A few months before finalizing her divorce from Kanye West in 2022, Kim Kardashian remarked on Instagram: “Girls can see the difference between 200 shades of nude lipstick but they can’t see red flags.” Though the ambivalent term of the ‘red flag’ has long been in circulation, it has recently emerged as a contentious flashpoint in Anglo-American popular media with which to (over)identify and label unhealthy, toxic, and abusive personality traits and relationship dynamics. Red flags as a tropified category ostensibly marks up anything from minor dating irritations and personality blemishes, such as ‘bad’ texting habits or ‘questionable’ fashion taste, to the harmful rhetoric of ‘undesirable’ celebrities, politicians, and celebrity politicians, over to the murderous intentions of (heartthrob) serial killers on- and off-screen.
The Spotting Red Flags Symposium invites critical engagement with ‘seeing red’ in global screen narratives to interrogate the perceived ‘failures’ and ‘toxicities’ of (hetero)normative romance, politics, and identity in the present moment. We ask how in film, television, and digital media hegemonic norms and power are stabilized and/or challenged by way of complex ideological and affective representations of so-called ‘red flags’ and, implicitly, their supposed ‘green’ counters. Topics covered by presenters on the day will include notions of toxic masculinity, feminist and queered (dis)identifications with white heteropatriarchal culture, and the post-romantic imaginaries coming out of Hollywood and beyond, all concerned with negotiating and ‘flagging’ the fine line between danger and desire.
The program will be bookended by a keynote address delivered by Prof. Mary Harrod, Professor of French and Screen Studies at the University of Warwick. Her talk is titled “Flickers, Stutters, Shimmers, Warps: Romance without Ethics in an Age of Digital Subjectivity.” She is the author of, among countless other publications, From France with Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy (2015) and co-editor of Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I’: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (2021, with Diane Negra and Suzanne Leonard; MeCCSA Edited Collection of the Year, 2022).
This in-person symposium is free to attend, but registration is essential. Please get your ticket and see the full program at spottingredflagssymposium.eventbrite.com
We are very grateful to the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS), the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London, and the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) for their generous support and sponsorship of this event.
Organizers: Victoria K. Pistivsek (King’s College London), Dr. Sarah Lahm (University of Leeds and York St John University), Dr. Matthew Hilborn (University College Dublin)
For any questions about the event, please contact the organizing committee at spottingredflags@gmail.com
