“To be a woman is to perform”- Simone de Beauvoir Does my body provoke you? Growing up as women, no matter the decade, you may been conditioned to believe one thing: your body, their pleasure. This project argues that adolescent women have been misrepresented in a number of ways, through the lens of the camera. I will interrogate the patriarchal framing of female friendship, purity, sexuality and parental figures by comparing classic “teen films”such as American Pie, Revenge of the Nerds, and Superbad to their independent competitors such as Thirteen, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and The Virgin Suicides. Scholars such as Timothy Shary, Frances Smith, and Caroline Madden support the argument that certain indie films reframe the myths of teenage selfhood. My presentation questions if teenage girls are a myth the patriarchy made up, or if we are simply conditioned to experience teen selfhood by harmful representational traditions.
