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Published in:
2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Desire, Outcast: Locating Queer Adolescence
Author : Clara Bradbury-Rance
Published in: International Cinema and the Girl
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
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Picture the doubled image of a teenage girl in a baseball cap: she looks outwards but the darkened window of the bus on which she is travelling directs her gaze back in our direction. Her image resides in a movie poster next to a definition of the film’s titular subject: “PARIAH [puh-rahy-uh] noun 1. A person without status. 2. A rejected member of society. 3. An out-cast.”1Pariah (Dee Rees, 2011) is a film of escape (about looking out) but also of self-recognition (about looking back inwards). This kind of mirror image is highly suggestive of the adolescent state itself: constructed through prepositions, the teen finds herself after childhood (if biology does its job); before adulthood (if society does its job); if not, then alongside both … or neither. The word “pariah” and its definition riff on this prepositioning, sitting neatly in a poster in justified font between the girl’s original image and her reflection.