Sexing it up: Navigating sex, power and pleasure in popular cinema during MeToo

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The MeToo movement has created a new urgency for the discussion of sex on screen. It shed a newsocial and political importance on the issue of representation (Boyle, 2019), which is yet to be sufficientlyaddressed within Film Studies. Following exemplary analysis of the relationship between sex on screenand its sociopolitical context (e.g Williams, 2008), this project will address a new corpus of film andtelevision texts placing female sexuality within the emerging discursive contexts of MeToo and feministdiscourses of the 2010s. Through this process, the project will ask: How do the discourses of MeTooframe and conceptualise female sexual agency and pleasure? How are these terms negotiated andproblematised in the audiovisual texts of this period? In what ways do the texts open up pathways thatgo beyond the conceptions of sexual power and pleasure permissible within the MeToo discourse?Moving beyond existing scholarship on MeToo (Boyle, 2019; Wilz, 2020), this project will question themovement's offerings and limitations, intervening in wider debates in feminist film theory, specificallythose pertaining to sexuality, power, aesthetics, and discourses on value. This project will build oninsights of queer and critical race theorists (e.g Bradbury-Rance, 2018; Jackson, 2018) to develop moreinclusive frameworks for examining female sexuality which challenge Mulvey's binary economy of thegaze (Mulvey, 1975) which has overdetermined the discussion on sexual exchange in the field. Attentionto race is crucial as MeToo has taken as its paradigm the experience of white women. The inclusion ofTelevision texts and the privileging of female authorship, both of which are crucial to understanding thechanges in representation over the last decade, will address further omissions in literature on screeningsex