scholarly journals Victim-Warriors and Restorers—Heroines in the Post-Apocalyptic World of Mad Max: Fury Road

Text Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 106-118
Author(s):  
Anna Reglińska-Jemioł
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Gender Discourse ◽  
Action Films ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Previous Series ◽  
Female Solidarity

The article discusses the evolving image of female characters in the Mad Max saga directed by George Miller, focusing on Furiosa’s rebellion in the last film—Mad Max: Fury Road. Interestingly, studying Miller’s post-apocalyptic action films, we can observe the evolution of this post-apocalyptic vision from the male-dominated world with civilization collapsing into chaotic violence visualized in the previous series to a more hopeful future created by women in the last part of the saga: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). We observe female heroes: the vengeful Furiosa, the protector of oppressed girls and sex slaves, the women of the separatist clan, and the wives of the warlord, who bring down the tyranny and create a new “green place.” It is worth emphasizing that the plot casts female solidarity in the central heroic role. In fact, the Mad Max saga emerges as a piece of socially engaged cinema preoccupied with the cultural context of gender discourse. Noticeably, media commentators, scholars and activists have suggested that Fury Road is a feminist film.

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.

scholarly journals Analysis of Memory, Gender, and Identity in Psychological Thrillers with Specific Reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and James Mangold’s Identity

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Merin Susan John
Keyword(s):  
Thematic Analysis ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Practical Implications ◽  
Identity Issue

Purpose: This paper aims to analyze the portrayal and presentation of memory, gender, and identity in selected psychological thrillers. Approach/Methodology/Design: The selected films are Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and James Mangold’s Identity. For the analysis of these films, the researcher employs both narrative and structural approaches; thematic analysis, psychoanalysis, and also feminist film theory. Findings: The results of the analysis show that apart from building suspense and mysteries with the identity issue, these thrillers question the stereotypes and inequality in society through the female characters for the consumerist audience. Hence, these films attempt to break the chains of legitimated stereotypes in the society which create binaries in the lives of people. Practical Implications: The portrayal of illness in psychological thrillers has attracted a lot more audience to seats. Dissociative elements such as memory and identity of the mind perhaps have permeated the film-going experience. The paper showcases these aspects in the selected films. Originality/value: The picturization of the fading identity and the double personality of the characters are central to the interior experience. The capturing of Amnesia and its related themes of memory, identity, and distributed consciousness are common materials in recent films because they can stretch to basic humanistic concerns and contemporary psycho-social issues.

Close up: The female gaze and ethnic difference in two Vietnamese women's films

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 444-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lan Duong
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Ethnic Difference ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Women Filmmakers ◽  
Vietnamese Women ◽  
Female Gaze ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Women's Films

This article looks at two contemporary films by Vietnamese women. In Việt Linh's Travelling Circus (1988) and Phạm Nhuệ Giang's The Deserted Valley (2002), a female gaze is sutured to that of an ethnic minority character's, a form of looking that stresses a shared oppression between women and the ethnic Other. While clearing a space for a desiring female gaze in Vietnamese film, they nonetheless extend an Orientalist view of racialised difference. A feminist film optic, one that does not consider industry history and constructions of race, fails to mark out the layered relations of looking underlying Vietnamese filmmaking. This study attends to the ways women filmmakers investigate gendered forms of looking, sexual desire and otherness within the constraints of a highly male-dominated film industry.

scholarly journals THE REPRESENTATION OF SISTERHOOD IN SUSAN GLASPELL'S TRIFLE: PROXEMIC AND KINESIC ANALYSES

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Ni Komang Arie Suwastini ◽  
Alexei Wahyudiputra
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Feminist Ideology ◽  
Male Dominated

Abstract: Susan Glaspell’s plays have been recognized for its feminist ideologies. The present study traces the representations of the notion of sisterhood in Glaspell’s scrip entitled Trifles by employing Barthes’ semiotics and Fischer-Lichte’s concept of kinesics. Focusing on the gestural and the proxemic signs of the kinesics included in the script, the present study reveals that the notion of sisterhood grows among the female characters in the play through the increasing realization of their similar positions as women in patriarchal society. This development of solidarity among the female characters implies a strong feminist ideology about how women should stand together in facing oppression in male-dominated structures.

Tired Gaze: A Feminist Reading of Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber (2010)

Film Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-35
Author(s):  
Lauren Powell
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Gender Representation ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Male Dominated

Rubber (2010) could be read as a monstrous replication of a male-dominated society that sees women subordinated and exploited simply for their “otherness” to men. This article, however, argues that when a dynamic reading is performed, Rubber can be seen to question Hollywood’s dominant system of gender representation and should therefore be considered a feminist film. In dialogue with feminist theory, it will be claimed that by drawing attention to the artifice of cinema, Dupieux has delivered a feminine text that highlights and calls for change to inherently misogynistic codes and conventions present in traditional dominant cinema and society in general.

Images of Women Resisting the Tide

2020 ◽  
pp. 148-158
Author(s):  
Özgür İpek
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Popular Films ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
General Perspective ◽  
Images Of Women

Many popular movies reproduce dominant cultural life, dominant viewpoints, and norms that we encounter in everyday life. And we also see a public sphere where the discourse of men is displayed as more important, but women are displayed as inferior and powerless in the movies. Against this problematic approach of popular films, the feminist film theorists take this issue into public debate. This study focuses on the concept of social gender through the female characters presented in the movies from a general perspective.

“There Is More to Me Than Just Hunger”: Female Monsters and Liminal Spaces in Monstress and Pretty Deadly

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-66
Author(s):  
Ayanni C. H. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Boundary Crossing ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Female Monsters

This chapter analyzes the power of liminality that forces readers to identify with the transgressive ‘other.’ For the important female characters in the two comic books Monstress and Pretty Deadly, liminality and the abject are paradoxically sources of their power as revealed in their relationship to profanity, blood, and boundary crossing. While these female characters are undoubtedly situated as monsters because their liminal, abject natures, they are also the protagonists, and so the reader is compelled to identify with monstrosity. Because the celebrated creators of these comics, Marjorie Liu and Kelly Sue DeConnick, have voices in the wider U.S. cultural context, there is powerful potential in their choices to call readers to examine their own relationship to the abject and thus to challenge assumptions of social normalcy.

scholarly journals The Theme of Misogyny: A Study of the Select Plays of Vijay Tendulkar

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (S1-i2-Dec) ◽  
pp. 40-46
Author(s):  
R Panguni Malar
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Normal Life ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Female Counterpart

This study is an investigation of the theme of misogyny as represented by the female characters in the select plays of Vijay Tendulkar. The study argues that the Indian cultural context leaves space for man to be superior and woman to be inferior. The term misogyny denotes hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women, manifested in various forms such as physical intimidation and abuse, sexual harassment and rape, social shunning and ostracism, etc. In most of the plays of Vijay Tendulkar women stand to be the objects of subjugation in the hands of their male counterparts with whom they happen to connect with in the hope of leading their normal life. Tendulkar’s plays display a wide range of complex behaviours those constitute different forms of violence – physical attacks and verbal abuses. A thorough analysis of the situations and circumstances related to women in Vijay Tendulkar’s plays reveal that the domestic, personal, political and social ambience in which the characters live in contribute them much violence physically, sexually, psychologically and verbally. As Tendulkar’s plays stand for the middle class society, the man in his plays quite often is brutal towards his female counterpart with his deep rooted ideologies. The paper’s finding speaks on how the woman characters evolve to be strong individuals amidst their adverse ambience.

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