Reconsidering Women and Female Stardom in 1980s Hollywood: The Case of Goldie Hawn

Abstract

Starting with Private Benjamin (1980), Goldie Hawn became the only female star in mainstream Hollywood to consistently produce her own star-vehicles across the Reagan-Bush years, including films such as Swing Shift (1984), Protocol (1984), Overboard (1987), and Deceived (1991). Despite such notable activity, film studies scholars have neglected both Hawn’s influential position in Hollywood and the wider gendered negotiations of female creatives in the period. This thesis addresses this neglect, engaging in an interdisciplinary discussion of stardom, production, text, and reception to reassess an underexplored narrative of gender and Hollywood across the 1980s. By re-examining Hawn’s contradictory and strategic ‘dumb blonde’ stardom, her creative and political networks, and her relationship with Kurt Russell, I position Hawn as a figure of social and symbolic significance in Hollywood during the decade, staging core questions about women’s role in the home and the workplace, both within the industry and in wider US society. This includes opening out to construct a connective history of Hawn and other women in the leftist Hollywood Women’s Political Committee as well as re-evaluating her star-producing in relation to other female stars with significant control over their own productions, such as Jane Fonda and Barbara Streisand. Drawing on production studies and reception materials, I evidence and contextualise Hawn’s often contradictory positioning within broader industry changes and emerging charged socio-historical discourses relating to feminism and gender in an era of conservative realignment, exposing the tensions that formed as she tried to exercise consistent control over her star-vehicle projects. By examining Hawn’s contestation of both progressive and regressive gendered ideologies, I present transitioning female and feminist spaces within wider structural constraints in 1980s Hollywood. Through this approach, this thesis finds more radical and progressive spaces than have often been recognised in the existing scholarship on Hawn and women in 1980s Hollywood. At the same time, however, it reveals new evidence of containing, patriarchal forces, from both liberal and conservative discursive domains – which increasingly came to be internalised and mobilised by female stars like Goldie Hawn.

Date of Award	7 Jul 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Ian Scott (Supervisor) & Eithne Quinn (Supervisor)