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Sex, Motherhood, and Killing Boys: Diablo Cody & Body Genres through the Feminine Perspective

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First Reader Rachel C. Fabian
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 Semester Spring 2025
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Fabian, Rachel C.
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Spring 2025
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2025
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http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/16749
Abstract
The project draws importance to Diablo Cody as a figurehead of feminist screenwriting and authorship through the theoretical framework of feminist film theory surrounding the 'body genres'. Film scholar Linda Williams proposed in her 1991 essay, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," that the 'body genres' represented a class of low culture cinema which reflects the patriarchal aversion to female subjects in conceptual works of substance. Melodrama, horror, and pornography are the three body genres Williams points to as upholding the misogyny in sharing an onscreen sensation with a female character (e.g. sadness, pain, and arousal). Four different films written by Diablo Cody are included as case studies; Juno, Jennifer's Body, Tully, and Lisa Frankenstein, which champion her expansive and continued work within body genres. In this paper, I discuss how Cody contests the mode of traditional Hollywood cinema through her position as a writer within these genres, and how her position as a writer of these projects has influenced her longevity through cinematic close analysis, biographical research, and theoretical assessment.
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