Under-dressed: Vests as representations of White, liminal masculinity and the transnational body in Saturday Night Fever and Raging Bull

The 1970s is often considered a period in which masculinity was in crisis. This article considers that through cinematic representation and the use of the white cotton vest as a motif of hegemonic and working-class masculinity, masculinity was not in crisis, but in transition. The focus on films Saturday Night Fever and Raging Bull, is used here to exemplify discussions surrounding primarily hetero-normative masculinity, nationhood, tradition and the White working-class male body both dressed and undressed, and how these provide spaces through narrative and mise en scène to discuss notions of flux, change and fluidity that maps and arcs ‘masculinity’ to masculinities. The male body is deconstructed and reconstructed through the vest and becomes public spectacle. The centrality of the vest and its purpose within these (and many other) films during the period, acts as a means of revealing more than just the body of the wearer. In particular, the ethnicity of the protagonist and the repurposing of stereotypes through the vest as motif, underpin the credibility of the narrative and can be understood as a means of simplifying or coding approaches to shifting masculinities.

Accented Essay Films: The Politics and Poetics of the Essay Film in the Age of Migration

Igor Krstić brings together the notion of ‘accented cinema theory’ (Hamid Naficy) with the category of the essay, in order to conceptualise a burgeoning body of film, video, and other moving image practices in what sociologists have termed ‘the age of migration.’ Through this confluence of a supposedly generic category (the essay film) with a theory that has been of great importance to film scholarship since its emergence, Krstić provides new perspectives on an emerging transnational body of films, all of which have been produced by diasporic, exilic or interstitial documentary and/or essay filmmakers in the recent past. In applying Naficy’s terminology, one can describe these examples as ‘accented essay films’, because they all deal with displacement, exile or migration in the essayistic format. His study includes readings of The Nine Muses(Akomfrah, 2009),Grandmother’s Flower(Jeong-Hyun Mun, 2007), Home (Hruza, 2008) and A Hungarian Passport(Kogut, 2001).

Manicures as Transnational Body Labor

Based on interviews and participant observations with nail salon owners, workers, customers, and advocates, in addition to analysis of media representations, this chapter expands the concept of “body labor” to explore the dynamics of emerging circuits of “transnational body labor” that connect Asian workers to immigrant niches in the United States, and increasingly forge material and aesthetic ties back to Asia.

Transnational Body Projects: Media Representations of Cosmetic Surgery Tourism in Argentina and the United States

Cosmetic surgery tourism (CST) is part of the growing trend known as medical tourism. As people in the global North travel to less affluent countries to modify their bodies through cosmetic surgery, their transnational body projects are influenced by both economic "materialities" and traveling cultural "imaginaries." This article presents a content analysis of media representations of cosmetic surgery tourism in a major country sending patient-tourists (the United States) and a popular receiving country (Argentina). The power relations of globalization appear to be played out in the media. U.S. sources assert U.S. hegemony through a discourse emphasizing the risks of CST in the global South, in contrast with medical excellence in the U.S. Argentine sources portray Argentina as a country struggling to gain a foothold in the global economy, but staking a claim on modernity through cultural and professional resources. The analyzed articles also offer a glimpse of how patient-tourists fuel sectors of the global economy by placing their bodies at the forefront, seeking to merge medical procedures and touristic pleasures. There is a gender dimension to these portrayals, as women are especially likely to engage in CST. Their transnational body projects are tainted by negative media portrayals, which represent them as ignorant, uninformed, and driven mainly by the low price of surgery overseas. Our comparative approach sheds light on converging and diverging perspectives on both ends of the cosmetic surgery tourism chain, showing that patterns in CST portrayals differ according to the position of a country in the world-system.