#ImNotAChickFlick: Neoliberalism and Post-feminism in Veere Di Wedding (My Friend’s Wedding, 2018)

2021 ◽  
pp. 097492762199259
Author(s):  
Megha Anwer ◽  
Anupama Arora
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Female Desire ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Important Landmark ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Mixed Responses ◽  
Hindi Cinema ◽  
The City ◽  
Indian Values

Released in 2018, Shashanka Ghosh’s Veere Di Wedding ( VDW; My Friend’s Wedding), dubbed as India’s answer to Sex and the City, evoked mixed responses. While many reviews of the film denounced it for its vulgarity and tawdriness, frivolity, flippant vision of women’s liberation and as a threat to Indian values, others, however, celebrated it for its frank depiction of female desires. This article undertakes a close study of the film to argue that while the focus on female desire and sexuality is rare in Hindi cinema, and thus VDW marks an important landmark, the film is not a feminist film, and it does not offer a radical politics of female solidarity. On the contrary, by locating it within its neoliberal and postfeminist politics and aesthetics, we will argue that it haphazardly borrows and superimposes tropes from the ‘bromance’ and ‘the buddy road movie’ genres onto its vision of what feminine choices entail and enable. Its casual evocation of elite lifestyles, denigration of working-class women’s life struggles, and sexual humour jeopardise a radical reworking of patriarchal and heteronormative frameworks, and it encourages us to settle for a future in which ‘women playing the same games as men do’ is the only mode of radicalism or emancipation on offer. While it is undeniably refreshing to watch the film’s push back against the repressive taboos surrounding women’s sexuality and desire, these are articulated only within neoliberal renditions of heterosexuality, matrimony, motherhood and consumerism.

The Peer Group’s Agency in a Brazilian School

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-86
Author(s):  
Cinthia Torres Toledo ◽  
Marília Pinto de Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
School Engagement ◽  
Peer Groups ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Educational Trajectories ◽  
Schooling Process ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban State

Black working-class boys are the group with the most significant difficulties in their schooling process. In dialogue with Raewyn Connell, we seek to analyze how the collective conceptions of peer groups have influenced the school engagement of Brazilian boys. We conducted an ethnographic research with students around the age of 14 at an urban state school in the periphery of the city of São Paulo. We analyzed the hierarchization process between two groups of boys, demonstrating the existence of a collective notion of masculinity that works against engagement with the school. Well-known to the Anglophone academic literature, this association is rather uncommon in the Brazilian literature. We have therefore attempted to describe and analyze here the challenges faced by Black working-class Brazilian boys to establish more positive educational trajectories.

Gentrification and neighborhood melancholy. Collective sadness and ambivalence in Dortmund’s Hörde district

2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402098725
Author(s):  
Susanne Frank
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Residential Area ◽  
Artificial Lake ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
The Core ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The City ◽  
The Phoenix

Since 2000, the City of Dortmund has pursued an ambitious flagship project in the district of Hoerde. On the enormous site of a former steel plant, and in the middle of an impoverished working class district, a large new upper-middle class residential area (Phoenix) has been developed around an artificial lake. Qualitative fieldwork suggests that the project has generated mixed feelings among longtime working class dwellers in the old part of Hoerde. Widespread enthusiasm about new lakeside living is interwoven with emotions of sadness and loss, reflecting a neighborhood transformation which unmistakably demonstrates their social, cultural, and political marginalization – feelings that were not allowed to become part of the jubilant official discourse which has marketed the Phoenix project as a shining example of the City’s successful post-industrial structural change. Ever since its announcement, the project has been blamed for triggering gentrification processes – despite the fact that there are still no empirical signs of rising rents or displacement. I argue that the concept of gentrification has been taken up so readily because it is popular, polyvalent, polemical, and critical, enabling citizens to find a language to denounce the blatant social inequalities and power imbalances that competitive urbanism has fostered in Dortmund. However, I also claim that the core of the prevailing sadness – the loss of the familiar neighborhood which could not be grieved over – remains under the radar of standard gentrification discourse. The article thus proposes neighborhood melancholy as a concept to account for the unclear, subconscious, and deeply ambivalent ways in which long-established residents experience their neighborhood’s transformation, expressed within the rubric of gentrification.

THE CONCEPT OF CO-INHERENCE IN THE WORK OF CHARLES WILLIAMS

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-128
Author(s):  
O.B. Lukmanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Holy Trinity ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Unique Interpretation ◽  
Refusal To Participate ◽  
Charles Williams ◽  
The City

The article examines the concept of coinherence (or co-inherence) as one of the central and unifying concepts in the life and work of Charles Stansby Williams (1886 – 1945), English poet, writer, and literary critic, also known as “the third Inkling” in conjunction with C .S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Through a close study of the writer’s biography and letters as well as his poetry, novels, theological treatises and essays we trace the origin of the term “coinherence,” borrowed from the Church Fathers in the meaning of mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Holy Trinity, uncover the unique interpretation that Williams gave to the term, and look at various ways he used to integrate it into his writing. Understanding coinherence as a fundamental ontological principle of comprehensive mutual interdependence, exchanged life, and substitution as direct fulfillment of the Gospel commandment “to carry each other’s burdens,” Williams portrays it as a necessary condition of any truly human existence and expounds its universal nature on every level of life, from childbirth to money as a means of exchange, to mutual services of empathy, to intercessory prayer, and to self-sacrifice for another’s sake. In his thinking, people can carry each other’s burdens even through barriers of space and time, since they are simultaneously co-inherent to each other and to God who exists both outside of time and space and in all time and space. Thus, in his novels Williams often employs a version of Dante’s vertical chronotope of simultaneity, and one of the most important symbols that reflect the nature of coinherence is the City as a web of continuous mutual exchange and substitution, in its turn coinherent to the City of God. Williams portrays refusal to participate in the principle of co-inherence as “descent to hell” which is seen as a gradual unraveling of any personhood and ultimate annihilation.

scholarly journals THE CITY WALLS OF FLORENCE, A METHOD TO MANAGE INFORMATIONS OF A COMPLEX SYSTEM

2020 ◽  
Vol XLIV-M-1-2020 ◽  
pp. 457-464
Author(s):  
J. G. Vitale
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Open Data ◽  
Scientific Innovation ◽  
Important Landmark ◽  
History Of ◽  
City Walls ◽  
University Of Florence ◽  
The University ◽  
Historic City ◽  
The City

Abstract. The city walls of Florence constitute a complex system: six circles and at least nine distinct phases of use and transformation, from the foundation of Florentia to Florence Capital, to contemporary adjustments. The DIDA, Department of Architecture of the University of Florence with the Municipality of Florence, has been carrying out since 2012 the FIMU project with the study of the various walls circuits and diachronic surveys of the surviving wall sections. The aim is to combine and harmonize the historical data with technical-scientific innovation, expressing its own vision of the relationship between the history of the city of Florence and the correct valorization of one of its important Landmark. Every citizen must be able to recognize in the traces of the past his belonging to a community, the results expected from this research are the realization of an informative-didactic and informative apparatus that will emphasize this important historical testimony of Florence and its transformations occurred over the centuries. Data acquisition, processing and visualization methods define this research as ‘experimental’ for the knowledge and evolution of a historic city that would contribute to elevating services for the technical scientific community and the citizen, to which data would become available currently ‘raw’ with the preparation of an apparatus based on a database through the ‘Open Data’ platform of the Municipality of Florence.

“Tangled Passions”: Realism and Lyricism in the Plays of Peter Gill

Modern Drama ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 442-457
Author(s):  
William McEvoy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Time Perspective ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Young Male ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
History Of ◽  
Class Representation ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

This article argues that the work of Welsh theatre director and playwright Peter Gill occupies a unique place in post-1960s’ British playwriting. It explores Gill’s plays as – using theatre critic Susannah Clapp’s phrase – the “missing link” between kitchen-sink realism and more self-consciously poetic forms of theatre text. Gill’s plays make an important contribution to the history of working-class representation in UK theatre for three main reasons: first, the centrality he gives to Wales, Welsh working-class characters, and the city of Cardiff; second, his emphasis on the experience of women, especially mothers; and third, his focus on young male characters expressing and exploring the complexities of same-sex desire. The plays make advances in terms of realist dialogue and structure while also experimenting with layout, repetition, fragmentation, poetic description, and monologue narration. Gill’s work realistically documents the impact of poverty, cramped housing conditions, and social deprivation on his characters as part of a political project to show the lives of Welsh working-class people on stage. While doing so, Gill innovates in his handling of time, perspective, viewpoint, and genre. His plays occupy a distinctive place in the history of British, working-class, gay theatre, helping us to rethink what each of these three key terms means.

Speaking to the ‘Hard Men’: Masculinities, Violence and Youth Gangs in Glasgow, c. 1965–75

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Bartie ◽  
Alistair Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Youth Gangs ◽  
Masculine Identity ◽  
Popular Representations ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
The City

This chapter unites perspectives from history and sociology in excavating the lived experiences of everyday masculinities and violence that lie behind the persistent image of the Glasgow ‘hard man’, while also interrogating popular representations of the ‘hard city’. Drawing on oral history interviews with individuals involved in violent territorialism – specifically through street-based ‘gangs’ of young men – c. 1965-1975, it contrasts popular representations of the Glasgow ‘hard man’ with the lived experiences of those living and working in the city at that time. Focusing specifically on Easterhouse, it highlights the prominence of ‘the street’ in narrative accounts of masculine identity formation for young working-class men and links this to the specific social, cultural and economic composition of the locale. Overall, it argues that such ‘street’ masculinities should be understood in historical context, recognising the influence of local cultures of machismo on the persistence of forms of masculine identity.

Conclusion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marne L. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
The City

Most histories that have been written about black Los Angeles center on the community that developed after the Great Migration. After all, the amount of newer arrivals dwarfed the small numbers who had settled in the city before. These histories take advantage of a richer historical record than what remains of the earlier period of settlement, where migrants’ experiences were virtually unknown. But that does not mean they were non ex is tent. In fact, when one looks closely, one finds a small, thriving black community that worked closely with other racial and ethnic communities in order to maintain itself. This early black community, made up almost entirely of working-class people, together with a very small elite class, created black Los Angeles....

Experts in Womanhood

2018 ◽  
pp. 14-40
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
World War ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Gender Ideals ◽  
Women Police ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The City ◽  
First World

This chapter examines the development of some of Liverpool’s most significant moral welfare organisations between the late-Victorian period and the end of the First World War. It unpacks the early historical trajectories of the House of Help, the Liverpool Vigilance Association, the Liverpool Catholic Women’s League and the Liverpool Women Police Patrols, and it argues that these organisations continued to view women’s relationship to the city through the lens of Victorian gender ideals. Moreover, the chapter examines how the pioneering and well-intended efforts of these organisations to craft a ‘respectable’ form of public womanhood during the first two decades of the twentieth century were still steeped in presumptions about the immorality of the working class, and working-class women in particular.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 297-300
Author(s):  
Hannah Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

This book ends in 1750 but its preoccupations can be traced into the early nineteenth century. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars against France between 1793 and 1815 saw two decades of warfare. Fears of popular revolution dominated the 1790s and 1800s, with radical groups being fiercely suppressed. The government’s concern over radical politics and the politics of class extended to the army. It was remarked that military service abroad had led to soldiers becoming vehement democrats; troops were even alleged to have been reading that working-class radical text ...

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