Surveilling lesbians: The Birds, Hitchcock’s narrative cinema and the criminalization of sexuality

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenden O’Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Rear Window ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Surveillance Practice ◽  
The 1960S

This article analyses The Birds in order to distinguish a form of heteropatriarchy characterized by the development of surveillance practices. In the earlier films Vertigo and Rear Window, female characters were represented as intensely desirable, yet also disturbingly unattainable. This article is dissatisfied with the explanation that Hitchcock’s unattainable woman is an example of the 1960s developing lesbian subjectivity. Instead, I use The Birds to prove that Hitchcock’s representation of women has in mind the projects of arranging women for interrogation, eavesdropping on their conversations and intruding upon their intimate moments. Hitchcock’s voyeurism, construable as ambivalent in earlier films, manifests in The Birds as a surveillance practice that assumes access over the private lives of women: a heteropatriarchal strategy that keeps women’s bodies, if not accessible for men, punishable by them. By keeping tabs on the ways that women grow intimate with one another instead of with men, Hitchcock’s cinema moves from narrative to surveillance, blurring the distinction between cinematography and security footage.

scholarly journals Праблема рэпрэзентацыі жанчыны ў мужчынскай прозе ў асэнсаванні беларускіх даследчыкаў 1960–1980-х гг.

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-109
Author(s):  
Аляксандра Чарнавокая
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Female Images ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The 1960S

The works of A. Matrunenak, A. Adamovich, A. Yaskevich and other resear¬chers who addressed the problem of representation of women in men's prose are examined in the article. For Belarusian literary criticism of the 1960s – 1980s period, this problem was not of central importance but was raised in the analysis of the works written by J. Kolas, M. Zaretsky, K. Chorny and I. Shemyakin. The authors' personal experience, as well as the realism and psychological accuracy of the characters were immensely important for the researchers. The difference in gender experience was one of the reasons for creative failures in the development of female images. The article outlines different approaches to the creation of female characters.

Hollywood Can’t Wait: Elaine May and the Delusions of 1970s American Cinema

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Maya Montañez Smukler
Keyword(s):  
Women Directors ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
First Time ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Made In

Elaine May began her career as a filmmaker during the 1970s when the mythology of the New Hollywood male auteur defined the decade; and the number of women directors, boosted by second wave feminism, increased for the first time in forty years. May’s interest in misfit characters, as socially awkward as they were delusional, and her ability to seamlessly move them between comedy and drama, typified the New Hollywood protagonist who captured America’s uneasy transition from the hopeful rebellion of the 1960s into the narcissistic angst of the 1970s. However, the filmmaker’s reception, which culminated in the critical lambast of her comeback film Ishtar in 1987, was uneven: her battles with studio executives are legendary; feminist film critics railed against her depiction of female characters; and a former assistant claimed she set back women directors by her inability to meet deadlines. This chapter investigates Elaine May’s career within the lore 1970s Hollywood to understand the industrial and cultural circumstances that contributed to the emergence of her influential body of work; and the significant contributions to cinema she made in spite of, and perhaps because of, the conflicts in which she was faced.

Thinking About the Concept of Social Gender With a Film

2020 ◽  
pp. 228-247
Author(s):  
Berceste Gülçin Özdemir
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Public ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Social ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Public Sphere

The concept of social gender is an interdisciplinary matter of debate and is still questioned today. Making sense of this concept is understood by the ongoing codes in the social order. However, the fact that men are still positioned as dominating women in the contrast of the public sphere/private sphere prevents the making sense of the concept of gender. This study questions the concept of social gender through the female characters and male characters presented in the film Tersine Dünya (1993) within the framework of Judith Butler's thoughts regarding the notion of the subject. The thoughts of feminist film theorists also bring the strategies of representation of female characters up for discussion. Butler's thoughts and the discourses of feminist film theorists will enable both making sense of social gender and a more concrete understanding of the concept of the subject. The possibility of deconstruction of patriarchal codes by using classical narrative cinema conventions is also brought up for discussion in the examined film.

The Representation of Women in Feminist Cinema

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Elçin Akçora As ◽  
Alev Fatoş Parsa
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Female Character ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Construct Meaning

In the art of cinema, which fulfills the function of a “dream factory” with its male-dominated narrative structure, men are represented in active roles with their actions, while women in passive roles that do not or cannot interfere with the flow of events with their inactions. This perception, which dominates the cinema, showed a change with the reflection of intellectual context of the Second Wave Feminism to the films. In this sense, in the study, Fried Green Tomatoes, regarded as a feminist film example by movie critics and directed by Jon Avnet in 1991, was chosen as a sample. In the study, structuralist narrative codes that construct meaning in the film are analyzed in the context of feminist thought and film theory paradigms. In the film, the “strong female character representations,” which are placed in the center of narrative and positioned to advance the story, are subjected in the foreground; these characters also stand against the known stereotyped roles imposed on women by traditional narrative cinema.

scholarly journals ‘Nimble Fingers’ in Electronic Music: Rethinking sound through neo-colonial labour

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucie Vágnerová
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Sound Production ◽  
Electronics Industry ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Electronics Assembly ◽  
Electronic Sound ◽  
The 1960S

How can historians of electronic music address the factory labour of the global underclass of women building electronics used in sound technologies? How can we speak to the repetitive work of women who are racially and sexually stereotyped as having ‘nimble fingers’, being ‘detail oriented’ and ‘obedient’? Although women workers in electronics assembly are already de facto entangled in contemporary sound production, scholars have yet to enfold their lives and labour into histories of electronic music. I situate electronic sound technologies since the 1960s in the contexts of the global division of labour and the intimate disciplining of women’s bodies, and investigate the discursive fallout of transnational subcontracting in the electronics industry. I argue that rethinking the category ‘women in electronic music’ is a necessary step for sound studies and musicology, and I call for a new disciplinary understanding of electronic sound and audio as fundamentally neo-colonial.

scholarly journals For the Father of a Newborn

Aspasia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-164
Author(s):  
Amy E. Randall
Keyword(s):  
Postpartum Period ◽  
Health Personnel ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This article introduces the translated pamphlet For the Father of a Newborn by contextualizing it in Soviet medical efforts to deploy men as allies in safeguarding reproduction and bolstering procreation in the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the pamphlet as an illustration of how doctors and other health personnel tried to educate men to protect their wives’ pregnancy and the health of their wives and newborns in the postpartum period, and it considers the implications of these initiatives for women’s bodies, gender norms, sexual practices, models of masculinity, and the socialist goal of promoting women’s equality.

Apocalyptic Fiction, 1950–2015

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather J. Hicks
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Economic Collapse ◽  
The 1960S

From 1950 to the 2010s, the genre known as apocalyptic fiction has grown in prominence, moving from the mass-market domain of science fiction to a more central position in the contemporary literary scene. The term “apocalyptic fiction” can be understood to encompass both depictions of cataclysms that destroy the Earth and texts that portray the aftermath of a disaster that annihilates a nation, civilization, or all but a few survivors of the human population. The term itself finds its roots in the book of Revelation, and while contemporary apocalyptic fiction tends to be largely secular in its worldview, important traces of the Christian tradition linger in these texts. Indeed, while apocalyptic fiction has evolved over the past sixty-five years in response to historical transformations in Western societies, much of it remains wedded to Revelation’s representation of women as the cause of apocalyptic destruction. The material of the 1950s reflects Cold War anxieties about nuclear war while presenting sexually liberated women as implicated in the same modernity that has created the atomic bomb. People of color are also depicted as threats that must be contained. The apocalyptic fiction of the 1960s registers a fascination with genetic, social, and literary mutation, ambivalently treating a variety of “others” as both toxic and potentially useful ambassadors to some new, postmodern condition. The 1970s see the emergence of feminist apocalypses, works that react against the sexist tendency to conflate female power and sexuality with apocalyptic menace. The 1980s introduce the “American apocalypse,” a subgenre that imagines a disaster befalling America in specifically economic terms. The 1990s, meanwhile, find combinations of the feminist and American apocalypse, while also beginning to bring environmental peril into focus. From 2000 forward, there is a renewed interest in broader, more global disasters, in part informed by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Formally, this is the era of the “metapocalypse”—apocalyptic fictions that are self-reflexive about the conventions of the genre, including those involving gender and race. Nonetheless, several of the novels in this period still unapologetically introduce figures that recall Jezebel and Babylon from Revelation. Finally, the period since 2010 has seen a revived emphasis on economic collapse precipitated by neoliberal capitalism as well as the anthropocene.

Female characters in Kenyan women’s short story: From submission to self-reliance

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 68-92
Author(s):  
Alina Rinkanya
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Women's Literature ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
The 1960S

The article analyses the depiction of new types of female characters in the stories by Kenyan female writers published from 2003 to 2012 in literary almanacs Kwani? and Storymoja. The author traces the evolution of female characters from the “victim” type, which appeared in Kenyan women’s literature already in the 1960s, to its modern alternatives – women advocating their rights in all spheres of private and public life.

Fitting In

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Himanee Gupta-Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Asian Women ◽  
South Asian Women ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Fitting In ◽  
Racial Ethnic

This chapter describes the experiences of four South Asian women who grew up in Muncie, Indiana, in the 1960s and 1970s, and of the author’s relationship with them. It situates their experiences within the scholarship on race and ethnicity. Through auto-ethnography, it analyzes how a marking of foreign-ness upon the individual women’s bodies created a consciousness that served at varying times as a source of pride, of shame, protection, and/or confusion. It proposes re-imagining the American landscape as not browner and less Christian than in the past but rather as a space where racial, ethnic, and religious differences were always already embedded.

The Historical and Social Context

Hurt ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Boeri
Keyword(s):  
Drug Use ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Drug Policy ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Law Enforcement Agencies ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
The 1960S

Drug use and drug policy do not happen in a social vacuum. This chapter shows how the social and historical context shaped drug use patterns as a figurative war became literal one. Coming of age during the “peace and love” era of the 1960s, early baby boomers encountered an increasingly punitive drug policy as they aged in adulthood. Mass incarceration left many drug users with a criminal record and limited options for employment. The financial security needed for a stable family life became unattainable for many, and divorce rates increased, with no social safety net for single-parent homes. Working-class and middle-class jobs were replaced by low-paying service work. As fewer boomers could achieve the American Dream, the middle class was vanishing, and one drug epidemic was replaced by another in rapid succession. Law enforcement agencies were given more power over drug users, with minorities and the poor receiving the brunt of this aggressive infringement on their private lives.

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