“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”? Tracing the implications of a song in Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

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dc.contributor.authorClarke K
dc.date.accessioned2023-05-10T01:17:06Z
dc.date.available2023-05-02
dc.date.available2023-05-10T01:17:06Z
dc.date.issued2/05/2023
dc.description(c) The Author/s
dc.description.abstractWhen Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) dressed as Lorelei (Marilyn Monroe) from 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes performs “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Cathy Yan’s 2020 film Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), links are drawn between 70 years of film history and women’s representation on screen. In this article, I put various iterations of “Diamonds” into dialogue to explore how this moment in Birds of Prey might be understood. I consider this scene as central to understanding Quinn’s “emancipation,” with the representation of women’s security and control over their lives key themes in the history of this scene. The return to this song throughout the histories of film and video enables a sense of solidarity across time, acknowledging the systemic problems that remain unresolved, and contemplation of this can alter the ways we understand characters and texts, past, present, and future.
dc.description.confidentialFALSE
dc.identifier.citationFeminist Media Studies, 2023
dc.identifier.doi10.1080/14680777.2023.2200527
dc.identifier.elements-id461362
dc.identifier.harvestedMassey_Dark
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10179/18228
dc.relation.isPartOfFeminist Media Studies
dc.relation.urihttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2023.2200527
dc.subject.anzsrc1699 Other Studies in Human Society
dc.subject.anzsrc2001 Communication and Media Studies
dc.title“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”? Tracing the implications of a song in Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
dc.typeJournal article
pubs.notesNot known
pubs.organisational-group/Massey University
pubs.organisational-group/Massey University/College of Humanities and Social Sciences
pubs.organisational-group/Massey University/College of Humanities and Social Sciences/School of Humanities, Media & Creative Communication
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