Journal articles on the topic 'Feminist film theories'

Feminist movement deconstructs the constructed images of women on the screen as well. The gap between real and reel woman is a vibrant topic of discussion for the feminist scholars. As a regional genre of Indian film industry Assamese film flourished during the third decades of twentieth century. Like the films of other parts of the world, Assamese films also constructing the image of woman, particularly Assamese women, in its own way of projection. Hence, this article is an attempt to explore the questions related to women’s representation by taking the films of Assamese director Dr. Bhabendra Nath Saikia as reference. Moreover, as per the demand of the article it will cover a historical overview of the representation of women in Indian cinema and Assamese cinema. Different theories from psychoanalysis and feminism will be applied to analyze the select movies.

The text addresses the issue of feminist film criticism in Poland in the 1980s, represented by the book by Maria Kornatowska Eros i film [Eros and Film, 1986]. In her analysis Kornatowska focused mostly on Polish cinema, examined through a feminist and psychoanalytic lens. As a film critic, she followed international cinematic offerings and the latest trends in film studies, which is why she decided to fill the gap in Polish writings on gender and sexuality in cinema, and share her knowledge and ideas on the relationship between Eros and Film. The purpose of the text on Kornatowska’s book was to present her individual interpretations of the approach of Polish and foreign filmmakers to the body, sexuality, gender identity, eroticism, the question of violence and death. Secondly, it was important to emphasize her skills and creative potential as a film critic who was able to use many diverse repositories of thought (including feminist theories, philosophy and anthropology) to create a multi-faceted lens, which she then uses to perform a subjective, critical analysis of selected films.

This article traces the development of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics within the LA Rebellion, a film movement made up primarily of Black film students at UCLA from 1970 to the late 1980s. It argues that these aesthetics are integral to the movement’s heterogeneous but radical politics, even as the filmmakers express them through widely different means. The article focuses primarily on three films that span the final decade in which Rebellion filmmakers were active at UCLA: Barbara McCullough’s Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979), Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), and Zeinabu irene Davis’s Cycles (1989). Each of these films’ renderings of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics—through attention to African oral and mythical traditions, African and Pan-African-inflected mise-en-scène, rich col-oration and film stock, and play with nonlinear, nonteleological time—register at once the sedimented condition of patriarchal anti-Blackness in the United States and Black feminists’ ongoing projects of freedom that perdure within and despite that condition. In many ways, such representations anticipate contemporary Black feminist grapplings with recent Black studies scholarship that orbit around Afro-pessimist theories of Black ontology and social death. Through their expressions of Afrocentric feminist forms of communal, caring, and creative living, the films represent a form of Black social life that expresses value systems and ways of being that are incompatible with social death, even when they are inevitably moored within its ontological structure.

This article uses AT&T’s 1910s–30s “Weavers of Speech” campaign to read on-screen telegraph and telephone operators as vernacular translators of cinematic syntax and hypervisible avatars for the invisible cutter girls who “knitted the pieces of film together” on studio lots. While operators largely played peripheral roles in classical films, two transitional periods saw them rise to the surface of story en masse, as if temporarily hired to sew over a rupture. A comparative analysis of telephone girls’ enlistment as temp techno-pedagogues during US film’s introduction of crosscutting and European film’s polyglot transition to sound suggests women’s film-weaving labor as an alternative to the surgical rhetoric (suture) and auteur models that dominate theories of film editing. More broadly, the article suggests that the culturally conspicuous feminization of low-level information labor offers feminist film historians a crucial “mediatrix” for uncovering woman workers hidden in the cut of film.

This article brings into dialogue the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Berlin School filmmaker Valeska Grisebach to consider the relationship between film sound, gender and settler colonialism in Western ( Valeska Grisebach, 2017 ). I draw connections between Nancy's Listening and Eugenie Brinkema's concept of radical quiet to examine how the film's sonic composition attends to the sonority of silence and voice. I argue that Western combines sonic strategies of radical quiet and part-subtitled multilingual dialogue to undermine the sovereign silence associated with the genre's white heroic masculinity and challenge linguistic nonreciprocity in settler colonial landscapes. The article contends that these strategies work together to destabilise mastery within the narrative's discursive economy and within the spectatorial experience, shifting the spectator towards a mode of Nancean listening that invites defamiliarising encounters with foreignness that depart from existing theories of embodied spectatorship. Western brings to the fore the political stakes of silence, linguistic difference, and Nancean listening as model of communication, as they intersect with the film's feminist and anti-colonialist project of revisionist critique.

AbstractThis essay seeks to unsettle feminist philosophy through an encounter with Aboriginal artist Tracey Moffatt, whose perspectives on intergenerational relationships between (older) white women and (younger) Indigenous women are shaped by her experiences as the Aboriginal child of a white foster mother growing up in Brisbane, Australia during the 1960s. Moffatt's short experimental film Night Cries provides an important glimpse into the violent intersections of gender, race, and power in intimate life and, in so doing, invites us to see how colonial and neocolonial policies are carried out through women's domestic labor. Seeing cross-generational and cross-racial intimacy through Moffatt's lens, I suggest, helps us to unsettle both feminist theories of motherhood and feminist practices of mentoring.

In this article, I analyse how a celebrity can perform cultural critique and feminist activism using her Instagram account and online book club. The celebrity in question is British film star Emma Watson, famous for playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter franchise. Watson is performing her activism on gender equality and cultural critique by recommending feminist literature. This study undertakes an analysis of Watson’s presentations of self on Instagram and in her letters in the Our Shared Shelf book club. The analysis takes its point of departure from theories of social media and celebrity culture and film studies as well as investigations of celebrity book clubs and celebrity activism. This case study of Emma Watson’s performance of cultural critique and activism on specific media platforms demonstrates that Watson’s authority is based on her star image as well as the fact that her book club letters and Instagram posts mutually reinforce one another’s written personal arguments and visual documentation.

In official and unofficial histories, and in cultural memorializations of the 1971 war for Bangladeshi independence, the treatment of women's experiences—more specifically the unresolved question of acknowledgment of and accountability to birangonas, “war heroines” (or rape survivors)—has met with stunning silence or erasure, on the one hand, or with narratives of abject victimhood, on the other. By contrast, the film Meherjaan (2011) revolves around the stories of four women during and after the war, and most centrally the relationship between a Bengali woman and a Pakistani soldier. In this article, I investigate the anxieties underlying the responses to Meherjaan, particularly in association with themes of trauma—its absence or omnipresence—to nonnormative gender frames of national sexuality, and the notion of loving the Other. Drawing from feminist theories of vulnerability, ethics, and love, I want to explore these themes at two levels: the political message the film transmits, and its aesthetic choices and affects. Finally, I want to comment on the potential of this film, as feminist art, in furthering a dialogue around healing and ethical memorialization in relation to 1971 in Bangladesh.

Michel Foucault's ethics of embodiment, focusing upon care of the self, has motivated feminist scholars to pursue promising models of embodied resistance to disciplinary normalization. Cressida Heyes, in particular, has advocated that these projects adopt practices of “somaesthetics,” following a program of body consciousness developed by Richard Shusterman. In exploring Shusterman's somaesthetics proposal, I find that it does not account for the subjective challenges of resisting normalization. Based on narrative theories of subjectivity, the role narrative plays in normalization, and a commitment to developing concrete, feminist practices of embodied ethics, I develop a model of “narrative somaesthetics” based on an updated consciousness‐raising model that emphasizes group heterogeneity and narrative conflict that deals with these challenges. Through an analysis of interviews with self‐identified femme lesbians and a “female to femme” transition support group featured in the documentary film, FtF: Female to Femme, I argue that narrative somaesthetics enables the analytical, genealogical work required to identify and weaken normalization's constraints on embodied feminist ethics.

Representations of women, or more exactly of gender, and the presence and works of women filmmakers constitute an important area of analysis for gender studies and feminist film theories. In Turkey the presence and the participation of women in the public sphere have been one of the important objectives of the Kemalist modernization project since the founding of the modern nation-state in 1923. However, despite the modernizing efforts to empower women in different spheres of life there was no woman director in Turkish commercial feature cinema until the beginning of the 1950s. Since the beginning of the 2000s the number of women directors has increased significantly, reaching a number well above that of the entire period before. This article investigates the reasons behind this increase based on quantitative data gathered from secondary sources and in-depth interviews with women producers and directors. It also questions whether and to what extent the increase in the number of women film directors contributed to the production of ‘women’s films’, based on a qualitative analysis of films produced by women directors between the years 2004 and 2013. The results show that in addition to technological and aesthetic changes in the industry, the increase in the availability of international and national public funding for low-budget independent film productions and the enlargement of the women’s movement allowed more women directors to enter the film industry. While half of the films made by women directors in the 2000s could be qualified as ‘women films’, the other half remained, largely due to market forces, within the conventions of popular or art house cinema.

A growing discourse in surveillance studies is leading the field away from socially neutral theories and introducing methodologies that account for factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. However, scholarship on surveillance in the arts, among which voyeurism and panopticism remain dominant, has been slower to adopt models that address these sociological dimensions of surveillance. This interdisciplinary article argues for expanding the theoretical and sociological scope of scholarship on surveillance in the arts, using Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels and the Swedish films adapted from them as a case study. This series of narratives features three scopic regimes: the state’s surveillance apparatus, the protagonist’s own surveillant gaze, and the male gaze, each of which operates on and through the body of the central character, Lisbeth Salander. These representations, as so many others, demand that we break away from the panoptic model and employ a theoretically intersectional approach. The author integrates theories from surveillance studies, feminist film theory, and the social sciences to develop such an approach.

This article examines the origin myth of the feminist film journal Close Up, namely, an excursion by its founders Bryher and H.D. to see G. W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925) in a small cinema in Montreux, Switzerland. Throughout the essay, I use Joyless Street as a case study to analyze the ways in which theories of trauma can be effectively brought to bear on melodramas of the post–World War I era and, in the process, demonstrate the appeal Pabst’s works held for the Close Up editors, who shared his interest in trauma, psychoanalysis, and healing. By analyzing Joyless Street through the lens of Close Up, I demonstrate how Bryher and H.D. anticipate the development of trauma theory, which emerged in the early 1990s. Unlike traditional, often totalizing, applications of psychoanalysis (which emphasize notions of spectator desire and lack), the Close Up writers’ engagement of psychoanalysis focuses on issues of history, memory, and the response of spectators to historically specific situations. Their theory further suggests that in addition to surrogate fantasy fulfillment, film—in its recurring representation of trauma—might aid in mastering shared cultural symptoms, which women often experienced in isolation. Through their sustained analysis of film melodrama, the Close Up writers demonstrate that the war, beyond its devastating effects on combatants, also impacted the (female) civilian population—resulting in Close Up’s call for a critical film culture that speaks to that experience.

This study discusses the construction of Islamic identities in the figure of veiled woman in Ayat-Ayat Cinta film. The method in this research applies textual analysis method and cultural studies approach in analyzing the film scenes and dialogues based on the theories proposed by Castells on identity formation, Asma Barlas’s feminist hermeneutics of al-Qur’an, gender, and patriarchy. This film shows that Islamic identities as represented by veiled woman is related to the values of man’s power, patriarchal ideology, and social construction. The results of this research proves that the main character as in veiled women is tried side by side with the ideology of patriarchy in struggling for her freedom, justice, and equality with men, so that the veiled woman represents current Islamic values that are harmonious, dynamic, and modern (Pluralist Islam). This study is important to understand variants Islam through Islamic dress, religious practice, and the interpretation of al-Qur’an verse that exist in Indonesia as religious discourse in cultural studies.---Studi ini membahas konstruksi identitas Islam dalam sosok perempuan berjilbab pada film Ayat-Ayat Cinta. Metode dalam penelitian ini menggunakan metode analisis tekstual dan pendekatan kajian budaya dalam menganalisis adegan film dan dialog berdasarkan konsep yang dikemukakan oleh Castells tentang pembentukan identitas, konsep hermeneutik feminis Asma Barlas tentang al-Qur’an, konsep gender, dan patriarki. Dalam film ini menunjukkan bahwa identitas Islam yang diwakili oleh wanita berjilbab terkait dengan nilai-nilai kekuatan laki-laki, ideologi patriarkal, dan konstruksi sosial. Hasil penelitian ini membuktikan bahwa tokoh utama perempuan berjilbab berdampingan dengan ideologi patriarki dalam memperjuangkan kebebasan, keadilan, dan kesetaraannya dengan laki-laki, sehingga perempuan berjilbab mewakili nilai-nilai Islam saat ini, yang harmonis, dinamis, dan modern (Pluralist Islam). Penelitian ini penting untuk memahami variasi Islam melalui busana Islami, praktik keagamaan, dan interpretasi ayat al-Qur’an yang ada di Indonesia sebagai wacana keagamaan dalam kajian budaya.

A movie must have a purpose and a message according to the directors’ vision and plans. There are many ways to convey the message to viewers around the world, explicitly or implicitly. Yet, every individual has their own perspective, ideology, opinion, and culture background, and this diffence results in different interpretation of a movie. Nevertheless, viewers can still analyze a movie with theories that has been studied for generations, for instance semiotics theory, feminist film theory, psychoanalysis, etc. We will analyze how Robby Ertanto, as the director, the writer, and the producer of Ave Maryam, conveys messages through symbols, or as we call it the semiotics theory.

RESUMO O artigo analisa, com estatísticas e por meio de crítica do filme Azul é a Cor Mais Quente (França, 2013), as características fundamentais nas produções audiovisuais eurocêntricas – hegemônicas e dominantes no panorama mundial – que instigam, perpetram, e perpetuam a anulação e/ou a negação do feminino. Bem como enraízam os estereótipos de gênero que permeiam as diversas culturas e sociedades globais. As estatísticas sobre mulheres empregadas nas produções audiovisuais, as teorias do cinema, da fotografia em movimento, e as análises críticas das teorias feministas do cinema são desenvolvidas como ferramentas para a pesquisa. A imagem é um instrumento poderoso de comunicação, assemelha-se ou confunde-se com o que representa. Visualmente imitadora (mimesis), ou reflexo, pode levar ao conhecimento, educar, ou enganar. A imagem construída cria associações mentais sistemáticas. Repetidas à exaustão, as imagens criam padrões de representações nas sociedades. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Cinema, Teorias de Gênero, Estatísticas, Pós-Colonialismo. ABSTRACT This article analyzes the striking features, common and fundamental, in Eurocentric audiovisual productions, hegemonic and dominant across world cinema landscapes, which incite, perpetrate and perpetuate the denial of female image and the formation of gender stereotypes that pervade diverse cultures and global societies. The analysis of the film Blue is the Warmest Color (France, 2013) is also used as a methodological tool. Statistics on women employed in audiovisual productions (TV and Film), as well as theories of cinema, (moving) photography, and critical feminist cinema theories are developed as tools for research. Image is a powerful tool of communication; it is similar to or confused with what it represents. Visually imitator (mimesis), or reflection, can lead to knowledge, to education, or serve as a means to deceit. Image systematically builds up mental associations. Repeated to exhaustion, images create patterns of representations within global societies. KEYWORDS: Cinema, Gender Theories, Statistics, Postcolonial Studies. RESUMEN El artículo analiza, entre otros, mediante el estudio de la película Azul es el Color más Caliente (Francia, 2013), las características fundamentales de las producciones audiovisuales eurocéntricas - hegemónicas y dominantes en el escenario mundial - que instigan, perpetran y perpetúan la cancelación y/o la negación de lo femenino. Y ponen raíces en los estereotipos de género que impregnan las diferentes culturas y sociedades globales. Las estadísticas sobre las mujeres que trabajan en producciones audiovisuales y teorías cinematográficas, la imagen en movimiento, y análisis críticos de las teorías feministas del cine se desarrollan como herramientas para la investigación. La imagen es una poderosa herramienta de comunicación, se asemeja o se confunde con lo que es. Imitadora visualmente (mimesis), o la reflexión, pueden conducir al conocimiento, la educación, o engañar. La imagen construida crea asociaciones mentales sistemáticas. Repetidas hasta el agotamiento, las imágenes crean patrones de representaciones en las sociedades. PALABRAS CLAVE: Cine, Teorías de Género, Estadísticas, Estudios Poscoloniales.

This essay focuses on the use of brain imaging technologies to understand sexual arousal and orgasm and the issues that this practice raises for feminist theories of embodiment, visuality, and gender. In the first section, the paper examines the use of brain imaging technologies to measure the brain’s role during sexual arousal and orgasm and its circulation in popular culture, with a particular focus on fMRI and PET technology. The second section examines the interplay between brain imaging technologies as the means of measurement and film pornography as the means of arousal, bringing together scholarship on pornography studies, visual studies, and science and technology studies. By interrogating the technology behind research into the neurology of sexual response and critically examining the use of one representation of sexuality to produce another, the paper investigates how gendered difference is manifested in this research and how the body is produced as a site of intervention.

This essay focuses on the use of brain imaging technologies to understand sexual arousal and orgasm and the issues that this practice raises for feminist theories of embodiment, visuality, and gender. In the first section, the paper examines the use of brain imaging technologies to measure the brain’s role during sexual arousal and orgasm and its circulation in popular culture, with a particular focus on fMRI and PET technology. The second section examines the interplay between brain imaging technologies as the means of measurement and film pornography as the means of arousal, bringing together scholarship on pornography studies, visual studies, and science and technology studies. By interrogating the technology behind research into the neurology of sexual response and critically examining the use of one representation of sexuality to produce another, the paper investigates how gendered difference is manifested in this research and how the body is produced as a site of intervention.

This article intervenes in feminist theories concerning the politics of care, reading this contested notion through its representation in an ‘artificial’ relationship between a human clone and a computer in the science fiction film Moon (dir. Duncan Jones, 2009). Drawing on Joan Tronto’s work (1993), I delineate a conventional, vernacular conception of care, which puts in place problematic, prescriptive roles in caring relationships. Then, reading Moon through Donna Haraway’s theorisation of companion species (2008) and what she terms the ‘touching’ of material histories and contingencies, I show how these hierarchies may be unravelled. This figure of the caring computer represents a capacity for affective impact upon human subjects that is not normally ascribed to ‘emotionless’ technological subjects. It animates a disruption of the linear, instrumental relationships of power between humans and technologies by showing the ways in which ongoing processes of co-constitution are responsible for bringing each participant in the relationship into being. Care here is a manner of activating and making conspicuous those processes and can unravel, rather than prescribe, the roles which respective participants in such relationships are assigned.

AbstractThis article considers the significance of dirt to three Western texts: Lonesome Land, Mudbound, and Brokeback Mountain. The overall argument is that the more complicated and ambiguous dirt is permitted to be, the more imaginative and critical potential it has for the iconography of the contemporary Western. Taking B.M. Bower’s 1912 Western Romance as a model, it is argued that the dirt aesthetic is crucial to how Westerns construct the myth of the American character. This is further complicated by intersections between representations of the White rural poor, women (as for both Lonesome Land and Mudbound, there are connotations of sexual impurity in the dirty White female body), and representations of queerness. In the two versions of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s film, we see the ambiguity of dirt: it can be read as an essential part of the American land, or as polluting waste matter. The critical framework draws on feminist history and criticism via Kathleen Healey and Phyllis Palmer; sociological theories of imagining poverty in North America via Kate Cairns and Winfried Fluck; and queer theory via Christopher Schmidt.

Resumo: No âmbito das teorias feministas do cinema, e dos estudos fílmicos em geral, algumas questões têm sido levantadas ao longo das últimas décadas, nomeadamente no que diz respeito à exigência de uma maior representatividade feminina no mundo da realização e produção cinematográficas. Sendo o olhar do espectador, como Laura Mulvey sugeriu, pressupostamente masculino, treinado por realizadores com fantasias e tendências voyeuristas homogéneas, a questão seguinte seria inevitável: poderá este mesmo olhar assumir características distintas, quando mediado por uma mulher? Poderá a arte, ao contrário dos anjos, ter sexo? Existirá, neste sentido, uma “estética feminina”, como Silvia Bovenschen, em artigo homónimo, publicado em Setembro de 1976, procura antecipar? Procurá-la não implicará um aprofundar de estereótipos associados à feminilidade e à masculinidade, todos eles redutores, segundo o ponto de vista de Michel Foucault e Judith Butler, bem como a atribuição de um certo carácter de exotismo, pela falta de representatividade nos circuitos artísticos? Enunciando e debatendo os principais argumentos dos autores mencionados, propomo-nos, no presente artigo, responder às questões colocadas. Palavras-chave: voyeurismo; espectadora; ausência; receptividade; identificação. Abstract: In the context of feminist theories of cinema, and film studies in general, some questions have been raised in the past few decades, concerning the need for a greater representation of women in the world of film making and production. Accepting the idea of a viewer gaze, as Laura Mulvey suggested, supposedly male, trained by directors with fantasies and uniformed voyeuristic tendencies, the next question is inevitable: might this gaze have different characteristics when mediated by a woman? Can the art, unlike the angels, have sex? Is there, in this sense, a “feminine aesthetic”, as Silvia Bovenschen, on an article with the same name, published in September 1976, looks forward to anticipate? To look for it does not imply a deepening of stereotypes associated with femininity and masculinity, all reducers, according to the point of view of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, as well as the assignment of a certain exoticism’ character, motivated by the lack of representation in the art circuit? Outlining and discussing the main arguments of the authors above mentioned, we propose, in this paper, to answer these questions. Keywords: voyeurism; female spectator; absence; receptivity; identification.Resumen: “Las mujeres son diferentes, y una manifestación natural de esta diferencia (nota bene!) es precisamente el hecho de que son incapaces de producir arte.” (Bovenschen, 1976: 115).Haciéndose eco del paralelismo ya realizado por Simone de Beauvoir en el ensayo El segundo sexo, Silvia Bovenschen vuelve, en un artículo publicado en 1976 que nos proponemos discutir aquí, a la asociación asumida entre una perspectiva descriptiva masculina y la verdad absoluta. En su opinión, el dominio de la producción artística por el género masculino habrá originado una inaccesibilidad y una extrañeza relativas a la otra mitad de la población, que se denuncia por el carácter de exotismo que muchos críticos votaron a los pocos, y de cierta forma lejos entre si mismos, objetos culturales producidos por las mujeres, a lo largo de la historia. Otra consecuencia natural de este fracaso, descrito por el uso del término déficit, importado del lenguaje economicista, todavía sería, a nuestro juicio, una segregación de la dicha producción en una sola clase: una escritura femenina, una mirada femenina, un rasgo femenino. Con la restricción, la incertidumbre se multiplica: la escritura femenina es la que centra su atención en mujeres fuertes y decididas, la que demuestra una sensibilidad y capacidad de observación característica de un género, o la que construye una narrativa entrecruzada, por la sociológicamente establecida capacidad de realizar múltiples tareas asociadas al mismo sexo?

Abstract: Fairy Tale films do not only show entertainment for the audience but also therepresentation of femininity that can affect the mindset of the viewers. The representation shouldevolve in line with the global feminist movement in order for the audience to have a realisticdescription of the condition of women in the current era. Research is needed to determine whetherthe transition is in line with the development of feminism waves and theories. This study usesfeminist theories and concepts of femininity as a reference. The primary data collection wascompleted using observation and secondary data was taken from the study of literature anddocumentation. Observations were accomplished by watching Maleficent 2, and Frozen 2 films. Thefinal analysis shows that the transition in the representation of femininity in Maleficent 2, andFrozen 2 films indicates equalities and emphasizes the rebellious side of woman.Keywords: Maleficent 2; Frozen 2; Feminism; Femininity, Representation; Equalities

Participation of women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in international trade is gaining more importance in the transformation of institutional changes. Although women entrepreneurs contribute to the social and economic development, the role of social, cultural, and legal institutions in fostering women entrepreneurship is still debatable. This argument remains controversial as there is no single theory that has explained the phenomenon of women-owned firms in international trade. Because of the missing link between gender sensitivity and the existing theories of entrepreneurship and internationalization, there is a significant research gap. To fill up this research gap, this study revisited existing theories from three research domains: feminism, entrepreneurship, and internationalization. Factors derived from revisiting theories of entrepreneurship and internationalization were evaluated based on findings from the review of the feminist theories. Finally, key parameters were selected to assess the internationalization of women-owned SMEs, which require future empirical investigation.

This article contends that black feminist conceptions of ‘pussy power’ have prematurely foreclosed an examination of both pussy and its powers, thereby missing the erotic potential inherent in a ‘pussy power’ that is distinctly black – what I term black pussy power. Taking Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation performances in Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) as my primary case studies, I use black pussy power as a conceptual framework through which to read Grier’s performances of black eroticism, which enable her to resist racialised gendered sexual subjection and tap into modes of erotic agency otherwise denied to her. Moving away from delimited understandings of pussy as female genitalia or an objectified entity of female sexuality, I mobilise black queer feminist theorisations of the ‘arbitrary relation between black sex and gender’ to theorise the polymorphous potential of black pussy to signify beyond the narrow gender and sexual grammars currently available to us. 1 At the same time, black pussy’s discursive connection to black feminine sexuality animates the insurgent potential of black pussy power to secure nominal black freedoms in the face of state-sanctioned infringements on black erotic life.

ABSTRACT This essay readdresses the issue of the social marginalization of women in light of social cognitive theories of schema- and stereotype-driven perception, reasoning, memory, and behavior. The notions of "fundamental attribution error," "stereotype threat," and "outcome dependency" will help elucidate why women's words and actions have traditionally been construed as less consequential than those of their male peers. Moreover, the essay discusses the benefits of the social cognitive model for film scholarship. It argues that social cognition's comprehensive, micro-level understanding of how our habitual, normative reality is constructed can usefully complement those theories of cinematic defamiliarization that invoke the psychology of the mind (e.g., Deleuze's "time-image").

This article places existing discourses on Egyptian cinema, revolution, and global feminism in conversation with theories of film melodrama. The text examines the tradition of Egyptian melodrama as a site for analogizing women's liberation with national modernization in the wake of the 1952 Revolution—an analogy facilitated by the careful manipulation of melodramatic vernaculars of emotionality, and the endurance of affective cultural memory. In this context melodrama functions as a specific critical tool for understanding how popular film culture then and now organizes people politically and affectively, on- and offscreen. The article further investigates the “method of contradictions” that seems necessary to think critically about comparative melodrama at three levels of discourse: melodrama in general; the Egyptian melodramatic tradition specifically; and within melodramatic scholarship that tends to resemble its object of study.

This research is analyzes about the struggle of Malala’s in He Named Me Malala film. The purposes of this research are to explain the great efforts of young girl named Malala for gender equality on education and politic and to explain the positive and negative impact after defying gender in equality in He Named Me Malala film. In analyzing the research, the writer uses feminism approach and some supporting theories. The method used in the research is descriptive qualitative. The data are formed in words, phrases and sentences. The data are analyzed through four procedures: identifying, classifying, analyzing, and making conclusions of the data. Result of this research are the writer found some great efforts of Malala’s struggle on gender equality on education and politic. The last, the writer found the positive impact of the Malala’s effort on education and politic. Malala has given chance for the other women to get education and the right of politic which is the basic right of human being as seen on He Named Me Malala film.

In a series of non-Western films — Times and Winds, A Time for Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly and Buddha Collapsed out of Shame — contemporary child figures inhabit their world in a manner that demonstrates the child’s resilience and their intimacy with the land. Drawing on non-representational theory (NRT) and relating this to feminist theories of affect and subjectivity, the article suggests that these films present child figures for whom mobility has effectively become their ontology and that this demonstrates that there may be a different form of kinship between the natural world and the child. This is not to romanticize this connection or to essentialize the child: this relationship is revealed to be not idyllic but affectively ‘open’ in a way that may be terrifying as well as liberating.

Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) are films about women directed by men. Both films unorthodoxly chart women artists’ struggle with the discipline imposed on them by the arts and by their live-in mothers. By portraying mothers as their daughters’ oppressors, both films disturb the naïve “women = victims and men = perpetrators” binary. Simultaneously, they deploy audiovisual violence to exhibit the violence of society’s gender and sexuality policy norms and use gender-coded romance narratives to subvert the same gender codes from within this gender discourse. Using Judith Butler’s and Michael Foucault’s theories, we argue that Haneke and Aronofsky “do” feminism unconventionally by exposing the nexus of women’s complicity with omnipresent societal power structures that safeguard gender norms. These films showcase women concurrently as victim-products and complicit partisans of socially constructed gender ideology to emphasize that this ideology can be destabilized only when women “do” their gender and sexuality differently through acts of subversion.

Abstract This article discusses the role of the body in Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina (2015). It focuses on Ava’s female cyborg body against the backdrop of both classic post-humanist theories and current reflections from scholars in the field of body studies. I argue that Ex Machina addresses but also transcends questions of gender and feminism. It stresses the importance of the body for social interaction both in the virtual as well as the real world. Ava’s lack of humanity results from her mind that is derived from the digital network Blue Book in which disembodied communication dominates. Moreover, the particular construction of Nathan’s progeny demonstrates his longing for a docile sex toy since he created Ava with fully functional genitals but without morals. Ex Machina further exhibits various network metaphors both on the visual and the audio level that contribute to the (re)acknowledgement that we need a body in order to be human.

Using male and female gaze theories as frameworks, this article analyzes the visual design and composition of four distinct breastfeeding (BF) photographs posted by Alyssa Milano to her Instagram in order to better understand the public’s mixed responses of support and criticism. I argue that Milano borrows visual elements from the male gaze and combines them with feminine content in an attempt to (1) challenge the dominant, patriarchal norm of deriving pleasure from viewing sexualized women and (2) instead encourage an understanding of the maternal woman as visually pleasing. In turn, Milano’s message supports the normalization of public BF. Milano’s position as firmly entrenched in the male-dominated world of television and film is key: it enables her to speak and promote change from within the system, for external oppositions often remain on the outside, as counterpoint. Using Instagram promotes this as well. Rather than dilute their power, intermingling BF images with those representing the dominant culture may prove more successful for its gradual progression to normalization. The end goal, of course, is to encourage not just acceptance but a sense of pleasure in seeing feminine representations of women, including those focused on aspects of motherhood, like BF.

American science fiction stories, such as U.S. historical narratives, often give central place to white, Western male subjects as noble explorers, benevolent colonizers, and border-guarding patriots. This constructed subjectivity renders colonized or cultural others as potentially threatening aliens, and it works alongside the parallel construction of white womanhood as a signifier for the territory to be possessed and protected by American empire—or as a sign of empire itself. Popular cultural narratives, whether in the world of U.S. imperialism or the speculative worlds of science fiction, may serve a religious function by helping to shape world-making: the envisioning and enacting of imagined communities. This paper argues that the world-making of American science fiction can participate in the construction and maintenance of American empire; yet, such speculative world-making may also subvert and critique imperialist ideologies. Analyzing the recent films Arrival (2016) and Annihilation (2018) through the lenses of postcolonial and feminist critique and theories of religion and popular culture, I argue that these films function as parables about human migration, diversity, and hybrid identities with ambiguous implications. Contact with the alien other can be read as bringing threat, loss, and tragedy or promise, birth, and possibility.

This article demonstrates how Netflix, the current leading SVOD provider, can be a plat­form of global cultural exchange, which not only provides entertainment, but also offers a critical reflection on international affairs to its subscribers. Despite the fact that most Netflix content is fic­tional, its distributed and produced films and TV series still portray various theoretical approaches of international relations. This claim is based on the premises of critical discourse, which see our reality in terms of the social context.The aim of the article is to reveal what principles of main international relations theories (name­ly realism, liberalism, feminism, constructivism, or other critical theories) can Netflix subscribers find in the selected TV series. Using a visual qualitative analysis as a research method, the authors study five TV series, specifically Traitors (UK), 1983 (PL), Nobel (NOR), Pine Gap (AU) and Homeland (US). These TV series were selected with regard to their diverse origins of production, the topic’s central focus being politics, security or international relations, and their high ratings and numbers of viewers.The analysis of each TV series is based on answering three questions, which are used in defining basic premises of the portrayed theories. The following questions are: What role does the state play as an actor in the international system? What is the dominant cultural identity of the society? What is the status of an individual in a country? Processes of forming opinions and building images of social reality are influenced by the context in which the individual acts. As such, cultural exchange can influence the evolution of contemporary media society and thus affect viewers who are indirectly led to critical reflection. The results indicate that the global cultural exchange through the medium of mass entertainment is still driven mainly by traditional theoretical premises.

Some studies exploring the life of migrant domestic workers found that the main factor that push Indonesian migrant domestic workers is experiencing severe economic condition (Raharto, 2000; Silvey, 2004; Pitoyo, 2007). The poor economic condition forces women and girls to be domestic workers. Additionally, cultural value of patriarchy puts a responsibility for women at domestic area influencing the women’s ability to fill the demand of the domestic workers in overseas. This paper addresses the main topic of enhancing protection and empowerment for Indonesian female migrant domestic workers by specifically exploring the issues after working in overseas. The study exploring the life of former migrant domestic workers from Bondan village of Indramayu district using qualitative method. The informants of the study were the workers who just finished their work contract, staying at the moment in the village waiting for the next call or deciding to stop working in overseas. The number of participants was 40 women (n=40), joining focus-group discussions and in-depth interviews. The theoretical frameworks used in the study consist of human capabilities approach, feminist perspective, and social work theories of empowering individual, family, and community. Then, the discussion covers three main points: first, discussion of the theories applied in the study; second, the life of transnational domestic workers of examining abusive conditions; third, developing future practices to empowering the workers; and fourth, a part of the paper provides conclusion to whole points discussed.

Abstract Impoliteness scholars have drawn attention to the fact that any deviation from the stereotypical ‘polite’ and ‘feminine’ behaviour, in certain communities of practice, is considered impolite and offensive (Mills 2005). The aim of the study is to investigate how im/politeness constructs gender identities in two Greek stage translations (1977, 2006) of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), through analysis of how the translators reshape the im/polite behaviour in the interaction of the main couple to capture the audience’s attention. An emic approach to the analysis of the two translations, along with a glimpse into multimodal aspects of interaction, namely, the body language as manifested in the film adaptation of the play (1966), indicate subversion of gender roles and different levels of aggression in the two Greek versions, highlighting the significance of the chronological distance between the two translations. The study reveals that impoliteness theories can be applicable to stage translation, that body language may be another factor contributing to the shaping of im/politeness, while there is a growing awareness that relationships and gender roles, in the sphere of the spectacle, continuously embrace aggression for entertainment purposes.

AbstractIt is imperative that Social Sciences examine in depth the underlying issues in human relations that have contributed to divisions among persons, within families, institutions, between nations and religions. If we accept that dialogue is the main currency of statecraft, diplomacy, negotiation, mediation and peacebuilding (Rieker and Turn 2015), then we need to ask ourselves, what are the characteristics of a person capable of engaging in dialogue? Are they characteristics that can be taught? Are they characteristics that make us human?In his book “Relational Being” Gergen (2009) warns of the dire consequences we face if we continue on the pathway of “rugged individualism”. He explains how our relationships have become instruments for our own satisfaction. From Freud to Skinner, psychology has described human relationships as being primarily about seeking the greatest pleasure from others. But, the so-called “freedom” that we achieve gives us a satisfaction that is transitory at best. “Freedom contains an emptiness that only relationship can fill” (Gergen, 2009, p. 20). It is essential that we find the path to discovering the true meaning of relationship and more importantly cross-racial/ethnic relationships.Jean Baker Miller described what she termed “growth-fostering relationships” (Miller, 1986), and Chodorow (2001) has developed a theory regarding development suggesting that women develop along a relational pathway whereas men follow the developmental phases that move them toward autonomy. These theorists, and others, view the relational trait to be particularly characteristic of women. A more comprehensive understanding of the nature of the human person can be attained only by taking into consideration both autonomy and relational ability as equally important.Capacity for dialogue, therefore, is an important contribution that women bring to the world stage. Women from traditionally marginalized groups offer an essential and unique perspective to this topic due to their understanding of the role of power in the dynamics of relationships. To foster cross-cultural dialogue it is important to examine the power dynamics of what it means to be honest, empathetic and collaborative across cultures.In this discussion, the authors draw upon the fields of technology, child development, feminism, and the social justice literature in an attempt to articulate the benefits of dialogue. It is far from exhaustive and provides a cursory purview of this challenging topic. It is an example of how integration among different theories can help move our literature forward in understanding a challenging topic as dialogue. It also offers a perspective on how men and women can grow in their relationship building ability, and therefore ability to dialogue, by embracing characteristics like being vulnerable, cooperative, selfless, and nurturing, relating this to the teachings of Chiara Lubich.

In an attempt to look at how content could be developed in dialogue with the use of visual documentary material, this article traces key ideas and references that were important to the making of an animation “FQ”. A research blog, personal notes and references are used to reflect on the work. The animation was based on historical portraits of the Norwegian political pioneer, Fredrikke Marie Qvam (1843-1938), and created for outdoor screening in the main square in her home town. Research and documentary material formed a base for an animation that was conceptually inspired by photo theories from diverse sources as well as feminist film theories of the gaze. In the process, imagination and fantasy plays into the treatment of the documentary material while the local viewing situation anchors the work in a biographical context.

This article examines the 1995 fictional feature film Kids, which locates its story in skateboarding culture. The film reached its 25th anniversary in 2020; it is directed by Larry Clark and written by Harmony Korine, both recognizable figures in skateboarding, and it featured a cast of youth from the New York skateboarding scene. The research analyses narrative content that depicts sexual coercion and rape. Contemporary social and feminist theories of sexual violence, rape culture and media on the film inform the analysis. The discussion points to how the characters that the boys play embody forms of hegemonic masculinity, pointing to the social and cultural dimensions of male power and how sexual violence can be an element of that. The article also presents an occasion to reflect on such issues in skateboarding culture more widely, with emerging insights that can be useful to studies of other male-dominated youth cultures, lifestyle sports and subcultures.

This introduction provides context for a collection of articles that came out of a research symposium held at the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre in 2018 for the ‘ Demons of Mind: the Interactions of the ‘Psy’ Sciences and Cinema in the Sixties' project. Across a range of events and research outputs, Demons of the Mind sought to map the multifarious interventions and influences of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) on film culture in the long 1960s. The articles that follow discuss, in order: critical engagement with theories of child development in 1960s British science fiction; the ‘horrors’ of contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Exorcist (1973); British social realist filmmakers' alliances with proponents of ‘anti-psychiatry’; experimental filmmaker Jane Arden's coalescence of radical psychiatry and radical feminist techniques in her ‘psychodrama’ The Other Side of the Underneath (1973); and the deployment of film technologies by ‘psy’ professionals during the post-war period to capture and interpret mother-infant interaction.

Young people's sexting is an area of concern amongst parents, policymakers, and educators.1 Much education around the topic of sexting focuses on risk and shame. My creative work, Sexting Scenes – what do you think?, is a film script intended as a sext education resource. It highlights the various reasons for and consequences of sexting, using an intersectional and sex-positive approach not rooted in risk or shame. I address issues of victim blaming and heteronormativity in sext education resources Tagged and Exposed. I utilise the theories of feminist scholars Amy Shields Dobson and Jessica Ringrose and applied theatre scholar Katherine Low. My previous placement at the School of Sexuality Education, my current PhD Practice-as-Research, and my experience as an applied theatre practitioner all informed the script content. The script incorporates multiple storylines, diverse characters, and reflective questions to challenge and question victim blaming and heteronormativity in relation to sexting. Keywords: sexting, sext education, victim blaming, heteronormativity, applied theatre

This paper engages with the concept of ‘elsewhere’ in the feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray as a way to theorise the experience of viewing the audio-visual installations of Finnish artist, Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Ahtila’s work traces specific narratives concerning feminine desire and subjectivity across multi-screen apparatus in gallery environment. The space of exhibition and film form initiate a mode of encounter that motivates a different relation of projector, screen and viewer. Ahtila’s multi-screen installations insist that we look to the places of exclusion in discourse and to the silences in representation for meaning elsewhere, in excess and otherwise. The exclusion in discourse is for Luce Irigaray of course the feminine. Irigaray articulates a view that textually and performatively demands we recognise the impossibility of a feminine position. I take up this problematic with specific attention to how Ahtila’s audiovisual installation If 6 Was 9 (Jos 6 olis 9, 1995) produces and disrupts traditional cinematic representation to examine how the space of installation, multi-screen form and the filmic space lend itself to a different encounter with the cinematic. By tracing the concept of ‘elsewhere’ in philosophical and audio-visual texts, the article develops and refines a position from which one might view contemporary cinematic experience. KEYWORDS Luce Irigaray, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, feminism, feminist film, moving image installation, expanded cinema, gallery film

SCULLY: I said, I got the lab to rush the results of the Szczesny autopsy, if you're interested.MULDER: I heard you, Scully.SCULLY: And Szczesny did indeed drown, but not as the result of the inhalation of ectoplasm as you so vehemently suggested.MULDER: Well, what else could she possibly have drowned in?SCULLY: Margarita mix, upchucked with about 40 ounces of Corcovado Gold tequila which, as it turns out, she and her friends rapidly consumed in the woods while trying to reenact the Blair Witch Project.MULDER: Well, I think that demands a little deeper investigation, don't you?SCULLY: No, I don't.— The X-Files, “All Things” (0717) IntroductionMikel J. Koven argues that “The X-Files [1993-2002, films 2005, 2010, revived 2016-2018] was the American television series that defined the zeitgeist of the 1990s” (337) by tapping into “pre-millenium paranoia and the collapse of traditional beliefs” (338). In each episode, “True Believer” and FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and his partner, the skeptical and rational Dr Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), travel through a post-Cold War American landscape that is manifesting varying levels of anxiety about the century to come. The series is preoccupied with a series of questions that have, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, come to be answered fairly definitively. Have aliens visited Earth? (Well, if you believe a team of Harvard scientists, maybe [see Freeman], but there is no evidence of alien colonisation just yet.) Does the US government have its citizens’ best interests at heart? (In its current incarnation, no.) Will climate change have monstrous consequences? (Yes, we’re seeing them.) What do we do about the shady forces operating in post-Soviet Union Russia? (God knows, but they seem to be doing a good job of changing the shape of “democracy” in an increasing number of countries.)These broader socio-political aspects of The X-Files have been explored in a number of studies (see Koven; Moses; Wildermuth). In this article, I focus in more closely on some of the ways in which the character of Scully can be read as a complex engagement with a particularly 1990s version of third-wave feminism. I suggest that the type of feminism embodied in the character of Scully taps into the zeitgeist of the 1990s, a decade characterised not only by a growing media-driven “backlash” against feminism (see Faludi), but also by emergent third wave of feminism driven by movements such as “Riot Grrrl” (centred on openly feminist bands like Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear) and the various, and often contested, feminisms endorsed by a new generation of writers like Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolf, and even Katie Roiphe. Part of Scully’s longevity as a feminist icon can be attributed to the fact that while she is not without her own contradictions and complexities, she emerged from a televisual landscape dominated by particularly insipid representations of professional women. Scully, with her combination of lively wit and serious scientific mind, represented a radical imagining of professional femininity in the 1990s.Working against the Backlash: Scully and the Power of ProfessionalismBy the late 1980s, the political gains made by the second-wave feminism in the 1960s and early 1970s had come increasingly under fire in a “backlash” that “worked to revoke the gains made by the feminist movement” (Genz and Brabon 53). L.S. Kim argues this backlash is reflected in the fact that while strong female characters had always been a feature of US television (e.g. Mary Tyler Moore), in the 1990s televisual landscape feminism was often made popular in a type of “postfeminist discourse in which it is acceptable to be pro-woman but not to be feminist” (319). The quintessential example of this trend was David E. Kelley’s series about a Boston lawyer, Ally McBeal (1997-2002), in which McBeal’s primary dilemma is presented as being that she has “too many choices, too much freedom, and too much desire” which leads to “never-ending searching and even to depression and dysfunction” (Kim 319). McBeal’s professional success never seems to compensate for her various romantic disappointments and these remain the focal point of Kelley’s series.Part of what sets Scully apart from a character like McBeal is her unerring professionalism, and her strong commitment to equality in her relationship with Mulder. Scully displays none of McBeal’s neuroses, and she is unapologetically feminist in her disposition. She also understands implicitly the pivotal role she plays in the partnership at the heart of the X-Files. Scully is, then, a capable, professional woman who not only remains professional at all times, but who also works as a powerful grounding force to her partner’s more outlandish approaches and theories. As series creator Chris Carter has been forced to concede on numerous occasions, without the rational and practical figure of Scully in the morgue to (usually) prove and (sometimes) disprove Mulder’s theories, The X-Files as we know them would cease to exist. In fact, and somewhat paradoxically, in order to best understand Scully as a character, one needs to recognise the significance of the relationship between Scully and Mulder that lies at the heart of the series. The sheer force of Scully’s professionalism, and its resistance to being conscripted straightforwardly into a traditional romantic plot, becomes an important contributor to the powerful sexual tension between Mulder and Scully that came to define the series. Scully also, as critics and commentators were quick to point out, takes on the traditionally masculine role of skeptical scientist on the series, with Mulder positioned in the typically feminine role of intuitive “believer” (in, among other things, aliens, Chupacabra, big foot, and psychic powers). There are, of course, problems with this approach, but for now it is enough to simply point out that this positioning of Mulder and Scully is an important feature of the internal structure of The X-Files and speaks to an awareness of, and desire to challenge, the traditional association of women with intuition and men with rationality. Indeed, Linda Badley points out that the relationship between the two agents is “remarkably egalitarian, challenging traditional gender roles as portrayed on television” (63).Scully and Mulder’s relationship, a relationship that is at once personal and professional, is also grounded in genuine equality and respect. Mulder never undermines Scully, he (occasionally) knows when to bow to her superior scientific reasoning, and his eventual love for his partner is based in his understanding that Scully’s skepticism offers the perfect counterpart to his openness to the paranormal. In fact, one might say that Mulder, at least in part, falls in love with Scully’s professionalism and with her commitment to scientific reasoning. Mulder admits as much himself in the film The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998): “as difficult and frustrating as it’s been sometimes, your goddamn strict rationalism and science have saved me a thousand times over. You kept me honest. You made me a whole person.” In this calculation, Scully is not only Mulder’s equal, she is his missing piece. While she might sometimes grumble about merely playing Watson to Mulder’s Holmes (see “Fight Club” [0720]), Scully’s role is much more important than this, and Mulder (and the viewer) knows it.In the context of the televisual landscape of the 1990s, this representation of Scully as a character who is every bit as intelligent and as integral to the action of the series as her male partner, was incredibly powerful. It marked Scully as a third-wave feminist character in an era dominated by women who seemed to conform to the kind of problematic post-feminism embodied by Ally McBeal. In a recent interview, Gillian Anderson acknowledged the significant role Scully played in opening up possibilities for the representation of women on television in the 1990s. She observed, “a lot of women felt that they saw something recognisable for the first time [in Scully and] there were a lot of young women whose eyes were opened to feeling like they were finally represented in some way on television” (Anderson in Idato n.p.) Many women saw themselves in this character, and there can be little doubt The X-Files spearheaded a shift towards a more representative approach to the writing of female roles in US television in which layered and complex characters such as Scully became the norm rather than the exception. Rosalind Gill, for example, notes that “quality television” has “evolved since the 1990s into a site of rich and complex representations of gender including Homeland, Veep, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Transparent, and The Good Wife” (620).One of the other pervasive positive effects associated with the character of Scully is that she functioned, and indeed continues to function, as a role model for women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). A recent report commissioned by 21st Century Fox, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and J. Walter Thompson Intelligence found that “Scully’s media depiction of a high-achieving woman in STEM asked a generation of girls and women to imagine new professional options… Scully also influenced a generation of young women to study and pursue careers in STEM” (3). Although this report is not entirely impartial (21th Century Fox owns The X-Files), it found that “among women who are familiar with Scully’s character, 91% say she is a role model for girls and women” (5). This finding tallies with those of a variety of earlier online observers who noticed Scully had become a touchstone character “who inspired an entire generation of young women to pursue medical, scientific, and law enforcement degrees as positions” (Consalvi). To an extent not seen before in the history of television, Scully became an important role model for young women in the STEM professions. Scully’s fictional professionalism helped to create a new generation of real-life female STEM professionals.But it is worth remembering that in other respects, Scully is a complicated feminist heroine. This is largely because The X-Files’ production team’s own feminist credentials were often less-than-inspiring. The series was created by a man, and was written and directed predominantly by men in all of its various filmic and televisual incarnations. As Anderson herself pointed out on her Twitter feed for 29 June 2017, of the 207 episodes of X-Files produced, only 2 were directed by women (fig. 1). Famously, when the X-Files began in the early 1990s, Anderson was paid far less than her co-star Duchovny and was even asked to stand behind him on camera. The actor agitated successfully for equal pay after three years in the role, and for the right to stand beside her televisual partner, rather than behind him, even if, somewhat astonishingly, Twenty First Century Fox also offered Anderson less than Duchovny to reprise her famous role in 2016. (Anderson eventually received equal pay for equal billing.)Fig. 1: Gillian Anderson tweet, 29 June 2017.It ought to be remembered, then, that Scully’s feminism is predominantly a construction of men, overlaid with the undoubted feminine empowerment brought to the role by Anderson. As far back as 1998, Linda Badley noticed that for Scully/Anderson “the transference of ‘feminist’ characteristics between character and star is unusually strong—to the extent that a discussion of one must refer to the other. And Anderson/Scully is instantly recognisable as an icon of popular feminism” (62). But in more recent years, Anderson has made even clearer her own feminist leanings. She has done this through the publication (with Jennifer Nadel) of the explicitly feminist We: The Uplifting Manuel for Women Seeking Happiness (2017); by taking up more explicitly feminist roles, such as that of Stella Gibson in the acclaimed BBC series The Fall (2013-present); and through her Twitter feed. The significance of Anderson’s online feminist presence is highlighted by Lauren Modery, who notes: “the next time you’re having a day where you’re not sure if you’re being the best feminist you can be, just ask yourself “what would Gillian Anderson do?” and go to her Twitter account” (Modery). Scully’s 1990s Feminism in a Twenty-First Century ContextFor much of the series, Scully’s feminism can be viewed as a form of the “New Feminism” that Stephanie Genz and Benjamin Brabon associate with the late 1990s and with Natasha Walter’s book The New Feminism (1998). This “New Feminism” attempts to break from second-wave feminism by decoupling the personal from the political (64). Badley, for example, points out that Scully’s feminism is strictly based on individual empowerment: “rather than challenge patriarchy directly or join forces with women activists, Scully channels her anger/ambition into fitting into the system” (70). But equally, Scully’s feminism could be seen as a prototype of the kind of “neo-liberal” feminism that theorists such as Angela McRobbie associate with the present moment, a feminism which “discards the older, welfarist and collectivist feminism of the past, in favour of individualist striving” (4). Certainly, over the course of the 25 years, The X-Files has been in existence, we have seen little evidence that Scully has female friends (or indeed, that she interacts with anyone much outside of Mulder and her family).When other women do enter the picture, such as when Mulder’s one-time lover and co-founder of the X-Files, Diana Fowley appears in the fifth season of the series (see “The End” [0520]), Scully is often positioned in an antagonistic relationship with them. In this context, it is notable that “All Things,” a seventh-season episode directed and written by Anderson, places Scully’s interaction with Colleen Azar, a woman from the American Taoist Healing Centre, at the centre of the narrative. Azar’s exhortations to Scully to “slow down” are presented as the wise words of a female ally in this episode, and Scully does well to heed them. This episode, consciously I think, works as a counter to the more typical representation of Scully as being in competition with women for Mulder’s interest, evident in episodes like “Alpha” (0616) and “Syzygy” (0313). In this respect, Anderson appears to be aligning Scully with a feminism that is much more inclusive than it appears in other, male-written, episodes.From the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century, one of the more problematic elements The X-Files has to do with its representation of sex and sexuality. Sex, in the world of The X-Files, is very 1990s in orientation. In fact, it echoes the way in which sex operated in the Clinton impeachment: denial, denial, denial, even in the face of clear evidence it took place. We see this most obviously in “All Things,” which begins with a shot of Scully getting dressed in front of a mirror, that pans to a shot of an undressed Mulder in bed. This opening seems to suggest the two had spent the night together, but nothing overtly sexual actually takes place in the episode. Indeed, any sexual activity that ever takes place in the X-Files happens off camera, but it is nonetheless worth pointing out that while the equally solitary Mulder is repeatedly characterised in the series by his porn fetish, Scully’s sexuality is repeatedly denied or diminished in the series. Moreover, any overt expression of Scully’s sexuality (such as in “Milagro,” [0618] where she falls for a writer living next door to Mulder) typically ends badly, with Scully placed in peril by her sexual desires.Scully’s continued presence in the twenty-first century, however, means that while her character is rooted in what we might call a “1990s feminist disposition” (she prides herself on being a “woman in a man’s world”; she demonstrates little interest in stereotypically feminine pursuits such as shopping or make up; her focus is on work, rather than romance), she has also been allowed the room to grow and develop. Perhaps most notably, the 2018 Scully is allowed to embrace her sexuality. Sexual activity still appears off screen, of course, but in “Plus One” (1103), we see her actively pursue sex with Mulder (twice!), while her vibrator makes an unapologetic cameo appearance in “Rm9sbG93ZXJz” (1107). Given that we live in a decade saturated in sexual imagery, it makes no sense for 2018 Scully to be as chaste and buttoned up as she was in the 1990s.Finally, in a series in which the wild speculation of the conspiracy theories is almost always true, Scully’s feminist commitment to rationality, science and the power of logic might appear to be undermined at every turn. Badley, for example, reminds us that while Scully may “have medicine and the law on her side ... Mulder’s vision is validated by Chris Carter, as the prologue to nearly every episode reminds us” (67). This is highlighted in “Field Trip” (0621) when Scully wonders, “Mulder, can’t you just for once, just ... for the novelty of it, come up with the simplest explanation, the most logical one instead of automatically jumping to UFOs or Bigfoot or…” Mulder simply counters with:Scully, in six years, how … how often have I been wrong? No seriously, I mean, every time I bring you a case we go through this perfunctory dance. You tell me that I’m not being scientifically rigorous and that I’m off my nut, and then in the end who turns out to be right like 98.95 of the time? I just think I’ve ... earned the benefit of the doubt here.Interestingly enough, however, it is Scully who solves the mystery at the heart of this particular episode of X-Files—Mulder and Scully are indeed trapped inside a giant fungus, being slowly digested by its gooey secretions.And while Mulder’s viewpoint is most often endorsed in the series, the chaos of the Trump administration illustrates perfectly the dangers behind the valorisation of the irrational over the rational. In a decade in which rationality itself is coming under increasing threat—by “fake news”; through a hostility towards the science of climate change; in the desire to wind back further the gains of the feminist movement—we need to remember the importance of the strong and abiding relationship between rationality and feminism. This is a relationship that goes at least as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759-1797) Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), is at the heart of the feminist gothic writings of women like Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) and Mary Shelley (1797-1851). This commitment to the power of rationality lives on in the character of Dana Scully.Conclusion: Scully as Twenty-First-Century Feminist IconI have argued throughout this article that there are limitations of the kind of feminism embodied in Scully, but it is clear that she has come to represent a type of woman who refuses to let men dictate her behaviour, and who maintains her professionalism even under the most difficult of circumstances. A host of Scully memes now circulating on the web celebrate the character’s competence, intelligence, and compassion (figs. 2, 3, and 4). The character of Scully now exists far beyond the confines of the television screen and the imaginations of her predominantly male authors. Scully’s continuing relevance to twenty-first century feminists is reflected in this meme recently placed by Anderson on her Twitter account in response to the allegations of sexual misconduct directed at US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanagh (fig. 5). Rarely have the 1990s seemed so relevant to the present moment.Fig. 2: Scully meme, Meme Generator.Fig. 3: Rustnsplinters, “Scully Motivational.” Deviant Art.Fig. 4: E.H. Redlum, “Scully: Meme Style.” Deviant Art.Fig. 5: Gillian Anderson tweet.ReferencesBadley, Linda. “Scully Hits the Glass Ceiling: Postmodernism, Postfeminism, Posthumanism, and The X-Files.” Fantasy Girls: Gender in the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television. Ed. Elyce Rae Helford. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 61-90.Consalvi, Sydney. “The Scully Effect Continues: How The X-Files’ Dana Scully Changed Television Forever.” Odyssey. 9 Aug. 2016. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://www.theodysseyonline.com/scully-effect>.Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women. London: Vintage, 1991.Freeman, David. “Scientists Say Mysterious ‘Oumuamua’ Object Could Be an Alien Spacecraft: Harvard Researchers Raise the Possibility That It’s a Probe Sent by Extraterrestrials.” NBCNews.com. 6 Nov. 2018. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/scientists-say-mysterious-oumuamua-object-could-be-alien-spacecraft-ncna931381>.Genz, Stéphanie, and Benjamin A. Brabon. Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009.Gill, Rosalind. “Post-Postfeminism? New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times.” Feminist Media Studies 16.4 (2016): 610-30.Idato, Michael. “Gillian Anderson on Why She’s Closing The X-Files after 25 Years.” The Sydney Morning Herald. 15 Jan. 2018. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/times-up-gillian-anderson-on-why-shes-closing-the-xfiles-after-25-years-20180115-h0iapf.html>.Kim, L.S. “‘Sex and the Single Girl’ in Postfeminism: The F Word on Television.” Television and New Media 2.4 (Nov. 2001): 319-334.Koven, Mikel J. “The X-Files.” Essential Cult TV Reader. Ed. David Lavery. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010. 337-343.McRobbie, Angela. “Notes on the Perfect: Competitive Femininity in Neoliberal Times.” Australian Feminist Studies 30:83 (2015): 3-20.Modery, Lauren. “Gillian Anderson Is the Feminist Twitter Hero We Need Right Now.” Birth. Movies. Death. 25 Jan. 2018. 1 Dec. 2018 <https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2018/01/25/gillian-anderson-is-the-feminist-twitter-hero-we-need-right-now>.Moses, Michael Valdez. “Kingdom of Darkness: Autonomy and Conspiracy in The X-Files and Millenium.” The Philosophy of TV Noir. Eds. Steven M. Sanders and Aeon J. Skoble. Lexington: U. of Kentucky P., 2008. 203-228.21stCentury Fox, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and J. Walter Thompson Intelligence. The ‘Scully Effect’: I Want to Believe… in STEM. 2018. <https://impact.21cf.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/03/ScullyEffectReport_21CF_1-1.pdf>.Wildermuth, Mark E. Gender, Science Fiction Television, and the American Security State: 1958-Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.X-Files: Fight the Future. Dir. Rob Bowman. Perf. Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny. 20th Century Fox. 1998.

<p>This research applies an analysis of a woman character in Indonesian horror film, through deeply exploration of <em>Setan Jamu Gendong</em> movie. This horror film, that is concerned with female sexuality. <em>Jamu</em> seller character in <em>Setan Jamu Gendong</em> movie would be chosen to be the subject of this academic research, usually comparing their features with those of the stereotype. The data that is taken, show the <em>jamu</em> seller should be considered as protagonist characters. Nevertheless, she could express multiple functions. While this is a broad and concentrate on area of the research, work in it has been shaped by a pronounced emphasis upon semiotic and feminist theory, which the researchers think, has limited the field in analyzing. In defining these diverse constructs, the researchers expand this focus sexuality by drawing from critical theories of semiology to provide the details of the way that taken-for-granted ideas about normative female sexuality are articulated, and stereotyping in popular culture. Over the research, it would show, how these paradigms serve to constrain and simplify broader cultural conceptualizations of female semiotically sexuality, placed them in second gender, At the outset of the research, the researchers had hoped to find out, that the horror genre in Indonesia was a place in which alternative modes of being and subordination could be explored and considered.</p><strong>Keywords:</strong> women, <em>jamu</em>, semiotic, gender, stereotype

In finding patriarchal oppression in linear narratives, early Second Wave feminist writers like Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray opposed biologically based Freudian theories that claimed the feminine was grounded in a certain essence of male-ness and female-ness. Cixous’ advocacy of écriture féminine includes her critique of traditional narrative, which she claims is structured by a sexual opposition that “has always worked for man’s profit to the point of reducing writing . . . to his laws” (883). Specifically in terms of cinema, the focus of this paper, Laura Mulvey finds similar oppression in filmic linear narratives. For her, the avant-garde’s near limitless possibilities can break this power, thus freeing “the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment” (47). Similarly, Steve Neale’s “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema,” where he theorizes about placing the male body under the erotic gaze, remains immersed in a discourse on linear narrative. Some pornography theorists like Richard Dyer slightly eschew the overall plot-based notion of narrative by using the visible male orgasm as the structuring device, creating something of a narrative of ejaculation. Specifically, I am referring to Dyer’s “Idol thoughts: orgasm and self-reflexivity in gay pornography” where he states that cumming “brings the linear narrative drive that structures porn to a clear climax and end” (192). This emphasis on the male orgasm is also a tool used by some anti-porn feminists to read male-supremacy into (heterosexual) porn. Linda Williams, however, is quick to show that the money shot “is after all only male orgasm” which “can also be seen as the very limit of the visual representation of sexual pleasure,” countering some anti-porn arguments of pornography vis-à-vis the recorded male orgasm (Hard Core 101, author’s emphasis). Yet this too comes from an ever-present formalist tradition of film theory that reads meaning almost exclusively on the screen, maintaining the notion that porn is viewed as standard, commercial movies are, a notion that hardly seems thorough enough to account for the particulars of porn spectatorship. (Subsequently, Williams explores patterns of consumption in a later article entitled “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” an article which I will discuss in more detail below.) With specific attention to pornography’s effects on viewers, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon were successful in getting certain municipalities to pass legislation banning pornography based on the detriments of the genre. (For further explanation of their position, please see the Minneapolis, Minnesota and Indianapolis, Indiana city council meeting transcripts in their book In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights.) Although the courts subsequently struck down this legislation, MacKinnon explained some of her reasoning in “Sexuality” where she asked important questions of (heterosexual) pornography’s defining woman in terms of what (heterosexual) male viewers find erotic, and her account of this definition’s role in terms of power seems fairly accurate. “Sexual meaning is not made only, or even primarily, by words and in texts. It is made in social relations of power in the world, through which process gender is also produced” (160). Yet because her argument is grounded in heterosexual porn, I must question some of her conclusions about “man” as a collective gender. In other words, do the erotics of gay porn still define woman as “what male desire requires for arousal and satisfaction and is totally tautologous with ‘female sexuality’ and ‘the female sex’” (161)? Or does man—at least in part—now fall into this category, thus disrupting the strict binaries of male and female sexuality? MacKinnon does bring in issues of same-sex desire, and her effort at inclusion should be commended. Her understanding of male-male sex, however, remains wed to the idea that dominance and submission are still defining characteristics, and that these characteristics reinforce the masculine:feminine binary, presumably in terms of sexual positioning, thus eliminating variance within male-male desire. The sum total of this is that many gender-based understandings of narrative are too closely tied to formalism, and much theory that questions the positioning of viewers—via feminist theory or otherwise—fails to account for variety within audiences. Porn theorists can use texts like Bel Ami’s Frisky Summer 1: Best Friends to correct the subtracting of marginalized groups by studying the technological characteristics of DVDs in the domestic sphere. And studying these features will allow for more in depth inquiries about geographies of consumption, a category in need of expansion for all of porn studies, not just gay porn. John Champagne favors this type of culturally-minded analysis of gay porn, focusing on consumption practices within the geographic spaces of gay porn theatres/arcades in his “‘Stop Reading Films!’: Film Studies, Close Analysis, and Gay Pornography.” Here, Champagne claims that close analyses of films of any genre act as a gatekeeper for film studies, suggesting that, through formalism, film theorists are able to ward off intrusions from other disciplines (like queer studies), preserve the film text as a privileged site of knowledge, and ensure their own place of authority (79). With regard to gay porn, Champagne claims that these acts of self-preservation film theorists perform when doing close analysis contain any perceived threat that gay porn and the gay porn theatre/arcade present. “In its psychoanalytically inflected variant in particular, it [film studies] uses close analysis to diagnose the desire of (homo)sexualized spectators, a desire it thinks it already knows and can recognize” (77). Offering the gay porn theatre/arcade as a more appropriate location for examination, Champagne aims “to understand the porno film viewing experience as part of a larger set of cultural and social rituals and practices” rather than studying it as simply another filmmaking practice (81). Going hand-in-glove with Champagne’s rejection of close analysis as a tool for porn studies, Linda Williams suggests that pornography—gay, lesbian, straight, or otherwise—is a “body genre,” defining this in terms of its desire to cause a bodily reaction (“Film Bodies” 3). In other words, porn wants to get the viewer off. Champagne’s transferring the emphasis from the text to the spectator is very appropriate for a cultural/social investigation into gay porn because of porn’s encoded desires to cause this bodily reaction. (Similarly, work could be done on the video rental store where consumption of pornography—i.e., renting a movie—could be the pretext for a desired sexual encounter.) Yet by focusing so tightly on the theatre/arcade, Champagne misses the opportunity to bridge textual analysis with consumption practices as they are acted out in the home viewing experience. I, as the home viewer, am allowed more control over the text than the theatre/arcade patron. Champagne describes a machine found in some porn theatres/arcades that cycles through movies, showing brief clips from specific scenes as a preview of what the patron could watch (86). Beyond that, the theatre/arcade patron has little control over pausing, rewinding, or fast-forwarding the film. DVDs, on the other hand, can be viewed non-linearly, something beyond comparison for theatre/arcade patrons and even exceeding what VHS offers. This ability of DVD to turn just about any porn film into a compilation movie infuses far more control over the text than ever before. Because of the overwhelming popularity of home consumption and the ever-expanding DVD market, porn research must account for these newer strategies of consumption. Like most mainstream DVDs, porn DVDs are divided into individual “chapters,” with porn DVDs usually featuring one sex scene at a time, thus acting similarly to the machine Champagne describes. The Frisky Summer DVD is divided into six chapters representing the six sex scenes, but after selecting, say, chapter 6—Ion Davidov and Johan Paulik—the DVD offers sub-chapter options of “play chapter,” “foreplay,” “oral,” “anal,” and “orgasms,” as written on the screen. By beginning with chapter six, the final scene/chapter, I am not missing vital information to understanding what will be present in this final scene because, as a body genre, the film is trying to cause a bodily reaction, trying to produce my orgasm, not necessarily needing me to follow a linear plot. In other words, what happens in chapter 1—Ion Davidov’s sex scene with Daniel Valent—has no bearing on the visceral pleasure of chapter 6. In fact, porn DVDs like Frisky Summer provide the pieces for me to construct my own sequences that meet my visceral desires. But we shouldn’t completely disregard formalist film theory because one of the offered pieces is the film as “sequenced” by the filmmakers. After all, following characters/actors from encounter to encounter could help drive the orgasmic pleasure for some viewers or possibly even satisfy other visual interests unintended by the filmmakers. Separating home porn consumption from other forms of domestic cinema consumption is that porn filmmakers must expect their product to be seen in fragments, illustrating their knowledge of porn viewer behavior. Furthermore, dividing the film into not only the individual sex scenes but also the types of sex featured in that scene suggests that the home viewer is not interested in watching the movie form beginning to end because porn’s true goal of viewer orgasm can be met more efficiently by watching a specific sexual act. Jumping right to, say, the anal sex in chapter six allows me to construct a meta-narrative that both defies the diegetic story offered by the filmmakers yet complies with the genre’s, and therefore, the filmmakers’ larger goal to produce my orgasm. And with my orgasm, the narrative truly comes to an end because, shortly after, I will presumably press stop, thus ending the diegetic narrative at a fairly random place, yet ending the meta-narrative of consumption at its standard and expected post-orgasmic conclusion. Underlining the specificity of the particular sexual act within the sex scene is that, after selecting the anal sex moments between Ion and Johan, the film does not continue on to their orgasms despite this being the next moment in the linear action. Rather, the DVD returns me to the sex act menu within their chapter, allowing me to watch the anal sex again, pick a different type of sex, or return to the chapter menu to pick a different set of actors. With these options of sexual acts within sex scenes, the filmmakers recognize both that I am not necessarily interested in watching the film from beginning to end and that even watching an entire sexual sequence could be more than I want. Furthermore, returning to the menu instead of continuing with the scene as the filmmakers’ edited it suggests that I might never want to see the actor’s orgasms anyway, challenging the formalist importance of the cum shot. An interesting note to consider with this is the time limitation selecting a specific sexual act places on the viewer. The anal sex sequence between Ion and Johan lasts 3:27. This does not guarantee the viewer enough time to reach an orgasm, a fact that appears to counter the film’s body genre qualities. Yet limited time actually results in viewer control. If 3:27 isn’t enough time to orgasm, the film’s return to the sub-chapter menu demands the viewer exercise power over the text by re-watching, rewinding, pausing, or “slow-motioning” the sequence. While the film could at one point be working against my ejaculation, it nevertheless demands that I control the text. Grounding gender-based theories on formalist traditions of narrative and heterosexist notions of spectatorship create a structured absence of marginalized sexual identities in non-linear narrative film viewing. Although my comments on this subscribe to a somewhat limited/“vanilla” idea of solo masturbation by self-identified gay men watching gay porn at home, they should be viewed as a starting point for future research that examines all forces being enacted upon porn viewers. Specifically, we can use this idea of pleasure being found between the text and the orgasm to look at both female and straight male pleasures of their using gay male porn. This middle ground between production and consumption is where I place the structuring device of gay male porn viewed by gay men and should be considered in future studies. References Champagne, John. “‘Stop Reading Films!: Film Studies, Close Analysis, and Gay Pornography.” Cinema Journal 36.4 (Summer 1997): 76-97. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (Summer 1976): 875-893. Dyer, Richard. “Idol thoughts: orgasm and self-reflexivity in gay pornography.” The Culture of Queers. London: Routledge, 2002. 187-203. Frisky Summer 1: Best Friends. DVD. Dir. George Duroy. With Ion Davidov and Johan Paulik. Bel Ami, 1995. 87 min. MacKinnon, Catharine A. “Sexuality.” The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997. 158-180. MacKinnon, Catharine A., and Andrea Dworkin, eds. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1997. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 34-47. Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.” Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 253-264. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44.4 (Summer 1991): 2-13. —-. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. Rev. ed. Berkeley: Univ. of Cal. Press, 1999. MLA Style Bolton, Michael C. "Cumming to an End: The Male Orgasm and Domestic Consumption of Gay Pornography." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/08_cumming.php>. APA Style Bolton, M. (2004 Oct 11). Cumming to an End: The Male Orgasm and Domestic Consumption of Gay Pornography, M/C Journal 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/08_cumming.php>

“I realised some time ago that I am a showgirl. When I perform it is to show the girl, whereas some performers take the approach of caricaturing or ‘burlesquing’ the girl.” (Lola the Vamp) “Perhaps the most surprising idea of contemporary feminism is that women are female impersonators” (Tyler, 1) In recent years, femininity has been the subject of much debate in mainstream culture, as well as in feminist theory. The recent moral panic over “size zero” bodies is only the latest example of the anxieties and tensions generated by a culture in which every part of the female body is subject to endless surveillance and control. The backlash against the women’s movement of the late 20th century has seen the mainstreaming of high femininity on an unprecedented scale. The range of practices now expected of middle-class women, including cosmetic surgery, dieting, fake tanning, manicures, pedicures, and waxing (including pubic waxing) is staggering. Little wonder, then, that femininity has often been imagined as oppressive labour, as work. If women were to attempt to produce the ideal femininities promoted by women’s magazines in the UK, USA and Australia, there would be little time in the day—let alone money—for anything else. The work of femininity hence becomes the work of adapting oneself to a current set of social norms, a work of adaptation and adjustment that must remain invisible. The goal is to look natural while constantly labouring away in private to maintain the façade. Alongside this feminine ideal, a subculture has grown up that also promotes the production of an elaborately feminine identity, but in very different ways. The new burlesque is a subculture that began in club nights in London and New York, has since extended to a network of performers and fans, and has become a highly active community on the Internet as well as in offline cultural spaces. In these spaces, performers and audiences alike reproduce striptease performances, as well as vintage dress and styles. Performers draw on their own knowledge of the history of burlesque to create acts that may invoke late 19th-century vaudeville, the supper clubs of pre-war Germany, or 1950s pinups. However the audience for these performances is as likely to consist of women and gay men as the heterosexual men who comprise the traditional audience for such shows. The striptease star Dita von Teese, with her trademark jet-black hair, pale skin, red lips and tiny 16-inch corseted waist, has become the most visible symbol of the new burlesque community. However, the new burlesque “look” can be seen across a web of media sites: in film, beginning with Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), and more recently in The Notorious Bettie Paige (Mary Harron, 2005), as well as in mainstream movies like Mrs Henderson Presents (Stephen Frears, 2005); in novels (such as Louise Welsh’s The Bullet Trick); in popular music, such as the iconography of Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl tour and the stage persona of Alison Goldfrapp; and in high fashion through the work of Vivienne Westwood and Roland Mouret. Since the debut in the late 1990’s of von Teese’s most famous act, in which she dances in a giant martini glass, the new burlesque has arisen in popular culture as a counterpoint to the thin, bronzed, blonde ideal of femininity that has otherwise dominated popular culture in the West. The OED defines burlesque as “a comically exaggerated imitation, especially in a literary or dramatic work; a parody.” In this article, I want to think about the new burlesque in precisely this way: as a parody of feminine identity that, by making visible the work involved in producing feminine identity, precisely resists mainstream notions of feminine beauty. As Lola the Vamp points out in the quotation that opens this article, new burlesque is about “caricaturing or burlesquing the girl”, but also about “showing the girl”, not only in the literal sense of revealing the body at the end of the striptease performance, but in dramatising and making visible an attachment to feminine identity. For members of the new burlesque community, I want to suggest, femininity is experienced as an identity position that is lived as authentic. This makes new burlesque a potentially fruitful site in which to think through the questions of whether femininity can be adapted, and what challenges such adaptations might pose, not only for mainstream culture, but for feminist theory. As I have stated, feminist responses to mainstream femininity have emphasised that femininity is work; that is, that feminine identities do not emerge naturally from certain bodies, but rather have to be made. This is necessary in order to resist the powerful cultural discourses through which gender identities are normalised. This model sees femininity as additive, as something that is superimposed on some mystical “authentic” self which cries out to be liberated from the artificially imposed constraints of high heels, makeup and restrictive clothing. This model of femininity is summed up by Naomi Wolf’s famous statement, in The Beauty Myth, that “femininity is code for femaleness plus whatever society happens to be selling” (Wolf, 177; emphasis added). However, a potential problem with such a view of gender identity is that it tends to reproduce essentialist notions of identity. The focus on femininity as a process through which bodies are adapted to social norms suggests that there is an unmarked self that precedes adaptation. Sabina Sawhney provides a summary and critique of this position: Feminism seems to be relying on the notion that the authentic identity of woman would be revealed once the drag is removed. That is to say, when her various “clothes”—racial, ethnic, hetero/homosexual, class textured—are removed, the real, genuine woman would appear whose identity would pose no puzzles. But surely that is a dangerous assumption, for it not only prioritises certain forms of identity formation over others, but also essentialises a sexual or gendered identity as already known in advance. (5) As Sawhney suggests here, to see femininity only in terms of oppressive labour is implicitly essentialist, since it suggests the existence of a primary, authentic “femaleness”. Femininity consists of consumer “stuff” which is superimposed onto unproblematically female bodies. Sawhney is right, here, to compare femininity to drag: however, female and male femininities are read very differently in this account. Drag and cross-dressing are decried as deliberate (male) parodies of “women” (and it is interesting to note that parodies of femininity are inevitably misread as parodies of women, as though the two were the same). However, those women who engage in feminine identity practices are to be pitied, not blamed, or at least not explicitly. Femininity, the compulsion to adapt oneself to incorporate “whatever society is selling”, is articulated in terms of “social pressure”, as a miserable duty over which women have no control. As Samantha Holland argues, the danger is that women become positioned as “mindless consumers, in thrall to the power of media images” (10). Resisting the adaptations demanded by femininity thus becomes a way of resisting mindlessness, particularly through resisting excessive consumption. This anxiety about female excess is echoed in some of the press coverage of the burlesque scene. For example, an article in the British Sunday paper The Observer takes a sceptical position on some performers’ claims that their work is feminist, wondering whether the “fairy dust of irony really strips burlesque of any political dubiousness” (O’Connell, 4), while an article on a feminist Website argues that the movement “can still be interpreted as a form of exploitation of women’s bodies,” (DiNardo, 1), which rather suggests that it is the purpose of feminism to try and interpret all manifestations of femininity in this way: as if the writer is suggesting that feminism itself were a system for curbing feminine excess. This is not to deny that the new burlesque, like more mainstream forms of femininity, involves work. Indeed, a reading of online burlesque communities suggests that it is precisely the labour of femininity that is a source of pleasure. Many books and Websites associated with this movement offer lessons in stage performance; however, these real and virtual classes are not limited to those who wish to perform. In this subculture, much of the pleasure derives from a sense of community between performer and audience, a sense which derives mainly from the adaptation of a specific retro or vintage feminine identity. Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy offers courses in the more theatrical aspects of burlesque, such as stripping techniques, but also in subjects such as “makeup and wig tricks” and “walking in heels” (Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque). Burlesque, like cross-dressing suggests that femininity needs to be learnt: and learning femininity, in this sense, also involves unlearning whatever “one [usually restrictive] size fits all” forms of femininity are currently being sold by the fashion and beauty industries. In contrast to this normative model, the online accounts of burlesque fans and performers reveal an intense pleasure in creating and adapting new feminine identities within a subculture, through a “DIY” approach to femininity. This insistence on doing it yourself is important, since it is through the process of reclaiming vintage styles of clothing, hair and makeup that real adaptation takes place. Whereas mainstream femininity is positioned as empty consumption, and as a source of anxiety, burlesque is aligned with recycling, thrift shopping and the revival of traditional crafts such as knitting and weaving. This is most visible in magazines and Websites such as Bust magazine. This magazine, which launched in the early 1990s, was an early forerunner of the burlesque revival with its use of visual imagery taken from 1950s women’s magazines alongside pinups of the same era. The Website has been selling Bettie Page merchandise for some time alongside its popular Stitch n’ Bitch knitting books, and also hosts discussions on feminism, craft and “kitsch and make-up” (Bust). In the accounts cited above, femininity is clearly not imagined through an imperative to conform to social norms: instead, the practice of recovering and re-creating vintage looks is constructed as a pleasurable leisure activity that brings with it a sense of achievement and of engagement with a wider community. The appeal of burlesque, therefore, is not limited to a fetishistic preference for the trappings of burlesque or retro femininity: it is also defined by what it is not. Online discussions reveal a sense of dissatisfaction with more culturally visible forms of femininity promoted by celebrity culture and women’s magazines. Particular irritants include the low-maintenance look, skinniness, lip gloss, highlighted and layered hair, fake tan and, perhaps unexpectedly, jeans. These are seen as emblematic of precisely stereotypical and homogenising notions of feminine identity, as one post points out: “Dita VT particularly stands out in this day and age where it seems that the mysterious Blondifier and her evil twin, the Creosoter, get to every female celeb at some point.” (Bust Lounge, posted on Oct 17 2006, 3.32 am) Another reason for the appeal of New Burlesque is that it does not privilege slenderness: as another post says “i think i like that the women have natural bodies in some way” (Bust Lounge, posted on Oct 8 2006, 7:34 pm), and it is clear that the labour associated with this form of femininity consists of adorning the body for display in a way that opposes the dominant model of constructing “natural” beauty through invisible forms of labour. Burlesque performers might therefore be seen as feminist theorists, whose construction of a feminine image against normative forms of femininity dramatises precisely those issues of embodiment and identity that concern feminist theory. This open display and celebration of feminine identity practices, for example, makes visible Elizabeth Grosz’s argument, in Volatile Bodies, that all bodies are inscribed with culture, even when they are naked. A good example of this is the British performer Immodesty Blaize, who has been celebrated in the British press for presenting an ideal of beauty that challenges the cultural predominance of size zero bodies: a press cutting on her Website shows her appearance on the cover of the Sunday Times Style magazine for 23 April 2006, under the heading “More Is More: One Girl’s Sexy Journey as a Size 18” (Immodesty Blaize). However, this is not to suggest that her version of femininity is simply concerned with rejecting practices such as diet and exercise: alongside the press images of Immodesty in ornate stage costumes, there is also an account of the rigorous training her act involves. In other words, the practices involved in constructing this version of femininity entail bringing together accounts of multiple identity practices, often in surprising ways that resist conforming to any single ideal of femininity: while both the athletic body and the sexualised size 18 body may both be seen as sites of resistance to the culturally dominant slender body, it is unusual for one performer’s image to draw on both simultaneously as Blaize does. This dramatisation of the work involved in shaping the body can also be seen in the use of corsets by performers like von Teese, whose extremely tiny waist is a key aspect of her image. Although this may be read on one hand as a performance of conformity to feminine ideals of slimness, the public flaunting of the corset (which is after all a garment originally designed to be concealed beneath clothing) again makes visible the practices and technologies through which femininity is constructed. The DIY approach to femininity is central to the imperative to resist incorporation by mainstream culture. Dita von Teese makes this point in a press interview, in which she stresses the impossibility of working with stylists: “the one time I hired a stylist, they picked up a pair of my 1940’s shoes and said, these would look really cute with jeans. I immediately said, you’re out of here” (West, 10). With its constant dramatisation and adaptation of femininity, then, I would argue that burlesque precisely carries out the work which Grosz says is imperative for feminist theory, of problematising the notion of the body as a “blank, passive page” (156). If some feminist readings of femininity have failed to account for the multiplicity and diversity of feminine identity performances, it is perhaps surprising that this is also true of feminist research that has engaged with queer theory, especially theories of drag. As Carol-Ann Tyler notes, feminist critiques of drag performances have tended to read drag performances as a hostile parody of women themselves (60). I would argue that this view of drag as a parody of women is problematic, in that it reproduces an essentialist model in which women and femininity are one and the same. What I want to suggest is that it is possible to read drag in continuum with other performances, such as burlesque, as an often affectionate parody of femininity; one which allows female as well as male performers to think through the complex and often contradictory pleasures and anxieties that are at stake in performing feminine identities. In practice, some accounts of burlesque do see burlesque as a kind of drag performance, but they reveal that anxiety is not alleviated but heightened when the drag performer is biologically female. While drag is performed by male bodies, and hence potentially from a position of power, a female performer is held to be both complicit with patriarchal power, and herself powerless: the performance thus emanates from a doubly powerless position. Because femininity is imagined as a property of “women”, to parody femininity is to parody oneself and is hence open to being read as a performance of self-hatred. At best, the performer is herself held to occupy a position of middle class privilege, and hence to have access to what O’Connell, in the Observer article, calls “the fairy dust of irony” (4). For O’Connell however the performer uses this privilege to celebrate a normative, “politically dubious” form of femininity. In this reading, which positions itself as feminist, any potential for irony is lost, and burlesque is seen as unproblematically reproducing an oppressive model of feminine identities and roles. The Websites I have cited are aware of the potential power of burlesque as parody, but as a parody of femininity which attempts to work with the tensions inherent in feminine identity: its pleasures as well as its constraints and absurdities. Such a thinking-through of femininity is not the sole preserve of the male drag performer. Indeed, my current research on drag is engaged with the work of self-proclaimed female drag queens, also known as “bio queens” or “faux queens”: recently, Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters has spoken of her early experiences as a performer in a San Francisco drag show, where there is an annual faux-queen beauty pageant (Barber, 1). I would argue that there is a continuity between these performers and participants in the burlesque scene who may be conflicted about their relationship to “feminism” but are highly aware of the possibilities offered by this sense of parody, which is often articulated through an invocation of queer politics. Queer politics is often explicitly on the agenda in burlesque performance spaces; however the term “queer” is used not only to refer to performances that take place in queer spaces or for a lesbian audience, but to the more general way in which the very idea of women parodying femininity works to queer both feminist and popular notions of femininity that equate it with passivity, with false consciousness. While burlesque does celebrate extreme femininities, it does so in a highly self-aware and parodic manner which works to critique and denaturalise more normalised forms of femininity. It does so partly by engaging with a queer agenda (for example Miss Indigo’s Academy of Burlesque hosts lectures on queer politics and feminism alongside makeup classes and stripping lessons). New Burlesque stage performers use 19th- and 20th-century ideals of femininity to parody contemporary feminine ideals, and this satirical element is carried through in the audience and in the wider community. In burlesque, femininity is reclaimed as an identity precisely through aligning an excessive form of femininity with feminism and queer theory. This model of burlesque as queer parody of femininity draws out the connections as well as the discontinuities between male and female “alternative” femininities, a potentially powerful connectivity that is suggested by Judith Butler’s work and that disrupts the notion that femininity is always imposed on women through consumer culture. It is possible, then, to open up Butler’s writing on drag in order to make explicit this continuity between male and female parodies of femininity. Writing of the need to distinguish between truly subversive parody, and that which is likely to be incorporated, Butler explains: Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony (Gender Trouble, 177). The problem with this is that femininity, as performed by biologically female subjects, is still positioned as other, as that which presents itself as natural, but is destabilised by more subversive gender performances, such as male drag, that reveal it as performative. The moment of judgment, when we as queer theorists decide which performances are truly subversive and which are not, is divisive: having drawn out the continuity between male and female performances of femininity, it reinstates the dualistic order in which women are positioned as lacking agency. If a practice is ultimately incorporated by consumer culture, this does not necessarily mean that it is not troubling or politically interesting. Such a reductive and pessimistic reading produces “the popular” as a bad object in a way that reproduces precisely the hegemonic discourse it is trying to disrupt. In this model, very few practices, including drag, could be held to be subversive at all. What is missing from Butler’s account is an awareness of the complex and multiple forms of pleasure and desire that characterise women’s attachment to feminine identities. I would argue that she opens up a potentially exhilarating possibility that has significant implications for feminist understandings of feminine identity in that it allows for an understanding of the ways in which female performers actively construct, rework and critique feminine identity, but that this possibility is closed down through the implication that only male drag performances are “truly troubling” (Gender Trouble, 177). By allowing female performers to ”parody the girl”, I am suggesting that burlesque potentially allows for an understanding in which female performances of femininity may, like drag, also be “truly troubling” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 177). Like drag, they require the audience both to reflect on the ways in which femininity is performatively constructed within the constraints of a normative, gendered culture, but also do justice to the extent to which feminine identity may be experienced as a source of pleasure. Striptease, in which feminine identity is constructed precisely through painstakingly creating a look whose layers are then stripped away in a stylised performance of feminine gesture, powerfully dramatises the historic tension between feminism and femininity. Indeed, the labour involved in burlesque performances can be adapted and adopted as feminist theoretical performances that speak back to hegemonic ideals of beauty, to feminism, and to queer theory. References Barber, Lynn. “Life’s a Drag”. The Guardian 26 Nov. 2006, 10. Bust Lounge. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.bust.com/>. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. Undoing Gender. London and New York: Routledge, 2004 DiNardo, Kelly. “Burlesque Comeback Tries to Dance with Feminism.” Women’s E-News 2004. 1 Mar. 2007 http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2099>. Dita von Teese. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.dita.net>. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a New Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Holland, Samantha. Alternative Femininities. London: Berg, 2004. Immodesty Blaize. 10 Apr. 2007 http://www.immodestyblaize.com/collage2.html>. Lola the Vamp. 8 Mar. 2006 http://www.lolathevamp.net>. Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.academyofburlesque.com>. O’Connell, Dee. “Tassels Will Be Worn.” The Observer 28 Sep. 2003, 4. Sawhney, Sabina. “Feminism and Hybridity Round Table.” Surfaces 7 (2006): 113. Tyler, Carol Ann. Female Impersonation. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. West, Naomi. “Art of the Teese.” Daily Telegraph online edition 6 Mar. 2006: 10. 1 Mar. 2007 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/main.jhtml?xml=/fashion/2006/03/06/efdita04.xml>. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. London: Chatto and Windus, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ferreday, Debra. "Adapting Femininities: The New Burlesque." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/12-ferreday.php>. APA Style Ferreday, D. (May 2007) "Adapting Femininities: The New Burlesque," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/12-ferreday.php>.

There is a humorously disturbing cartoon by Mary Leunig of a mother as a suffering Jesus figure crucified on the cross of motherhood. The image simultaneously evokes and countersigns the idealised portrait of mothers as serene and self-sacrificing Madonna figures. In Leunig’s cartoon the mother wears a crown of nappy pins; her children, inconsolable, bereft of the mother as a site of selfless love and nurture, look up at her on the cross. Over twenty years old, this cartoon haunts the viewer with its ironic/iconic motifs of motherhood, because it signifies the presence of an absence – the absence of the mother as a desiring subject, and a “space where the mother can be seen as woman” (Irigaray in Grosz 1989, 119). Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film AI (Artificial Intelligence) is, I think, an interesting attempt to speak/visualise that space, but it ultimately taps into our Western phallocentric society’s ongoing love affair with the woman as mother, and its denial of the mother as woman. Crucial to this denial is an erasure of the female body and love of self, both of which are sacrificed on the altar of the child’s needs and desires. Luce Irigaray’s concern for the absence of the mother’s subjectivity in Western discourses tempts her to claim that men are intent on giving birth to themselves, thus not only refuting the mother as woman, but disavowing even that limited, metonymic, signifying space allotted to the mother – the mother as the site of origin. She writes: in order to become men, they continue to consume … [the mother], draw on her resources and, at the same time, they deny her or disclaim her in their identification with and their belonging to the masculine world. They owed their existence, their body, their life and they forget or misrecognise this debt in order to set themselves up as powerful men, adults busying themselves with public affairs (Irigaray in Grosz 1989, 121) Developments in reproductive technology over the past twenty years have enabled the concept of the self-made man who disavows the maternal debt to become more of a reality. Mary Ann Doane, citing Andreas Huyssen, (in Wolmark, 1999) claims that the ultimate (male) fantasy of reproductive technology is the production of life without the mother (24). Doane also points out, however, that the technology/human reproduction interface in these processes “puts into crisis the very possibility of the question of origins, the Oedipal dilemma and the relation between subjectivity and knowledge that it supports” (26). Spielberg’s film AI (which screened to mixed reception world-wide) problematises the consequences of life without the biological mother due to male technological intervention, resolving this by reaffirming the importance of the woman as mother and celebrating the mother-child bond. In effect, one of the ‘messages’ in this film is that you cannot take the mother out of the woman, and I would suggest that part of the reviewers’ antipathy to the film is fed by an aversion to Spielberg’s focus on maternal space (Shepard, 2001). The film invites the viewer to be critical of the ways in which males use technology to tamper with nature, and suggests that such intrusions will have disastrous consequences. By revealing the robots as more moral and humane than their human counterparts, AI highlights a fundamental anxiety about the human “self”. However, in attempting to resolve these issues, AI reifies the woman as mother, aligning her with “nature” and positioning the mother and child as the precious casualties of technological intervention. Thus AI confirms that well rehearsed binarism that links women with nature/nurture and men with technology/culture, in the process endorsing a reductionist view of women’s bodies as essentially maternal (Grosz, 1987, 5-6) and subsuming the mother beneath a concern for the child (Walker, 1998). AI is set in a future society topographically ravaged by the effects of greenhouse gases. Major cities have been flooded and there are legal sanctions to strictly limit pregnancies. Robots called ‘mechas’ have been invented to serve the human race and to help conserve the limited resources. David is the perfect ‘mecha’ child who can be programmed to love – the realisation of the male scientist’s dreams. He is adopted by human parents, Monica and Martin, after it seems that Henry, their biological child, will never recover from a coma. The father Martin brings David home, a gesture that echoes the male scientist’s fantasy of the reproduction of life without a mother. Monica, the mother, falls in love with David, and it is Monica, not Martin, who programs David to love her in return. Thus it is suggested that motherhood is instinctive in women. The father retains an aloof detachment from the child: “You’re a toy,” he tells David, “I’m real”. This statement clearly distinguishes the technological from the human, culture from nature, and the gendered power hierarchy that these divisions uphold. Once David is programmed to love Monica, he calls her “Mommy”. David’s desire to be a ‘real live boy’ is fuelled by his potent love for the mother, which drives the drama and the narrative shape of his quest for reunion with her. The mother-as-woman disappears under the weight of nostalgia for the certainty of origins which mandates the woman-as-mother. Elizabeth Grosz, paraphrasing Luce Irigaray argues that, “with no access to social value in her own right, she becomes the mother who has only food (that is love) to give the child, a nurture that, in our culture, is deemed either excessive or inadequate”(1989, 119). Constructed by others, the mother here is both the phallic mother who satisfies all needs and desires, and the castrated mother who denies the self, both Freudian conceptualisations. AI further portrays motherhood without the mess, by transforming the female body into the ‘good and proper’ maternal body. It thus removes the potential for the abjectification of corporeal maternal space that occurs in many horror films dealing with the mother figure (see Creed’s work). The maternal body in AI is a sanitised space that is represented by the clean, bounded rooms of the family home, and the closed, groomed, feminine body of Monica. The film confirms the home as a traditional site of nurture and motherly love, a spatial marker of women’s identity as well as place. At the end of the film, David’s twofold wish of becoming a real live boy and being with his mother is finally granted, but not until after some 2000 years. In conferring human status on David, the narrative resolves any apprehension about loss of boundaries and the blurring of the distinctions between self and other, which is generated by the human/technology interface (Creed 1995, 147). When Monica is re-born by a male scientist figure in this future society, an event that echoes the immaculate conception birth of David, she is the woman-as-mother. Reunited in the family home with David, she comments that she feels strange and doesn’t quite know why she is there; but David’s presence and love reassures her, giving her access to her only identity, that of mother. The film closes on an idyllic scene in which David and the idealised mother are falling asleep together on the parental bed in the sanctuary of the home. Spielberg’s mother is not Mary Leunig’s suffering mother, but the film’s focus on the mother/child bond bears an interesting resemblance to feminist theories of the pre-oedipal as a space of potential disruption to the Oedipal narrative (Kristeva). In its demotion of the masculine and its criticism of technology, AI could be read as a celebration of the pre-oedipal, that phase of psycho-sexual identity formation in which the mother is privileged and which is usually devalued once the father intervenes in the mother-child dyad (as Martin does when he separates David from Monica, insisting he leaves after the real son Henry recovers). The phallic domain of the father, the symbolic, is spurned in this film, while the domain of the mother, the imaginary, and the pre-Oedipal, is valorised. This is visually enhanced in the film through the use of water imagery, the invigoration of the maternal figure (Monica/ Madonna), and the primacy given to the mother-child bond. Secure in the maternal space at the end of the film, David eschews the masculine: “No Henry, no Martin, no grief”. However such a reading still prioritises the woman-as-mother, not the mother-as-woman. The problem with singing the song of the pre-oedipal sublime (Helene Cixous’s ‘white ink’ and Julia Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’), is that it threatens to buy into the same idealisation of the mother as the phallocentric discourses that it attacks (Walker, 1998). I have argued here that the mother, mothering, motherhood and the maternal body continue to be represented in our culture as idealised experiences and states of being. Such textual representation allocates homogeneity and naturalness to motherhood, and a fixed conceptualisation, even obliteration, of women’s bodies and desires. Despite appearing to undermine the masculine and valorise the maternal, AI provides a metaphorical inscription of motherly love and love for the mother that fails to recognise the flesh behind the words. Works Cited Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Carnivalesque.” Fields of Vision. Eds. Leslie Deveraux and Roger Hillman. Berkley: University of California Press, 1995. Doane, Mary Ann. “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine.” Cybersexualities: A reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace. Ed. Jenny Wolmark. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Notes Towards a Corporeal Feminism.” Australian Feminist Studies, 5 (1987): 1-9. Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: three French feminists. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989. Spielberg, Steven. AI. Warner Bros. and Dreamworks Pictures, 2001. Shepard, Lucius. “AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE.” Fantasy & Science Fiction Vol 101 (Dec 2001): 112-117. Walker, Michelle. Philosophy and the maternal body: reading silence.London; New York: Routledge, 1998. Links http://www.benway.com/mary-leunig.shtml http://www.envf.port.ac.uk/illustration/images/vlsh/psycholo/irigaray.htm http://web.ukonline.co.uk/n.paradoxa/barnett.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Muller, Vivienne. "Motherly Love" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/motherlylove.php>. APA Style Muller, V., (2002, Nov 20). Motherly Love. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/motherlylove.html