Immanent cinematic girlhoods: the ordinary affects in/of Eighth Grade

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article engages an immanent ontology to theorize how the film Eighth Grade produced affective intensities for me through the detailed, fluid rendering of a teen girl. Drawing on Kathleen Stewart’s concepts of worlding and ordinary affects, I analyze how Eighth Grade resists the representational stasis of an autonomous protagonist to produce a teen girl embedded in and contingent on wider social and material cultures. As Kayla is not reduced to a “type,” movement is maintained through her relationality to a world enlivened beyond a static subjectivity. Eighth Grade thus escapes the oversimplifications common to many teen girl films in the twenty-first century, offering a singular example of immanent cinematic girlhood, or a girlhood in motion. I employ post qualitative inquiry to analyze two scenes that show how movement is generated through a vivid worlding produced by ordinary affects. I conclude with a discussion of the film’s feminist potential. If stasis creates homogeneity, then Kayla’s movement promotes heterogeneity, not only showing girlhood to be an irreducible, relational experience, but also opening space for unimagined girlhoods to emerge.