Gender, Taste, and Cinephile Culture.

摘要

In 2011 rumors circulated among online film communities that the independent film Tiny Furniture was slated for home video release by the prestigious Criterion Collection label. What followed was an online backlash directed at the critical devaluation of the film’s creator and star Lena Dunham. Noted for its high levels of animosity and vitriol, this backlash has maintained a presence throughout Dunham’s meteoric rise to stardom. By evoking issues of personal artistic tastes, members of one online cinephile community, Criterionforum.org, rhetorically construct Dunham as an effeminate middlebrow figure that threatens the established hierarchies of masculine autonomy and distinction. Dunham’s transformation from a filmmaker and performer into a rhetorical embodiment of gender and class anxieties reveals prevalent notions of gender and class that circulate within cinephile communities. Through a feminist lens examining taste as a method of social distinction, this thesis examines the discourse that circulates Dunham as a gendered middlebrow figure.