Research Seminar – ‘#Shittyboys’: visibilising institutional violence in The Hunting (SBS, 2019)

Presenter

Catherine Fowler is Professor in Film and Media at Otago University. She researches on women filmmakers, video essays and artists’ moving image. Her recent publications include the BFI Classic on Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce 1080 Bruxelles (BFI/Bloomsbury, 2021) and Epistolary Entanglements in film media and the visual arts (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) co-edited with Teri Higgins. She has published video essays (with Claire Perkins and Andrea Rassell) on slow looking and the tv adaptation of Normal People. Her video essay on the relational nature of sexual harassment and abuse in tv series: ‘The Responsive Eye, or, The Morning Show May Destroy You’ can be found in [in] Transition in Vol 10 Issue 3 2023.

Correspondent

Bonnie Evans is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Queensland. Her research has addressed the intersections between feminist politics and screen media, particularly film and television, and she has published on true crime documentary. Her most recent journal article examines rape-revenge film in the context of the Me Too movement, specifically Corale Fargeat's 2017 film Revenge, and her forthcoming monograph The New Feminist Horror will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2027.

Abstract

Content advice: The abstract below includes strong language and discussion of sexual harassment, image-based abuse and institutional violence. 

The Australian four-part series The Hunting, set in a high school in Adelaide, interrogates how the sexualisation of teenage culture is contributing to deepening divisions along gender lines. The girls encounter an all-too familiar set of problems: un-asked-for dickpics, upskirting, harassment, slut shaming, gas lighting and the sharing and recording of their images without their permission. In short, their right to privacy, intimacy, desire and sexuality are under seige - or hunted - by the boys. Yet the series goes further; as an episodic drama, with more time to explore different perspectives, The Hunting is able to develop a ‘vertical mapping [of] … hierarchical connections’ (Kornfield and Jones, 5) constituting a network of harm that implicates parents and teachers alongside the students. What reverberates across this network is what Sara Ahmed calls a ‘feminist snap’ (2017; 2022, 8). For Simone, the mother of Andy, accused (and guilty) of posting an intimate image of Zoe online, the snap is the sound of delusions about her son breaking; while for Zoe, responding to the unwanted post with the hashtag ‘Shittyboys’ the snap makes a connection with Dipali, whose private nude was also shared. Breaking and connection; such effects encapsulate the contradictions that #MeToo has produced, as Alyssa Milano’s tweet created new connections in the present, yet also acted as a circuit-break with past feminist acts and actions. Through a combination of close textual and videographic analysis, this presentation explores how The Hunting’s vertical mapping of a network of harm visibilises not just individual, but institutional violence, from the family and education to the law and the state.

References:

Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life Duke university Press.

Kornfield, S. and Jones, H.  (2021) ‘#MeToo on TV: Popular feminism and episodic sexual violence’ Feminist Media Studies https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1900314