“All Your Faves Are Problematic”: The Performative Spectatorship of Drunk Feminist Films

Abstract

This article looks at the work of the Drunk Feminist Film (DFF) collective from Toronto, Canada. DFF screenings offer interactive in-person and online events that combine watching popular Hollywood films with simultaneous live commentary, audience participation, and hashtag dialogs on Twitter. The article looks specifically at how the multiplatform hybridity of online and embodied participation allows feminist audiences to create collective spectatorial communities. DFF events emphasize paratextual conversation and reimagine how we can relate to movie narratives in the twenty-first century. By looking at a specific screening of The Craft (dir. Andrew Fleming, US, 1996), this article illustrates how DFF indexes the potential of engaging mainstream films while also engaging in feminist conversations about them. Problematic narrative aspects are discussed in real time by a community and are recorded via Twitter, resulting in digitally archived debates about how audiences collaboratively reinvent difficult but popular myths within their favorite films. As a result, the collective decenters mainstream films in favor of paratextual ephemera that negotiate the audience's pleasure in and critique of their favorite films.