Feminist (Re)Visions of Dystopian Futures: Learning to Fight in Hunger Games and Divergent

• In Event: 29.024 - Dystopian Futures, Black Queer Sex, and Racial Rememory: New Critical Perspectives on Education Through Film

Abstract

Objectives

This paper will explore learning relationships between adult and youth mentors and mentees in two blockbuster franchises, Hunger Games (Ross, 2012) and Divergent (Burger, 2014). Specifically, this paper will explore the tensions surrounding racialized and gendered mentoring relationships between young White women and their White (male) mentors within a genre that is recognized as advancing representations of strong, independent, female characters.

Perspectives

While traditional schools are noticeably absent in recent blockbuster films featuring youth, teaching and learning are not. Instead, they are entrenched in relationships with older youth and adult mentors. This is especially apparent in recent films based on post-apocalyptic young adult fiction that foregrounds strong female protagonists. This genre of fiction and the major film studio releases based upon it have become increasingly popular over the last decade. In the absence of conventional schools, these films depict educational processes that are facilitated by youth peers and adult mentors, and that noticeably revolve around the emergence of young White female protagonists as agents of change. The popularity of these films raises important questions about how they invite youth to explore the nature of teaching and learning, and the relationships between gender, agency, and education. This paper will employ a feminist media studies approach and critical race theory (Inness, 2004; hooks, 2008; Tasker & Nepa, 2007) to examine how education is framed within cinematic representations of “new worlds” in which young women are participants in the creation of “just” environments.

Methods and Data Sources

The method of analysis for each paper in this session is a contextual reading of the chosen films (also the data sources) that situates them within, and explores how they reveal truths and tensions about, the social, cultural, political, and/or educational discourses that make them meaningful cultural artifacts (Ott & Mack, 2014). This particular paper pays close attention to cultural anxieties toward the precarity of contemporary western societies (Means, 2015; Muehlebach, 2013) and the impact of those anxieties on current discourses of American school failure, multiculturalism, and dystopian visions of futurity. These discourses provide a backdrop for this paper’s analysis of the rising popularity of the post-apocalyptic film genre, and they inform the critical race and feminist readings of education in the two focus films.

Results and Significance

This paper’s analysis of Hunger Games and Divergent explores three intersecting claims that distinguish these films from typical cinematic depictions of education: (1) the films are significant because they are popularly framed as young adult feminist stories highlighting the power of skilled, independent, strong-willed, young women; (2) however, in these cinematic depictions of young adult feminism, learning is dependent on an adherence to troubling liberal tropes of colorblindness and gender equality; and (3) prominent mentor and mentee relationships in these films, while positioned as “loving,” effectively normalize heteronormative and abusive relationships. After discussing these three claims, this paper concludes by considering the pedagogies of race, gender, and dystopian futurity that can be collectively interrogated through these films.

Author

• Kristen Luschen, Hampshire College