Domesticity Stripped Gracious: Reading between the Lines in Calendar Girls

This article proposes reading between the lines as a tool that can be self-empowering for women and in particular for women whose domestic moorings have trained them to inhabit interiors – their home as much as their psyche – of drab existence and conditional worthiness. To demonstrate my working hypothesis, I examine the British comedy Calendar Girls (2003), a film inspired by real events, to probe into the characters’ understanding of the underpinnings and outcome of their decision to pose nude for a charitable calendar. I argue that their implicit reading between the lines of patriarchal and bourgeois sensibilities is empowering for the characters who perform it not only in the short run, by offering them the means to attain their goal, but also in the long run, by enabling them to “re-form” (Kenneth Clarke) both their corporeal self-image as middle-aged women and their self-worth as perceived by themselves and by others too. On the other hand, their means of self-empowerment is double-edged, for it retains that which it hijacks and parodies: women’s nudity. My interpretation is inflected by art critical theorisation of nudity and seeing, gender theory and Linda Hutcheon’s theorisation of “de-doxification” (defamiliarisation of social consensus).