Post-crisis, post-feminist: Reading Ada Colau as female Celebrity Politician in Alcaldessa (Pau Faus, 2016)

Loxham, AR ORCID: 0000-0003-0287-0926 (2019) Post-crisis, post-feminist: Reading Ada Colau as female Celebrity Politician in Alcaldessa (Pau Faus, 2016). Hispanic Research Journal, 20 (1). pp. 73-86.

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682737.2019.1584478

Abstract

In this paper, through a close reading of the documentary film Alcaldessa (Pau Faus 2016), and with reference to a selection of media texts and interviews, I examine the ways in which Ada Colau has come to represent a type of post-crisis politician that unsettled the established political elites in Spain in the years following the crisis. This mediatized version of the new mayor of Barcelona is both dependent on her femininity but also limited by it. In a reading informed by celebrity studies and accounts of our mediatized relationships with public figures I consider this as part of a global media and political landscape which constructs politicians through recourse to personality, and which foregrounds, in certain media, biography rather than policy. I examine the ways in which the (contradictory) discourses of neoliberal postfeminism are challenged when a female politician seeks an autonomous political power and continued activism which threatens to undo the politics of neoliberalism that have ‘granted’ her this platform in the first place. I will use the documentary as a case study and examine its attempts to counteract or perhaps contradict this limiting view of Ada Colau which foregrounds her gender and her motherhood, but which in doing so establishes her femininity as a pivotal element of her continued political success.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Ada Colau, Alcaldessa, Pau Faus, postfeminism, neoliberalism, celebrity
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	22 Mar 2018 14:20
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 06:38
DOI:	10.1080/14682737.2019.1584478
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3019343