Sexing it up: Navigating sex, power and pleasure in popular cinema during MeToo

The MeToo movement has created a new urgency for the discussion of sex on screen. It shed a new
social and political importance on the issue of representation (Boyle, 2019), which is yet to be sufficiently
addressed within Film Studies. Following exemplary analysis of the relationship between sex on screen
and its sociopolitical context (e.g Williams, 2008), this project will address a new corpus of film and
television texts placing female sexuality within the emerging discursive contexts of MeToo and feminist
discourses of the 2010s. Through this process, the project will ask: How do the discourses of MeToo
frame and conceptualise female sexual agency and pleasure? How are these terms negotiated and
problematised in the audiovisual texts of this period? In what ways do the texts open up pathways that
go beyond the conceptions of sexual power and pleasure permissible within the MeToo discourse?
Moving beyond existing scholarship on MeToo (Boyle, 2019; Wilz, 2020), this project will question the
movement's offerings and limitations, intervening in wider debates in feminist film theory, specifically
those pertaining to sexuality, power, aesthetics, and discourses on value. This project will build on
insights of queer and critical race theorists (e.g Bradbury-Rance, 2018; Jackson, 2018) to develop more
inclusive frameworks for examining female sexuality which challenge Mulvey's binary economy of the
gaze (Mulvey, 1975) which has overdetermined the discussion on sexual exchange in the field. Attention
to race is crucial as MeToo has taken as its paradigm the experience of white women. The inclusion of
Television texts and the privileging of female authorship, both of which are crucial to understanding the
changes in representation over the last decade, will address further omissions in literature on screening
sex