Page 59 - Tributaries Catalogue
P. 59
Sheroes of the Sea – Popular representations
of youthful female leadership
In this paper, presented at The future has to begin with the issue of
Tributaries Project Seminar (Oct 11) youth, because young people
and Colloquium (Nov 20), Dr Du embody the projected dreams,
Plooy discusses two contemporary desires and commitment of a
sea narratives depicting young society's obligations to the future’.
female leaders. Niki Caro’s 2002 Both Moana and Whale Rider
film, Whale Rider, inspired Disney’s function at the nexus where
2016 animated film, Moana, and feminism, history, indigenous
both, she argues, tell stories of cultures, mythology, narrative
young Pacific Island girls “and their practice and film technology
individual and communal crises of converge. As a result, both films
existence and rites of passage. The participate in the contemporary
classic hero's journey merges with critical pedagogical revisioning and
the iconic trope of the sea journey remythologising task, by providing
(both traditionally male genres) and female equivalents or parallels to
both are presented as the inner previously male dominated
quest of young girls and their mythologies and narratives of
subsequent transformation of the heroic journeying and quest,
communities they eventually will thereby contributing to a tradition
lead.” Henry Giroux, Du Plooy adds, of female sheroics.” (Photos, right
“says that ‘any discourse about the and page 52: Belinda Du Plooy.)
50
