The Topp Twins: Untouchable girls: The movie

Abstract

The recently released documentary The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls: The Movie (2009) has quickly become an important cultural text in Aotearoa New Zealand. It opened on April 9, 2009 and immediately broke records for best opening day and weekend in New Zealand’s movie history. For readers to get some sense of this documentary, it is worth watching the trailer (http://topptwins.com/tv-and-film/untouchable-girls) which provides a tantalising peak into the life story, so far, of the Topp Twins – much loved New Zealand entertainers. But the documentary does more than chart life stories, it highlights major social and political movements that helped shape national discourses of what it feels like to be a ‘Kiwi’ (the term ‘Kiwi’ is used by people – of all ethnicities and social classes - who feel they have a New Zealand national identity). I have chosen this documentary for this scholar’s choice essay because it links with a number of discourses that inspire my work on how emotions such as ‘pride’ shape people and place. Untouchable Girls illustrates the fluidity and partiality of subjectivities (both individually and collectively) and the ways in which subjectivities can be challenged and contested without humiliation.