Abstract
In October 2009, David Cameron, then leader of the Opposition, attempted to persuade voters to entrust him to help mend Britain’s broken society.1 The elements of his Conservative party’s discourse of “broken Britain” consist of single mothers, poor education, anti-social behavior, alcohol abuse, teenage sex, and lack of employment. This is the world of Fish Tank: a depiction of contemporary Essex housing-estate culture, in which 15-year-old Mia “swims frustrated circles, like a shark in a tank.”2 Mia is played by amateur actor Katie Jarvis, and her sullenness and rage are the beating heart of the film. Fish Tank may appear to suggest that Mia is a prime example of contemporary broken British culture, but it is a shot across the bows of such misperceptions, announcing that girls like Mia should not be dismissed or underestimated. The film achieves this by creating Mia’s very particular experiences at this pivotal point in her young life, and evoking the rhythms and relationships of this 15-year-old girl in her place in contemporary British society.
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Notes
Lisa Mullen, “Estate of Mind,” Sight & Sound 19:10 (October 2009), 16–19 (17).
Christine Geraghty, “Women and Sixties British Cinema: The Development of the ‘Darling’ Girl,” in The British Cinema Book edited by Rob Murphy (London: British Film Institute, 2009), pp. 154–163 (314).
Ibid., p. 319. Julie Burchill considers British cinema’s “Chelsea girls” in r9the context of mods, The Beatles, Keeler and fashion also in Julie Burchill, Girls on Film (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).
Carol Dyhouse, Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (London and New York: Zed Books, 2013), p. 136.
Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing like a Girl” and Other Essays (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 25.
Christina Schües, Dorothea E. Olkowski and Helen A. Fielding, eds., Time in Feminist Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 9.
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© 2016 Fiona Handyside and Kate Taylor-Jones
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Bolton, L. (2016). A Phenomenology of Girlhood: Being Mia in Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009). In: Handyside, F., Taylor-Jones, K. (eds) International Cinema and the Girl. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388926_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137388926_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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