The Grid, the Spectacle and the Labyrinth in The Big Clocks Skyscraper: Queered Space and Cold War Discourse

Film Studies ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-48
Author(s):  
Merrill Schleier
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Style ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
War Discourse ◽  
War Film

The Big Clocks skyscraper is a mechanical, entrapping grid controlled by a huge timepiece. It is presided over by the homosexual Janoth who tries to frame Stroud for a murder that he committed. This article traces Stroud‘s journey within the International Style skyscrapers temporarily ‘queered spaces.’ The Cold War film seeks the removal of undesirable ‘aliens’ to liberate capitalist space and reassert hegemonic heterosexuality. The married Stroud outsmarts his adversaries, leading to Janoth‘s death by his own building. After Janoth is symbolically ‘outed,’ he kills his partner before plummeting down a hellish elevator shaft, punishment for his ‘perverse’ deeds.

Poststructuralism and Security

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lene Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Important Challenge ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
War Discourse

Poststructuralism is an International Relations (IR) theory that entered the domain of Security Studies during the Second Cold War. During this period, poststructuralists engaged with power, security, the militarization of the superpower relationship, and the dangers that the nuclear condition was believed to entail. Poststructuralism’s concern with power, structures, and the disciplining effects of knowledge seemed to resonate well with the main themes of classical realist Security Studies. At the same time, the discursive ontology and epistemology of poststructuralism set it apart not only from Strategic Studies, but from traditional peace researchers who insisted on “real world” material referents and objective conceptions of security. The unexpected end of the Cold War brought challenges as well as opportunities for poststructuralism. The most important challenge that arose was whether states needed enemies. The terrorist attacks of September 11 and “The War on Terror” also had a profound impact on poststructuralist discourse. First, poststructuralists held that “terrorism” and “terrorists” had no objective, material referent, but were signs that constituted a radical Other. They viewed the actions on September 11 as “terror,” “acts of war,” and “orchestrated,” rather than “accidents” committed by a few individuals. The construction of “terrorists” as “irrational” intersected with poststructuralist deconstructions of rational–irrational dichotomies that had also been central to Cold War discourse. These responses to “the War on Terror” demonstrated that poststructuralist theory still informs important work in Security Studies and that there are also crucial intersections between poststructuralism and other approaches in IR.

How Red was my Valley: Hollywood, the Cold War Film, and I Married A Communist

1984 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Leab
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
War Film

Turkish Mother Citizens and Their Homefront Duties: The Cold War Discourse of the Türk Kadını Magazine

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatma Fulya Tepe
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
War Discourse

Screen Play: Chronoscope, 1951, 11pm

ARTMargins ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-147
Author(s):  
Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck ◽  
Media Farzin
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Television News ◽  
Direct Transcription ◽  
News Program ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
War Discourse ◽  
Screen Play

“Screen Play” is a collaged conversation that entangles complementary views on international politics during the Cold War, particularly in relation to Iran. The text is a direct transcription from the Longines Chronoscope television news program (1951–55), but the speakers' words have been edited to bring them in dialogue with each other, emphasizing the program's role in the manufacture of consent, as a sounding board for Cold War discourse, and as a precursor of today's infotainment.

Engineering Science Education and the Indian Institutes of Technology

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Dhruv Raina
Keyword(s):  
Science Education ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Engineering Science ◽  
Technological Education ◽  
Institutes Of Technology ◽  
Education In India ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
War Discourse

The last two decades have witnessed a revival of research interest in the Cold War, and on science during the Cold War, from a revised social theoretic perspective.1 Part of this reframing is evident in explorations of the relationship underpinning the Cold War discourse and modernisation theory. Drawing on this new turn, this article switches the register to the first decades of decolonisation, and revisits the establishment of elite institutes of engineering and engineering science, such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai, in order to understand the consequences of the entanglement of the Cold War discourse with decolonisation on higher technological education in India in the 1950s. The article argues that within the realm of technological or engineering science education, across the Cold War divide, the globalisation of higher technological education or the ‘Americanization of higher education’ as Krige calls it, is evident, as much at the elite IITs in India as elsewhere.

The Queer Afterlife of Gossip

2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-412
Author(s):  
Chad Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Queer Art ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
War Discourse ◽  
Changing Light ◽  
Ouija Board

This article reveals the formative interplay between the queer art of gossip and poetic practice in James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, a sprawling verse trilogy composed with the unlikely assistance of a Ouija board. The poem’s extensive gossip with the dead is often dismissed as mere surface. Yet Merrill, the article contends, indulges in what he calls the Ouija’s “backstage gossip” both to establish a queer relationship to poetic tradition and to confront the pervasive menace of the Cold War discourse of the Lavender Scare, which haunts the trilogy’s 1950s origins. Arguing that midcentury American attitudes about sexuality inflect—productively as much as disastrously—the relationship of lyric privacy to gossipy publicity in Merrill’s poem, the article shows how gossip, in its rich afterlife in Sandover, emerges not so much as a normative threat to be overcome but as a mode of fostering and preserving nonnormative voices, converting the privacy imposed on the homosexual into the conditions for creating queer worlds. Gossip concomitantly provides Merrill with a model of poetic self-performance that at once pushes against and embraces New Critical ideals of lyric subjectivity—a way of telling one’s own scandalous story through someone else’s words, even words intended as hostile, discovering poetic and sexual pleasures where others see only anxiety and dread.

Gendered Peace, Women’s Peace

2019 ◽  
pp. 128-161
Author(s):  
Petra Goedde
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Advocacy Groups ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Women Strike For Peace ◽  
War Discourse ◽  
Political Realm ◽  
International League

During the early years of the Cold War, women were active participants in all major peace advocacy groups, and they continued to work in traditional women’s peace organizations, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). They also created new groups, such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), Women Strike for Peace (WSP), and Another Mother for Peace (AMfP). Some groups relied heavily on their identity as women and mothers, others not at all. Regardless of how much or little they emphasized a special feminine disposition toward peace, these activists believed that their common experiences as women and mothers united them across national, ideological, and religious divides. Gendered language in the Cold War discourse on peace reinforced the notion that women had a special predisposition toward peace. The gendering of peace empowered women in the political realm, but it also allowed male-dominated political elites to marginalize peace as a women’s issue.

scholarly journals Cold War History beyond the Cold War Discourse: A Conversation with Łukasz Stanek

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilde Heynen ◽  
Sebastiaan Loosen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cold War History ◽  
War Discourse

From "Asia's East" to "East Asia": Aborted Decolonization of Taiwan in the Cold-War Discourse

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-302
Author(s):  
Chih-yu Shih
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
War Discourse

Martyrs, Miracles, and Martians: Religion and Cold War Cinematic Propaganda in the 1950s

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The West ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
American Movies ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Mass Entertainment ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
War Film

This article examines Cold War film propaganda in the 1950s, when the cin-ema was enjoying its last period as the dominant visual mass entertainment form in both the West and the East. I concentrates on the role that religion played as a theme of propaganda primarily in British and American movies, as well as some of the Soviet films released during the decade. The article ex-plores the relationship between film output and state propagandists to show how religious themes were incorporated into films dealing with Cold War is-sues, and considers how audiences received the messages contained within these films. The article therefore builds on recent scholarship that highlights the importance of ideas and culture during the Cold War by looking at the adoption and adaptation of religion as a tool of propaganda.

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