A cure for woundless pain

Author(s):  
Yasheng She

Abstract As a cultural construct, the idol is a consumer product created to “heal” in the age of exhaustion. Layering a “guardian” aspect onto Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze,” this paper contextualizes the commodification and consumption of innocence. This paper brings the documentary, Tokyo Idols (2017), and the animated film, Perfect Blue (1997), into a conversation to theorize how femininity is constructed and commodified in Japan’s pop idol industry. The idol culture consumes innocence only to create more trauma for women by stressing the arbitrary importance of innocence and sacrificing female agency in the process.

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Xiaomeng Li

In some East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and recently, China, there is a popular trend of having male celebrities as brand ambassadors or spokespeople for female cosmetics. This study is situated in the contemporary Chinese market and examines the so-called “Nan Se consumption (nan se xiao fei, 男色消费)” culture, which literally translates into “the consumption of sexualized men” in Chinese. Referring to postfeminism that focuses on female agency and the subjectivity of the female body, this article argues that the shift from “male gaze” to “female gaze,” and the consumption of sexualized men, appear to be revolutionary in terms of evaluating gender power; however, Chinese female consumers’ agency and self-empowerment are still limited by a conditioned neoliberal consumerist culture. The study also proposes that China’s contested “Nan Se consumption” culture reflects the complexity and fluidity of today’s postfeminist theorization.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-151
Author(s):  
Zuzanna Zarebska

Abstract The publication of Germaine Greer’s The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause presents a manifesto for women’s emancipation and their imminent embarkment on the avenue of freedom towards the liberation from the male gaze. In a similar vein, Edna O’Brien, a pioneer of the literary treatment of female agency and sexuality in the Irish literary canon, moves past the age when women enjoy visibility. Age liberates O’Brien from her entrapment in the public persona and her anxious relationship with the public opinion. It has the power to enhance the possibility of women’s difference. Nowadays, the commitment to women’s cause, the inherent element of O’Brien’s narratives, continues to mark out the uncompromising discourse of transgression of the standard as well as her vigilant condemnation of violence against women. In time, O’Brien has become both a foremother author and a legend. She has embraced her unrepressed femininity and the personification of a female sage that Irish women writers have long lacked and may thus represent a role model for authors who wish to transgress the discriminatory standards and defend the female voice.


2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelley Waters Deppa ◽  
Carol Pollack-Nelson ◽  
Elaine D. Allen

Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson

Building on the picture of post-war Anglo-Danish documentary collaboration established in the previous chapter, this chapter examines three cases of international collaboration in which Dansk Kulturfilm and Ministeriernes Filmudvalg were involved in the late 1940s and 1950s. They Guide You Across (Ingolf Boisen, 1949) was commissioned to showcase Scandinavian cooperation in the realm of aviation (SAS) and was adopted by the newly-established United Nations Film Board. The complexities of this film’s production, funding and distribution are illustrative of the activities of the UN Film Board in its first years of operation. The second case study considers Alle mine Skibe (All My Ships, Theodor Christensen, 1951) as an example of a film commissioned and funded under the auspices of the Marshall Plan. This US initiative sponsored informational films across Europe, emphasising national solutions to post-war reconstruction. The third case study, Bent Barfod’s animated film Noget om Norden (Somethin’ about Scandinavia, 1956) explains Nordic cooperation for an international audience, but ironically exposed some gaps in inter-Nordic collaboration in the realm of film.


2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-232
Author(s):  
Anne E. Fernald

The taxicab operated as a crucial transitional mode of transport for bourgeois women, allowing them maximum power as spectators when it was still brave for a woman to be a pedestrian. The writings of Virginia Woolf, which so often depict bourgeois women coping with modernity, form the chief context in which to explore the role of the taxicab in liberating the modern woman. The taxi itself, clumsy and ungendered, encases a woman's body and protects her from the male gaze. At the same time, a woman in a taxi can look out upon the street or freely ignore it. As such, the taxi is a type of heterotopia: a real place but one which functions outside of and in a critical relation to, the norms of the rest of the community.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 19-42
Author(s):  
Khalid Shibib

As a humanitarian worker who was professionally involved for decades in crisis- and war-shaken countries, the author strove to understand the political, socioeconomic, and cultural factors contributing to conflicts. This contextualization, with a focus on Arab countries, confirmed what other thinkers found: the majority of political, economic, social, cultural, religious, and finally humanitarian crises in the Arab world are man-made and can be attributed to both extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Central to the latter appears to be a shared cultural construct that can be termed “Arab reason.” This essay tries to present information on various aspects of the crisis; to understand why reform efforts come so late and why are they are more difficult for Arabs than for other Muslims. It continues by looking at the knowledge systems that govern Arab reason and their evolution, including the decisive role of the religious knowledge system. From there, it proposes some reform ideas including a renewed legal reasoning process with the goal of a future-oriented, knowledge-based, and inclusive Arab Islamic vision. A pragmatic way forward could be an additional unifying eighth legal school (madhhab/madhāhib) to counter sectarian conflicts and violence. This essay is built on a targeted literature search and is not a comprehensive review of the growing literature generated by distinguished thinkers on various aspects of Arab Islamic identity.


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