Managing Female Adolescence in Disney's Witch Mountain Movies during the Women's Liberation Era

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Pike
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Control Female ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Adolescence

Although Disney's 1970s Witch Mountain films were tremendously popular with preteen girls, they have been largely overlooked in historical scholarship on gender, film, and second-wave feminism. To help extend and shed new light on the history of girls on film during the women's liberation era, this article explores how Escape to Witch Mountain (1975) and Return from Witch Mountain (1978) negotiate ideas about youthful female independence, power, and sexuality. Though on the surface these films appear to fit Disney's model of “innocent” entertainment, close analysis reveals patterns common to the era's horror films made for adults—especially preoccupations with, and attempts to control, female sexuality. The specific mode of regulation applied to the preteen heroine depended on her age and maturity level. Thus, kindhearted male characters anxiously try to safeguard ten-year-old Tia (Kim Richard)'s innocent sexuality in Escape, while villainous characters viciously try to terminate it in the sequel. This shift, I argue, is tied to Tia's entrance into adolescence and the attendant horror produced by the intermingling of puberty and supernatural power. The films’ attempts to contain Tia's emerging sexuality speak to diffuse cultural anxieties surrounding female empowerment during the rise of women's liberation; yet, in showcasing girlhood strength and agency, they also offer pleasurable possibilities for youthful female identification. An analysis of the films’ gendered tensions not only illuminates how adult creators envisioned girls in the 1970s, but also suggests how girls growing up at the time might have experienced competing discourses about liberation.

The Injustices of Rape

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine O. Jacquet
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
History Of ◽  
Male Supremacy

From 1950 to 1980, activists in the black freedom and women's liberation movements mounted significant campaigns in response to the injustices of rape. These activists challenged the dominant legal and social discourses of the day and redefined the political agenda on sexual violence for over three decades. How activists framed sexual violence--as either racial injustice, gender injustice, or both--was based in their respective frameworks of oppression. The dominant discourse of the black freedom movement constructed rape primarily as the product of racism and white supremacy, whereas the dominant discourse of women's liberation constructed rape as the result of sexism and male supremacy. In The Injustices of Rape, Catherine O. Jacquet is the first to examine these two movement responses together, explaining when and why they were in conflict, when and why they converged, and how activists both upheld and challenged them. Throughout, she uses the history of antirape activism to reveal the difficulty of challenging deeply ingrained racist and sexist ideologies, the unevenness of reform, and the necessity of an intersectional analysis to combat social injustice.

Growing Up from the Counterculture in Family Ties and The Wonder Years

2018 ◽  
pp. 61-92
Author(s):  
Kristen Hoerl
Keyword(s):  
Baby Boomer ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
Baby Boomer Generation ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
The Family

This chapter argues that the television programs Family Ties and The Wonder Years advanced the neoconservative politics of the eighties even as they appeared to evince halting nostalgia for sixties-era dissent. The caricature of the hippie-turned-yuppie in eighties era television teaches viewers that radical beliefs, countercultural lifestyles, and women’s liberation were forms of youthful indiscretion that the baby boomer generation learned to outgrow. These programs recentered the family as the site of individual agency and moral activism, giving televisual form to the ideas undergirding neoliberalism and postfeminism.

scholarly journals CAN EROTIC CAPITAL SUBVERT MASCULINE ECONOMY? AESTHETIC WORK AND THE POST-FEMINIST APPROACH TO ECONOMICS

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nur Tsalits Fahman Mughni
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Capital Theory ◽  
Socio Economic Status ◽  
Liberation Movement ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Erotic Capital

Capitalism is transforming the women’s liberation movement. Theories such as erotic capital are a clear example of how such a transformation takes place by undermining feminism and converting women’s liberation into a product through the aestheticization and fetishization of women. How does this transformation affect the way in which we think about women, female bodies and female sexuality? The erotic capital theory offers a new paradigm to feed the ever-growing need of capitalism for consumption by transforming human bodies and relationships into exchangeable commodities in order to improve women’s socio-economic status instead of questioning the reality behind gendered inequalities.

scholarly journals On Women and their Wombs: Capitalism, Racialization, Feminism

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 263-267
Author(s):  
Françoise Vergès
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
White Women ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
Forced Sterilization ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract This article draws from Françoise Vergès's book, Le ventre des femmes: Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme,* which traces the history of the colonization of the wombs of Black women by the French state in the 1960s and 1970s through forced abortions and the forced sterilization of women in French foreign territories. Vergès retraces the long history of colonial state intervention in Black women's wombs during the slave trade and post-slavery imperialism, and after World War II, when international institutions and Western states blamed the poverty and underdevelopment of the Third World on women of color. Vergès looks at the feminist and Women's Liberation movements in France in the 1960s and 1970s and asks why, at a time of French consciousness about colonialism brought about by Algerian independence and the social transformations of 1968, these movements chose to ignore the history of the racialization of women's wombs in state politics. In making the liberalization of contraception and abortion their primary aim, she argues, French feminists inevitably ended up defending the rights of white women at the expense of women of color, in a shift from women's liberation to women's rights.

A Brief History of the Association for Women in Psychology: 1969–1991

1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 635-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonore Tiefer
Keyword(s):  
American Psychological Association ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
American Psychological ◽  
Women's Liberation Movement ◽  
Liberation Movement ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Women’S Liberation Movement

The Association for Women in Psychology (AWP) was founded in 1969 by American Psychological Association (APA) members who were frustrated with sexism in psychology, in the APA, and at the 1969 APA convention itself. The activism of the 1960s, together with the new women's liberation movement, gave the founders tools and justification for a new organization. This article, the first published AWP history, describes the founding circumstances, early skirmishes concerning structure and operations, evolution of major activities (such as the annual conference, importance of lesbians, growing attention to multiculturalism), and ongoing tensions between centralization and “feminist process.”

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