Where in the World are Chinese Women Filmmakers? Transnational China and World Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

Transnational Chinese women filmmakers reflect the enormous changes happening in the global film industry as well as political, economic, technological, social, and cultural transformations taking place in the region since the beginning of the millennium. An analysis of Hong Kong writer-director Aubrey Lam’s Anna & Anna (2007) uncovers how this film explores the divided psyche of a woman torn between “two systems” that model femininity for women in Singapore and Shanghai in the 21st century. Lam’s narrative touches on issues central to the work of many women working across the Chinese-speaking world including migration, labor relations, postcolonial and postsocialist identities, commodification of female bodies in consumer culture, cross-border sexualities, female desire and domesticity.

The Golden Ages of Porn: the 1970s (Translation into Russian)

This essay focuses on the brief moment in early seventies filmmaking when the porn industry made narrative-based films such as Deep Throat (1972) and Behind the Green Door (1972). This attempt to fuse porn with mainstream culture has come back into vogue in the present, when we see a new legitimization of porn. One might say that recent representations of sex on the screen have attempted to go back to the early seventies to restart a trajectory that was never able to complete itself. The essay begins with a consideration of the origins of porn films in nineteenth-century European art before moving on to the discussion of the seventies porn films and the complex way in which European art cinema influenced mainstream porn. Related to this topic are how cultural differences within countries influence the approach to sex that is expressed on the screen. In the US, the seventies full-length porn films legitimized certain sexual acts for their audiences and centered some of the pleasure on the screen on female desire as a way to expand the audience for porn. The essay concludes with a coda on the gay male cinematic equivalents of straight seventies porn films.

“Cherchez la fiction”: Stories of Self-Realization in Anne Garréta’s Pas un jour and Leïla Slimani’s Sexe et mensonges

Faced with the hermetic interiority of post-structuralist narratives, twenty-first-century French literature tends to turn outwards and explore sociohistorical realities as a fertile source of fiction. In this article, I compare two contemporary writers rarely paired together—Anne Garréta and Leïla Slimani—to consider the enduring importance of discursive paradigms in realizing a sense of self. Although Garréta’s mechanised autobiographical aesthetic in Pas un Jour seems to jar with Slimani’s ethnographic journalism in Sexe et mensonges, I argue that both use heuristic narratives to conduct a survey of female desire whose reality is only legible in literature. Intersecting with narrative theories formulated by Barthes, Jameson and Cixous, this article argues that Slimani and Garréta perform their lived sexual experience through a carefully manufactured textual machine that grants them freedom. Only through the straitjacket of a fictional system can the reader glean the reality of female subjectivities so long obscured by myth.

The Indian Women Writers and their Contributions to Indian Literature

The Indian women writers are the one who mainly talks about the male ego and female desire for freedom. Through their writings women writer tries to oppose the male dominance over them. Indian women writers depict the injustices, the anguish and the despair they received in a male dominated society. Many of the writings can be considered as a mutiny against the restraints which the society thrust upon women. In this man-centered world they are trying to bring out the feminine identity through their works. Indian women writers never attempted to adopt any masculine roles to achieve themselves as equal as men, but through their writings they came across all the barrier of class, gender and space boundaries. They try to project masculinity and femininity as equal categories. Though through their works the Indian women writers tries to project women’s responses to gender questions. However, they tried to depict the fact that writings of women need not be differentiated by language or location.

#ImNotAChickFlick: Neoliberalism and Post-feminism in Veere Di Wedding (My Friend’s Wedding, 2018)

Released in 2018, Shashanka Ghosh’s Veere Di Wedding ( VDW; My Friend’s Wedding), dubbed as India’s answer to Sex and the City, evoked mixed responses. While many reviews of the film denounced it for its vulgarity and tawdriness, frivolity, flippant vision of women’s liberation and as a threat to Indian values, others, however, celebrated it for its frank depiction of female desires. This article undertakes a close study of the film to argue that while the focus on female desire and sexuality is rare in Hindi cinema, and thus VDW marks an important landmark, the film is not a feminist film, and it does not offer a radical politics of female solidarity. On the contrary, by locating it within its neoliberal and postfeminist politics and aesthetics, we will argue that it haphazardly borrows and superimposes tropes from the ‘bromance’ and ‘the buddy road movie’ genres onto its vision of what feminine choices entail and enable. Its casual evocation of elite lifestyles, denigration of working-class women’s life struggles, and sexual humour jeopardise a radical reworking of patriarchal and heteronormative frameworks, and it encourages us to settle for a future in which ‘women playing the same games as men do’ is the only mode of radicalism or emancipation on offer. While it is undeniably refreshing to watch the film’s push back against the repressive taboos surrounding women’s sexuality and desire, these are articulated only within neoliberal renditions of heterosexuality, matrimony, motherhood and consumerism.

A Bedroom Story

The films of Chantal Akerman explore one of the key issues in the representation of female desire: the debate about the mechanisms of a language which, according to Laura Mulvey, is based on a male gaze founded on scopophilia, voyeurism, and fetishism. This article uses the film La captive (2000) and the desire between its two protagonists, Ariane and Simon, to reconsider the link established in feminist theory between language, the gaze, and desire. My hypothesis is that the confinement of Akerman’s female protagonist, expressed through the two dimensions of submission and intimacy, takes an approach to female desire that constitutes an alternative to the forms of the gaze associated with the male tradition of representation. This approach engages in a close dialogue with the concept of desire posited by Emmanuel Levinas, whose ideas had a huge influence on Akerman’s understanding of how to film the Other, as well as the relationship between the image and its observer.

Celebrating Female Desire in the Medieval Era: an Exegesis of the Erotic Verses from Jayadeva’s G?tagovinda

Discussing women’s sexual desire has long been perceived as a taboo in the East and the West as well. Undeniably, there is a stigma attached to it which, unfortunately, continues even today. However, surprisingly enough, the ancient and the medieval Indians had always been open to female sexuality before their philogynist culture was obliterated and replaced by the ‘zenana culture’ of the Mughals and the ‘Victorian morality’ of the British Raj. Even in the Medieval Era, which is often labelled as conservative and orthodox, people accepted female desire as a biological reality. Composed in twelve cantos, Jayadeva’s magnum opus, G?tagovinda, celebrates sexuality and candidly depicts female orgasm with sheer poetic acumen. Jayadeva has not only eradicated the stigma attached to it, but he has also delineated it from the aesthetical perspectives of the San?tana Dharma which makes it “a unique work in Indian literature and a source of religious inspiration in both medieval and contemporary Vaisnavism” (Miller, 1984). In this paper endeavours to analyze, assemble, and demonstrate how the poet has celebrated female psyche, female sexuality, and female orgasm in the 12th Century CE. The paper deals with the primary aspects of the book which are related to female mind and sexuality. Library method of research has been carried out to substantiate the claims that this research paper makes. As the book is originally composed in Sanskrit, the research paper contains many Indic names and words which are written in accordance with the International Alphabet for Sanskrit Translitearation (IAST) method.