feminist looks like? Male celebrity feminists and the postfeminist politics of 'equality
Additional informationNotes on contributorsShelley CobbShelley Cobb is Lecturer in Film and English at the University of Southampton, UK. She is the author of Adaptation, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and has published on women directors, celebrity culture, chick-flicks, film adaptation, and breast cancer culture. She is the Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded researc…
The 90s are officially over
In this piece we consider the intersection of relationships, nostalgia, and generational identities as struc- turing elements in celebrity culture, through a small sample of high-profile Gen X examples
Data and Responsibility
This article addresses how feminist interrogations of research methods and knowledge claims have an important role to play in the collection and dispersion of quantitative data. Taking the contemporary film industry as a historical formation, and seeking to identify and understand patterns of continued gendered inequality, it considers the methodological and ethical dilemmas we have experienced as feminist researchers gathering and presenting qua…
‘I hate to be the feminist here…’
Numerous accounts in recent years have announced (often zealously) the death of the chick flick, a genre whose output has conspicuously slowed since a peak in the 1990s. We analyse here two recent hits from the ‘post-epitaph’ phase in order to understand the kinds of generic updates such films are attempting and how they place women in regard to changing gender norms and the conditions of neoliberal capitalism. We find that in Trainwreck (2015) a…
Friends Reconsidered
With the passing in 2014 of the twentieth anniversary of its debut episode, the iconic millennial sitcom Friends retains a rare cultural currency and remains a crucial reference point for understanding the concerns of Generation X. This special issue, therefore, interrogates the contemporary and historical significance of Friends as a popular sitcom that reflected and obfuscated American fin de siècle anxieties at the time, and considers the last…
I’d Like Y’all to Get a Black Friend”
When Aisha Taylor joined the Friends cast in as Charlie Wheeler, she crossed a prime-time boundary—the segregation of American television shows by race. At the same time, Charlie had to be co-opted into the show’s gender dynamics. This article argues that Charlie epitomizes the ongoing postracial politics of respectability and hyper-class mobility that construct black women’s limited entry into postfeminist womanhood, as well as into the, still, …
Post Weinstein
“Harvey Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades:” so ran the headline to Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s October 5 2017 New York Times article, which broke the story of the Miramax
Gender Equality in British Film-making
Introduction
What about the Men? Gender Inequality Data and the Rhetoric of Inclusion in the US and UK Film Industries
This article argues that cis, hetero, abled, middle-class, white men – as a group and as an identity category – are the structuring absence of inequality discourse and, as a consequence, it is ‘diverse’ persons who bear both the burden of and any hope for changing the film industry. By ‘re-reading’ gender inequality data, diversity initiatives and inclusion rhetoric, this article shows the ways in which they elide men's domination of the film ind…
Histories of now
The research project ‘Calling the Shots: Women and contemporary film culture in the UK, 2000–2015’ investigates contemporary women's film history through two primary routes: the statistical analyses of the numbers of women in six key above-the-line professions (director, writer, producer, executive producer, cinematographer and editor), and interviews with 50 women in those same roles (by August 2018 we had interviewed 58). This paper focuses spe…
Adaptation, authorship and the critical conversations of Little Fires Everywhere
This article argues for an understanding of contemporary women’s television as a twenty-first century iteration of Lauren Berlant’s concept of the ‘intimate public’ of femininity, by analysing how the production, content, and reception of Little Fires Everywhere participate in the high visibility of popular feminism by invoking intersectionality and women’s empowerment. It does this first through the collective and collaborative female authorship…
Sociology (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (9 works) · Media studies (9 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (5 works)