The Prostitute and the Cinematic Cabaret

Cinesonidos ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 21-67
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Avila
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
First Sound ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Necessary Evil

Chapter 1 focuses on the diegetic music performed in the prostitute melodrama and the cabaretera subgenre, concentrating on the genre’s associations with sexuality, modernity, and gender. Since the Porfiriato, the prostitute functioned as a deeply controversial figure and symbol of womanhood in popular culture, perceived at once as a social vice and as an exploited “necessary evil.” Santa (1931), the tragic story of a young country girl turned prostitute, became Mexico’s first sound film. Cinema presented her musically in two distinct ways: dance music exposed her as a sexual figure, while romantic and sentimental boleros painted her as a figure of tragedy. This chapter analyzes the function of music performances in two canonic prostitute melodramas, Santa and the 1950 cabaretera film Víctimas del pecado. Music signified the prostitute-protagonist’s split identity as a seductress and an empathetic figure, uncovering her problematic position that continued to be exploited on and off screen.

Call Your "Mutha"

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Caputi
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Mother Nature ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Mother Earth ◽  
Made In

The proposed new geological era, The Anthropocene (a.k.a. Age of Humans, Age of Man), marking human domination of the planet long called Mother Earth, is truly The Age of the Motherfucker. The ecocide of the Anthropocene is the responsibility of Man, the Western- and masculine-identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that masks itself as the exemplar of the civilized and the human. The word motherfucker was invented by the enslaved children of White slave masters to name their mothers’ rapist/owners. Man’s strategic motherfucking, from the personal to the planetary, is invasion, exploitation, spirit-breaking, extraction and toxic wasting of individuals, communities, and lands, for reasons of pleasure, plunder, and profit. Ecocide is attempted deicide of Mother Nature-Earth, reflecting Man’s goal to become the god he first made in his own image. The motivational word Motherfucker has a flip side, further revealing the Anthropocene as it signifies an outstanding, formidable, and inexorable force. Mother Nature-Earth is that “Mutha’ ”—one defying translation into heteropatriarchal classifications of gender, one capable of overwhelming Man, and not the other way around. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American scholarship; ecofeminism; ecowomanism; green activism; femme, queer, and gender non-binary philosophies; literature and arts; Afrofuturism; and popular culture, Call Your “Mutha’ ” contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence of Man’s supremacy over nature, but that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is going away. It is imperative now to call the “Mutha’ ” by decolonizing land, bodies, and minds, ending rapism, feeding the green, renewing sustaining patterns, and affirming devotion to Mother Nature-Earth.

scholarly journals The 1930s Horror Adventure Film on Location in Jamaica: ‘Jungle Gods’, ‘Voodoo Drums’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ in the ‘Secret Places of Paradise Island’

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Emiel Martens
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Mumbo Jumbo ◽  
First Sound ◽  
African Caribbean ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Black Populations ◽  
Made In ◽  
Do So

In this article, I consider the representation of African-Caribbean religions in the early horror adventure film from a postcolonial perspective. I do so by zooming in on Ouanga (1935), Obeah (1935), and Devil’s Daughter (1939), three low-budget horror productions filmed on location in Jamaica during the 1930s (and the only films shot on the island throughout that decade). First, I discuss the emergence of depictions of African-Caribbean religious practices of voodoo and obeah in popular Euro-American literature, and show how the zombie figure entered Euro-American empire cinema in the 1930s as a colonial expression of tropical savagery and jungle terror. Then, combining historical newspaper research with content analyses of these films, I present my exploration into the three low-budget horror films in two parts. The first part contains a discussion of Ouanga, the first sound film ever made in Jamaica and allegedly the first zombie film ever shot on location in the Caribbean. In this early horror adventure, which was made in the final year of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, zombies were portrayed as products of evil supernatural powers to be oppressed by colonial rule. In the second part, I review Obeah and The Devil’s Daughter, two horror adventure movies that merely portrayed African-Caribbean religion as primitive superstition. While Obeah was disturbingly set on a tropical island in the South Seas infested by voodoo practices and native cannibals, The Devil’s Daughter was authorized by the British Board of Censors to show black populations in Jamaica and elsewhere in the colonial world that African-Caribbean religions were both fraudulent and dangerous. Taking into account both the production and content of these movies, I show that these 1930s horror adventure films shot on location in Jamaica were rooted in a long colonial tradition of demonizing and terrorizing African-Caribbean religions—a tradition that lasts until today.

scholarly journals The politics of a ‘Poncy Pillowcase’: Migration and borders in Coronation Street’

Politics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandria J Innes ◽  
Robert J Topinka
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
And Gender

This article examines the ways in which popular culture stages and supplies resources for agency in everyday life, with particular attention to migration and borders. Drawing upon cultural studies, and specific insights originating from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, we explore how intersectional identities such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender are experienced in relation to the globalisation of culture and identity in a 2007 Coronation Street storyline. The soap opera genre offers particular insights into how agency emerges in everyday life as migrants and locals navigate the forces of globalisation. We argue that a focus on popular culture can mitigate the problem of isolating migrant experiences from local experiences in migrant-receiving areas.

scholarly journals POSTMODERNITY, SEXUALITIES AND CULTURE: FEMINIST SCRIPTS AND GENDER POP-ICONS (Review of the book: Gaga Feminism. Sex, Gender, and The End of Normal. J. Jack Halberstam. Boston : Beacon Press, 2013. 157 p.)

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-106
Author(s):  
Tetiana Vlasova
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Icon ◽  
Postmodern Feminism ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga as a postmodern cultural icon manipulating with images and symbols has created in her “performances” a kind of new “post”-postmodern feminism, in which she followed the line of feminine anarchists – in politics, arts and culture. “Gaga ideology”, which in fact “embraces a void”, nowadays is vividly presented across alternative forms of popular culture with the subsequent great impact on the generation of millennials.

Imagining the Mulatta

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasmine Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Political Events ◽  
And Gender

Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media demonstrates how mixed-race women of African and European descent are harnessed in popular media as a tool to uphold white supremacy and discipline people of African descent to uphold state policies of antiblackness. Uncovering the racialized and gendered paradigms of U.S. and Brazilian media, the book uses case studies of texts from a broad range of popular culture media—film, telenovelas, television shows, music videos, magazines, newspapers, and Olympic ceremonies—to elucidate how the U.S. mulatta and Brazilian mulata figures operates within and across the United States and Brazil as a response to racial anxieties and notions of white superiority. These shared concepts of race, gender, and sexuality crystallize in the mulatta/mulata figure as representative of interlinked racial projects in Brazil and the United States. Focusing on popular culture and political events of the 2000s, the book demonstrates how the mulatta and mulata figures facilitated multicultural and postracial discourses. Exploring representations, definitions, and meanings of blackness in the context of the Americas, the book traverses the cultural conditions of racializations in the United States alongside Brazil to unveil the workings of pervasive racial and gender inequalities.

Magic and Gender in Popular Culture

Man as Witch ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 160-173
Author(s):  
Rolf Schulte
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
And Gender

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Christian Dyogi Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
White Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Asian American Women ◽  
Political Ambition ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Candidate Emergence ◽  
And Gender

Chapter 1 begins by presenting an overview of the vicissitudes of descriptive representation in state legislatures for women and men from the four largest racial groups in the United States, from 1996 to 2015. The chapter then previews the book’s main finding: factors related to representation and candidate emergence, such as the relationship between district populations and descriptive representatives or political ambition, are shaped by race and gender simultaneously. To account for the persistence of underrepresentation among women and minorities, Chapter 1 then advances the intersectional model of electoral opportunity. The model accounts for external and internal, multilevel pressures that constrain and facilitate the realistic candidacy opportunities for white women, white men, men of color, and women of color. The chapter closes by discussing the necessity of studying Asian American women and men, and Latinas and Latinos, in order to better understand representation in a nation shaped by immigration and immigrant communities.

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