Background

I am a PhD candidate in film and television, funded by M4C AHRC (2022-2026). My project focuses on representations of sex in popular film and television in the #MeToo era. I am currently a Senior Graduate Teaching Assistant on Hollywood Cinema, and a module tutor on Screening Bodies.

Outside of academia I work as a Sex and Relationship Education facilitator in the charity sector. I have previously worked as a project manager at the Birmingham Indian Film Festival, the largest independent Indian film festival outside of India. I have also worked on filmmaking projects for the Coventry City of Culture and have worked on The Boyfriend Trick, a short dance film funded through IATL Warwick, exploring the theme of modern slavery which was exhibited at various festivals as an installation.

PhD Research: Sexing it up: Navigating sex, Power and Pleasure in Popular Cinema and Television in the #MeToo Era

​The #MeToo movement has created a new urgency for the discussion of sex on screen. It shed a new social and political importance on the issue of representation (Boyle 2019) which is yet to be sufficiently addressed within Film and Television Studies. Following exemplary analysis of the relationship between sex on screen and its sociopolitical context (e.g Williams 2008), my project addresses a new corpus of film and television texts placing female sexuality within the emerging discursive contexts of #MeToo and contemporary feminist discourses. Through this process, the project asks: How do the discourses of #MeToo frame and conceptualise female sexual agency and pleasure? How are these terms negotiated and problematised in the audiovisual texts of this period? In what ways do the texts open up pathways that go beyond the conceptions of sexual power and pleasure permissible within the #MeToo discourse?

In exploring these questions I examine the figure of the sex worker and their relation to the feminist sexual politics of the #MeToo moment. I also take up the theme of female fantasy, thinking about the construction of sex in texts like Bridgerton (2020) , and further explore more fantastical representations of sex, moving from more realist to more abstract representations of sex.

Supervisors: Professor Rachel Moseley and Professor Catherine Constable

Research Interests

Popular film and television; popular culture; sex on screen; consent; feminist studies; queer theory; lesbian cinema​; sex work on screen; abortion on screen; film and television pedagogies

Teaching

FI249: Hollywood Cinema

FI944: Screening Bodies

Publications

​Book Reviews:

• 'Review of Sex, Consent and Justice: A New Feminist Framework' – Screening Sex (August 2022)
• 'Review of Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory' - Screening Sex (April 2021)

Publications:

• 'Reinvention: Building a future from our past': Editorial – Reinvention Journal, Volume 13, Issue 1 (April 2020)
• 'Reinvention: Uniting the World': Editorial – Reinvention Journal, Volume 13, Issue 2 (October 2020)

Conference papers:

• Between Agency and Victimhood: Adult Material and the Shifting Representations of Porn Performers on Screen in the #MeToo-Era – Sex, Scandal and Sensation Conference, Falmouth University (July 2024)
• Pleasurable Bodies: Sex, Power and #MeToo in Magic Mike’s Last Dance – (Inter)Disciplinary Bodies Conference, Brunel University (June 2024)
• Between Pleasure and Risk: Negotiating Representations of Sex in Film and TV After #MeToo – Consoleing Passions 2024, Indiana University Bloomington (June 2024)
• For Her Pleasure: The Labour Politics of Male Sex Work on Screen After #MeToo - BAFTSS Conference 2024 (April 2024)
• #MeToo as Sex Panic: Pleasure and the Negotiation of the #MeToo Sex Panic in Film and Television after #MeToo - Sex Panics Conference DCU (October 2023)
• Mediating Representations of Sex and Consent on Screen after #MeToo - BAFTSS Conference 2023 (April 2023)
• (Re)centering the Teen Girl after #MeToo: Teen Girls, Sex and Sexuality in Film and TV after #MeToo - The Girl in Theory: Towards a Critical Girlhood Studies Conference, Rutgers University (March 2023)
• Queering cinema's visual politics through musicology: the queer potential of music in Vita and Virginia – BAFTSS Conference 2022 (April 2022)
• (De)centering Abortion in Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Saint Frances: tracking progress in recent practices of representing abortion in narrative cinema – CAPPE Conference: The Politics of Reproduction (September 2021)

Other Roles

• Sex and Relationships Education facilitator (charity sector)​
• Screening Sex Organisational Committee Member
• Organiser of Sex in Contemporary Media Conference 2023
• Co-convenor of Sex:Queer Research NetworkLink opens in a new window
• BAFTSS: British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies member

Film and Videography

'The Boyfriend Trick'

A short dance film funded through IATL Warwick, exploring the theme of modern slavery | 2021 | Credit: Videographer/On-set Director. The film was screened at various conferences and festivals as part of a developing installation, including:

• The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (RCSSD) 'Collisions Festival– Regeneration and Liberation' (September 2021)
• St Mary's University, Twickenham 'Healing the Wounds of Modern Slavery' conference' (October 2021)
• Feelings of Freedom Festival linked to the Resonate Festival/Coventry City of Culture at the Warwick Arts Centre (November 2021)

You can read more about the project here.

'Stories from Next Door'

A short film part of Coventry City of Culture 2021, Community Connectors | 2022 | Credit: Videographer and Editor

'Shape Shifter'

A short experimental documentary about body dysmorphia (TW) | 2020 | Credit: Writer, Director, Editor

• Barnes Film Festival (in competition)
• Lift-off Filmmaker Sessions @PinewoodStudios (in competition)
• Cyprus International Film Festival (winner of best talent for documentary short)