Herstories on Screen

Herstories on Screen PDF Author: Kathleen Cummins
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231851294
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
From the late 1970s into the early 1990s, a generation of female filmmakers took aim at their home countries’ popular myths of the frontier. Deeply influenced by second-wave feminism and supported by hard-won access to governmental and institutional funding and training, their trailblazing films challenged traditionally male genres like the Western. Instead of reinforcing the myths of nationhood often portrayed in such films—invariably featuring a lone white male hero pitted against the “savage” and “uncivilized” native terrain—these filmmakers constructed counternarratives centering on women and marginalized communities. In place of rugged cowboys violently removing indigenous peoples to make the frontier safe for their virtuous wives and daughters, these filmmakers told the stories of colonial and postcolonial societies from a female and/or subaltern point of view. Herstories on Screen is a transnational study of feature narrative films from Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand/Aotearoa that deconstruct settler-colonial myths. Kathleen Cummins offers in-depth readings of ten works by a diverse range of women filmmakers including Jane Campion, Julie Dash, Merata Mita, Tracey Moffatt, and Anne Wheeler. She reveals how they skillfully deploy genre tropes and popular storytelling conventions in order to critique master narratives of feminine domesticity and purity and depict women and subaltern people performing acts of agency and resistance. Cummins details the ways in which second-wave feminist theory and aesthetics informed these filmmakers’ efforts to debunk idealized Anglo-Saxon femininity and motherhood and lay bare gendered and sexual violence and colonial oppression.

Herstories on Screen

Herstories on Screen PDF Author: Kathleen Cummins
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231851294
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book

Book Description
From the late 1970s into the early 1990s, a generation of female filmmakers took aim at their home countries’ popular myths of the frontier. Deeply influenced by second-wave feminism and supported by hard-won access to governmental and institutional funding and training, their trailblazing films challenged traditionally male genres like the Western. Instead of reinforcing the myths of nationhood often portrayed in such films—invariably featuring a lone white male hero pitted against the “savage” and “uncivilized” native terrain—these filmmakers constructed counternarratives centering on women and marginalized communities. In place of rugged cowboys violently removing indigenous peoples to make the frontier safe for their virtuous wives and daughters, these filmmakers told the stories of colonial and postcolonial societies from a female and/or subaltern point of view. Herstories on Screen is a transnational study of feature narrative films from Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand/Aotearoa that deconstruct settler-colonial myths. Kathleen Cummins offers in-depth readings of ten works by a diverse range of women filmmakers including Jane Campion, Julie Dash, Merata Mita, Tracey Moffatt, and Anne Wheeler. She reveals how they skillfully deploy genre tropes and popular storytelling conventions in order to critique master narratives of feminine domesticity and purity and depict women and subaltern people performing acts of agency and resistance. Cummins details the ways in which second-wave feminist theory and aesthetics informed these filmmakers’ efforts to debunk idealized Anglo-Saxon femininity and motherhood and lay bare gendered and sexual violence and colonial oppression.

Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850

Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850 PDF Author: Sandra Slater
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643363697
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Groundbreaking historical scholarship on the complex attitudes toward gender and sexual roles in Native American culture, with a new preface and supplemental bibliography Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans across the continent had developed richly complex attitudes and forms of expression concerning gender and sexual roles. The role of the "berdache," a man living as a woman or a woman living as a man in native societies, has received recent scholarly attention but represents just one of many such occurrences of alternative gender identification in these cultures. Editors Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough have brought together scholars who explore the historical implications of these variations in the meanings of gender, sexuality, and marriage among indigenous communities in North America. Essays that span from the colonial period through the nineteenth century illustrate how these aspects of Native American life were altered through interactions with Europeans. Organized chronologically, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400–1850 probes gender identification, labor roles, and political authority within Native American societies. The essays are linked by overarching examinations of how Europeans manipulated native ideas about gender for their own ends and how indigenous people responded to European attempts to impose gendered cultural practices at odds with established traditions. Many of the essays also address how indigenous people made meaning of gender and how these meanings developed over time within their own communities. Several contributors also consider sexual practice as a mode of cultural articulation, as well as a vehicle for the expression of gender roles. Representing groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Native American studies, these insightful discussions of gender, sexuality, and identity advance our understanding of cultural traditions and clashes that continue to resonate in native communities today as well as in the larger societies those communities exist within.

The Gendered Screen

The Gendered Screen PDF Author: Brenda Austin-Smith
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 9781554581955
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This book is the first major study of Canadian women filmmakers since the groundbreaking Gendering the Nation (1999). The Gendered Screen updates the subject with discussions of important filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta, Anne Wheeler, Mina Shum, Lynne Stopkewich, Léa Pool, and Patricia Rozema, whose careers have produced major bodies of work. It also introduces critical studies of newer filmmakers such as Andrea Dorfman and Sylvia Hamilton and new media video artists. Feminist scholars are re-examining the ways in which authorship, nationality, and gender interconnect. Contributors to this volume emphasize a diverse feminist study of film that is open, inclusive, and self-critical. Issues of hybridity and transnationality as well as race and sexual orientation challenge older forms of discourse on national cinema. Essays address the transnational filmmaker, the queer filmmaker, the feminist filmmaker, the documentarist, and the video artist—just some of the diverse identities of Canadian women filmmakers working in both commercial and art cinema today.

Women and the War Story

Women and the War Story PDF Author: Miriam Cooke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918096
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
In a book that radically and fundamentally revises the way we think about war, Miriam Cooke charts the emerging tradition of women's contributions to what she calls the "War Story," a genre formerly reserved for men. Concentrating on the contemporary literature of the Arab world, Cooke looks at how alternatives to the master narrative challenge the authority of experience and the permission to write. She shows how women who write themselves and their experiences into the War Story undo the masculine contract with violence, sexuality, and glory. There is no single War Story, Cooke concludes; the standard narrative—and with it the way we think about and conduct war—can be changed. As the traditional time, space, organization, and representation of war have shifted, so have ways of describing it. As drug wars, civil wars, gang wars, and ideological wars have moved into neighborhoods and homes, the line between combat zones and safe zones has blurred. Cooke shows how women's stories contest the acceptance of a dyadically structured world and break down the easy oppositions—home vs. front, civilian vs. combatant, war vs. peace, victory vs. defeat—that have framed, and ultimately promoted, war.

The Cinema of Louis Malle

The Cinema of Louis Malle PDF Author: Philippe Met
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023185126X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description
Arguably a pioneer of the French New Wave (with Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, 1957) Louis Malle went on to enjoy an acclaimed yet provocative and versatile transatlantic career. This collection of original essays proposes to reassess his richly eclectic and boldly subversive oeuvre and redress the surprising critical neglect it has suffered over the years. It does so through a combination of transversal and monographic analyses that use a variety of critical lenses and theoretical tools in order to examine Malle’s documentaries as well as his fiction features (and, more importantly, the constant shuttling and uniquely persistent cross-pollination between those two cinematic approaches), illuminate the profound, lasting dialogue his films entertained with literature and theater, bring to the fore their sustained, albeit often oblique autobiographical thrust along with their scathing sociopolitical critique, and scrutinize the alternating use of stars and non-professional actors. In addition, the volume features an exclusive interview with the acclaimed playwright John Guare (a close friend and collaborator of Louis Malle’s who scripted Atlantic City) and is bookended by a foreword by Volker Schlöndorff and an afterword by Wes Anderson, two renowned filmmakers who articulate their admiration for, and the seminal influence of, their predecessor.

Uproarious

Uproarious PDF Author: Cynthia Willett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781517908294
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A radical new approach to humor, where traditional targets become its agents Humor is often dismissed as cruel ridicule or harmless fun. But what if laughter is a vital force to channel rage against patriarchy, Islamophobia, or mass incarceration? To create moments of empathy and dialogue between Black Lives Matter and the police? These and other such questions are at the heart of this powerful reassessment of humor. Placing theorists in conversation with comedians, Uproarious offers a full-frontal approach to the very foundation of comedy and its profound political impact. Here Cynthia Willett and Julie Willett address the four major theories of humor--superiority, relief, incongruity, and social play--through the lens of feminist and game-changing comics such as Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho, Hannah Gadsby, Hari Kondabolu, and Tig Notaro. They take a radical and holistic approach to the understanding of humor, particularly of humor deployed by those from groups long relegated to the margins, and propose a powerful new understanding of humor as a force that can engender politically progressive social movements. Drawing on a range of cross-disciplinary sources, from philosophies and histories of humor to the psychology and physiology of laughter to animal studies, Uproarious offers a richer understanding of the political and cathartic potential of humor. A major new contribution to a wider dialogue on comedy, Uproarious grounds for us explorations of outsider humor and our golden age of feminist comics--showing that when women, prisoners, even animals, laugh back, comedy along with belly laughs forge new identities and alter the political climate.

Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature

Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature PDF Author: Justyna Sempruch
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 161249899X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
In Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Justyna Sempruch analyzes contemporary representations of the “witch” as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders. Sempruch revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current perceptions in feminist scholarship of exclusion and difference. She examines a selection of twentieth-century US American, Canadian, and European narratives to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the archetype of the “witch” widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging with these metaphors, Sempruch develops a new concept of the witch, one that challenges traditional gender-biased theories linking it either to a malevolent “hag” on the margins of culture or to unrestrained “feminine” sexual desire. Sempruch turns, instead, to the causes for radical feminist critique of “feminine” sexuality as a fabrication of logocentric thinking and shows that the problematic conversion of the “hag” into a “superwoman” can be interpreted today as a therapeutic performance translating fixed identity into a site of continuous negotiation of the subject in process. Tracing the development of feminist constructs of the witch from 1970s radical texts to the present, Sempruch explores the early psychoanalytical writings of Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, and feminist reformulations of identity by Butler and Braidotti, with fictional texts from different political and cultural contexts.

Turkish Cinema

Turkish Cinema PDF Author: Gönül Dönmez-Colin
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861895836
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Films often act as a prism that refracts the issues facing a nation, and Turkish cinema in particular serves to encapsulate the cultural and social turmoil of modern-day Turkey. Acclaimed film scholar Gönül Dönmez-Colin examines here the way that national cinema reveals the Turkish quest for a modern identity. Marked by continually shifting ethnic demographics, politics, and geographic borders, Turkish society struggles to reconcile modern attitudes with traditional morals and centuries-old customs. Dönmez-Colin examines how contemporary Turkish filmmakers address this struggle in their cinematic works, positing that their films revolve around ideas of migration and exile, and give voice to previously subsumed “denied identities” such as that of the Kurds. Turkish Cinema also crucially examines how these films confront taboo subjects such as homosexuality, incest, and honor killings, issues that have only become viable subjects of discussion in the new generation of Turkish citizens. A deftly written and thought-provoking study, Turkish Cinema will be invaluable for scholars of Middle East studies and cinephiles alike.

Academic Women in Neoliberal Times

Academic Women in Neoliberal Times PDF Author: Briony Lipton
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030450627
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This book investigates the gendered dimensions of academic life in the contemporary Australian university. It examines key discourses – most notably academic performativity and identity – through a feminist lens, and scrutinises how discourses of neoliberalism and feminism are entangled in the structure, systems, operations and cultures of the university. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with academic women in Australia, the author uses a mix of experimental methods to emphasise the performative and discursive decisions women make with regard to their academic careers. In doing so, this book reveals how women themselves generate neoliberal and feminist shifts, how they manage the contradictions they produce, and how they carve spaces of influence and authority. Moving towards a re-evaluation of existing discourses, this book offers new insights into gender inequality in the Australian university in neoliberal times.

Japanese Mythology in Film

Japanese Mythology in Film PDF Author: Yoshiko Okuyama
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739190938
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
A cyborg detective hunts for a malfunctioning sex doll that turns itself into a killing machine. A Heian-era Taoist slays evil spirits with magic spells from yin-yang philosophy. A young mortician carefully prepares bodies for their journey to the afterlife. A teenage girl drinks a cup of life-giving sake, not knowing its irreversible transformative power. These are scenes from the visually enticing, spiritually eclectic media of Japanese movies and anime. The narratives of courageous heroes and heroines and the myths and legends of deities and their abodes are not just recurring motifs of the cinematic fantasy world. They are pop culture’s representations of sacred subtexts in Japan. Japanese Mythology in Film takes a semiotic approach to uncovering such religious and folkloric tropes and subtexts embedded in popular Japanese movies and anime. Part I introduces film semiotics with plain definitions of terminology. Through familiar cinematic examples, it emphasizes the myth-making nature of modern-day film and argues that semiotics can be used as a theoretical tool for reading film. Part II presents case studies of eight popular Japanese films as models of semiotic analysis. While discussing each film’s use of common mythological motifs such as death and rebirth, its case study also unveils more covert cultural signifiers and folktale motifs, including jizo (a savior of sentient beings) and kori (bewitching foxes and raccoon dogs), hidden in the Japanese filmic text.