After the ratification of the nineteenth amendment, Black women continued organizing for women’s suffrage and labor rights in the face of racial and gender-based policies that legalized the labor exploitation of Black women and the suppression of the Black vote. By conducting a close, comparative reading of Killing Eve’s Villanelle and Basic Instinct’s Catherine, the relationship between investigator and female murderer in both media respectively, and by reading Killing Eve’s character Eve as an investigator who herself emerges as a femme fatale, this paper demonstrates how Killing Eve subverts the trope of the femme fatale, escalates its queer monstrosity and extends Catherine’s ability to violently disrupt the heteronormative, gendered politics of pop-cultural imagination.Ībstract: We argue that early twentieth century Black women labor organizers and their movement for inclusive women’s suffrage and women’s labor rights stay absent from popular first wave feminist narratives. Killing Eve serves as a critical revisitation of the 1992 US-American classic Basic Instinct, in which one of the most notorious, flamboyant and influential femmes fatales to this day, Catherine Tramell, seduces and threatens a male investigator.
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The article argues that despite the emancipating possibilities that an emergent posthuman subjectivity suggests, the show’s posthuman heroines are finally constrained by the text’s humanist and postfemininst limitations.Ībstract: The femme fatale, one of the most common and renowned female, cinematic tropes across different crime genres, undergoes a queering in the 2018 UK series Killing Eve, in which the female investigator Eve Polastri and the female killer Villanelle engage in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game driven by mutual, queer desires.
These two concepts, namely posthumanism and postfeminism, are interwoven in the representation of two of the show’s main protagonists, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton), two female androids that begin to realize their fabricated reality and develop a new subjectivity. Furthermore, the depiction of the hosts as specifically embodied and gendered artificial beings, also raises questions surrounding postfeminism.
Yet, unlike the robots of the 1973 version who easily betrayed their mechanical origin, this time the hosts blur the boundaries between human and machine, real and fabricated, thus posing significant questions about posthumanism. Based on the classic 1973 science fiction film of the same title, the show’s first two seasons are set in a technologically advanced Western-themed Park where human guests pay to interact in any way they wish with the hosts/androids that populate its world. Abstract: Westworld (2016-present) is one of the most popular and complex television narratives in recent years.