Schizoid Femininities and Interstitial Spaces: Childhood and Gender in Celine Sciamma’s Tomboy and P.J. Hogan’s Peter Pan

Abstract

Childhood innocence has often been treated by scholars as an empty, idealised signifier. This article contests such accounts, arguing that innocence is best regarded as a powerfully unmarked training in heternormativity, alongside class and race norms. This claim will be demonstrated through attention to two recent films addressing childhood: Celine Sciamma’s Tomboy and P.J. Hogan’s Peter Pan. The films characterise young femininity as an ‘impossible space’, in which subjects face the contradictory, schizoid demands to simultaneously show both childhood innocence and heteronormative femininity – or else face the threat of a spoiled identity. The plot of each film traces how the protagonist attempts to manoeuvre in the face of and precisely using this contradiction. In dramatising such manoeuvring, the films reveal the surprising forms of subjectivity (e.g. the tomboy) that can be inhabited for a time in the interstices between age and gender norms, and which might have lasting value. Both films thus dramatise how an interstitial space can offer possibilities for negotiating the terms under which a subject is inserted into dominant, recognisable forms of subjectivity.