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| The many hairstyles of Diablo Cody |
-Cody had what many would call a "normal" upbringing, attending a suburban Catholic high school in Illinois (Huffman)
-Cody played in a punk band in high school and is a self-professed nerd who often expresses her individuality in her varying hair styles, tattoos, and clothing styles (Huffman, Cody)
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| Cody as a stripper before her movie career |
-Eventually she left her job as a copy-typist for an ad agency to become a stripper at a Minneapolis strip club (Valby)
-She later wrote a memoir about her experiences in the sex industry called Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper
-Cody learned that strippers have "pent-up rage against men" (Cody 107)
-She claims that she had spent her "entire life choking on normalcy, decency, and Jif sandwiches with the crusts amputated" and says that, for her, "stripping was an unusual kind of escape" from privilege (Cody 210)
-Cody says that although she didn't mind receiving money for stripping and "grinding on customers," she felt "sex with a customer was out of the question" (Cody 67)
-Cody describes stripping as "living by my wits, pissing on my solid Second Wave feminist education, becoming a con artist disguised as dimbulb arm candy" before adding that she "liked it" (original emphasis, Cody 67)
-Cody entered the film world with her first screenplay for comedy-drama called Juno
-She has since been called "distinctively funny" and won the Academy Award for best original screenplay for Juno (qtd. in Valby)
-Cody says she wants to direct films because she feels she has a "responsibility to try because there's such a paucity of female directors" (qtd. in Valby)
-She also aims to represent women in films, saying after seeing the "phallus-driven comedy Superbad" that she "can't let the boys maintain their supremacy. Honestly, the stripping was the abnormality in my life, not this" (qtd. in Huffman)
Cody's unique experiences in the sex industry and her goal to become a successful female film writer, producer, and director make her an interesting subject for study in the realm of gender. Does Cody successfully deconstruct traditional gender roles in her films? Continue reading the Background of Juno.
Image sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
