scholarly journals Representations of female obesity in contemporary cinema

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Drummond

This essay will look at a particular aspect of the ongoing identity politics surrounding the representation of women and how fat females are commonly represented in Hollywood film in the late twentieth century. Although films are constructions that aim to reflect or depict reality, they often provide flattened characterizations of fat people, particularly fat women. Because no artistic production can escape the culture within which it is made, Hollywood movies, as well as independently funded and distributed "art house" films, often embed popular stereotypes or misconceptions in the characterization of marginalized people, including the obese. There are many ways to "represent" fatness in film: through the script, cinematography, plot, and the whether it uses a real fat body or a rubber suit. This paper will investigate how one might negotiate representations of obesity in a society that perceives fat as a social evil and fat individuals as "agents of abhorrence and disgust" (LeBesco, 2004, p. 1). -- Page 7.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Drummond

This essay will look at a particular aspect of the ongoing identity politics surrounding the representation of women and how fat females are commonly represented in Hollywood film in the late twentieth century. Although films are constructions that aim to reflect or depict reality, they often provide flattened characterizations of fat people, particularly fat women. Because no artistic production can escape the culture within which it is made, Hollywood movies, as well as independently funded and distributed "art house" films, often embed popular stereotypes or misconceptions in the characterization of marginalized people, including the obese. There are many ways to "represent" fatness in film: through the script, cinematography, plot, and the whether it uses a real fat body or a rubber suit. This paper will investigate how one might negotiate representations of obesity in a society that perceives fat as a social evil and fat individuals as "agents of abhorrence and disgust" (LeBesco, 2004, p. 1). -- Page 7.


1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 145-150
Author(s):  
Deonna Kelli

Identity politics has become the catch phrase of the postmodern age. Withconcepts such as "exile," "migrancy," and "hybridity" acquiring unprecedentedcultural significance in the late twentieth century, the postcolonial age givesway to new identities, fractured modes of living, and new conditions of humanity.Literature is a powerful tool to explore such issues in an era where a greatdeal of the world is displaced, and the idea of a homeland becomes a disrupted,remote possibility. The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam's Impact onContemporary Literature, is an attempt to discuss how Muslims negotiateidentity at a time of rapid and spiritually challenging transculturation. The bookuses fiction written by Muslims to critique the effects of colonialism, counteractmodernity, and question the status of Islamic identity in the contemporaryworld. It also can be considered as the primary introduction of contemporaryIslamic literature into the postcolonial genre. Muslim writers have yet to submit a unique and powerful commentary on postcolonial and cultural studies;this work at least softens that absence.The Postcolonial Crescent was conceived as a response to The SatanicVerses controversy. Therefore, it is “intimately involved in the interchangebetween religion and the state, and demonstrates that the roles Islam is playingin postcolonial nation-building is especially contested in the absence of broadlyacceptable models” (p. 4). Conflicting issues of identity are approached byinterrogating the authority to define a “correct” Islamic identity, the role ofindividual rights, and the “variegation of Islamic expression within specificcultural settings, suggesting through the national self-definitions the many concernsthat the Islamic world shares with global postcoloniality” (p. 7) ...


2021 ◽  
pp. 70-113
Author(s):  
Timothy Yu

The category of the “Asian Australian” has emerged only in recent years, as the exclusionary “White Australia” policy gave way in the late-twentieth century to substantial waves of Asian immigration. Journals and anthologies from the mid-2000s onward have employed the idea of “Asian” identification with an eye on North American examples and shared history, but also with a discomfort with US-style “identity politics.” Ouyang Yu, among the first and best-known Asian Australian poets, is harshly critical of Australian multiculturalism, seeing it as a means of continuing to exclude non-white writers from Australian writing; remaining suspicious of any notion of belonging, his work instead presents itself as a kind of “invasion literature” that seeks to disrupt the English language.


2021 ◽  
pp. 110-124
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

‘Against universalism’ explores the myriad challenges to universalism—in philosophy, social and political theory, and the arts—during the late twentieth century. It opens with a new view of 1960s radicalism, showing how its various quests for liberation radiated out into all arenas of American thought. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) helped pave the way for the fire and fury of postmodernism, though many of the antiessentialist ideas of postmodernism were already present in early twentieth-century was rooting in dramatic transformations of thought. The 1980s and 1990s gave rise to identity politics and the culture wars, further challenging the notion of unified American ideals and identity.


2005 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 42-49
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein

Verity Burgmann creates an unnecessary and ahistorical distinction between the politics of class and that of the various identities through which the contemporary working class defines itself. Indeed, her vision of a self-conscious proletariat seems too male and too musty. Racial and gender identities have achieved a privileged status, compared to that of class, but this has less to do with the outlook of the left-wing academy than with the late twentieth-century transformation of law, politics, and social policy, both in the US and other multicultural nations.


What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history


2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.


1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.


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