Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Feminist film theory'

This study is concerned with the development of a field of film theory around the place of the female spectator. Chapter 1 presents an historical overview of some trends in the development of film theory, with emphasis on the emergence of a paradigm in which theories of semiotics, ideology and psychoanalysis intersect. It critically assesses the establishment of a dominant theory founded in the notion of film as art, proposing certain parallels between this and contemporary Leavisite literary theory, and notes auteurism as the point of departure from this into the consideration of film as popular culture. It then traces the impact of the critiques by Barthes and Foucault of authorial intentionality, Althusser's theory of ideology and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in the shift to a body of film theory centrally concerned with the notion of film as text. The feminist intervention is located at the meeting point of this theory with the concerns of the emergent women's movement, and is traced in its development from the "image of" criticism of Rosen and Haskell to Claire Johnston's and Laura Mulvey's seminal work on women and representation. Chapter 2 focuses on some of the theoretical considerations of the image and the gaze, extends these into the theory of cinema as an apparatus, and outlines feminist critiques of apparatus theory. Accounts of representation and the image are drawn from Bill Nichols, John Berger, and Peter Wollen's summary of C.S. Peirce. In the shift of theoretical interest to the process of viewing film, Munsterberg's account of the psychology of vision is noted. The psychoanalytic construction of visual meaning is traced through Lacan's elaboration of the mirror phase to its significance for cinema in the centrality of desire and the gaze. The consequent development of a model of cinema as an apparatus by Baudry and Metz is followed. The feminist criticism of the androcentricity of this model is traced, both through its outright rejection, and through specific critiques by Teresa de Lauretis, Jacqueline Rose, Kaja Silverman, Mary Ann Doane and Constance Penley. Chapter 3 follows three theorists in their attempts to account for female spectatorship: Laura Mulvey's theory of oscillation, Teresa de Lauretis's double identification and Mary Ann Doane's accounts both of textual strategies of specularization in the "woman's film" and the masquerade are considered. Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the text Klute in order to apply some of the theoretical implications, particularly around questions of female subjectivity and spectatorship. It situates Klute within its historical context, in relation to the cinema industry and the emergent women's movement, and within the terms suggested by its generic structuration. The Conclusion provides a summary of my intention to provide an overview of this difficult and fertile field of debate. An Appendix provides a script of Klute.

This thesis offers an analysis of women in horror film through an in depth exploration of what I term ‘gynaehorror’ – horror films that are concerned with female sex, sexuality and reproduction. While this is a broad and fruitful area of study, work in it has been shaped by a pronounced emphasis upon psychoanalytic theory, which I argue has limited the field of inquiry. To challenge this, this thesis achieves three things. Firstly, I interrogate a subgenre of horror that has not been studied in depth for twenty years, but that is experiencing renewed interest. Secondly, I analyse aspects of this subgenre outside of the dominant modes of inquiry by placing an emphasis upon philosophies of sex, gender and corporeality, rather than focussing on psychodynamic approaches. Thirdly, I consider not only what these theories may do for the study of horror films, but what spaces of inquiry horror films may open up within these philosophical areas. To do this, I focus on six broad streams: the current limitations and opportunities in the field of horror scholarship, which I augment with a discussion of women’s bodies, houses and spatiality; the relationship between normative heterosexuality and the twin figures of the chaste virgin and the voracious vagina dentata; the representation and expression of female subjectivity in horror films that feature pregnancy and abortion; the manner in which reproductive technology is bound up within hegemonic constructions of gender and power, as is evidenced by the figure of the ‘mad scientist’; the way that discourses of motherhood and maternity in horror films shift over time, but nonetheless result in the demonisation of the mother; and the theoretical and corporeal possibilities opened up through Deleuze and Guattari’s model of schizoanalysis, with specific regard to the 'Alien' films. As such, this thesis makes a unique contribution to the study of women in horror film, while also advocating for an expansion of the theoretical repertoire available to the horror scholar.

What is at stake for female fans and followers of horror cinema? This study explores the pleasures in horror film viewing for female members of the audience. The findings presented here confirm that female viewers of horror do not refuse to look but actively enjoy horror films and read such films in feminine ways. Part 1 of this thesis suggests that questions about the female viewer and her consumption of the horror film cannot be answered solely by a consideration of the text-reader relationship or by theoretical models of spectatorship and identification. A profile of female horror film fans and followers can therefore be developed only through an audience study. Part 2 presents a profile of female horror fans and followers. The participants in the study were largely drawn from the memberships of horror fan groups and from the readerships of a cross-section of professional and fan horror magazines. Qualitative data were collected through focus groups, interviews, open-ended questions included in the questionnaire and through the communication of opinions and experiences in letters and other written material. Part 3 sheds light on the modes of interpretation and attempts to position the female viewers as active consumers of horror films. This study concludes with a model of the female horror film viewer which points towards areas of female horror film spectatorship which require further analysis. The value of investigating the invisible experiences of women with popular culture is demonstrated by the very large proportion of respondents who expressed their delight and thanks in having an opportunity to speak about their experiences. This study of female horror film viewers allows the voice of an otherwise marginalised and invisible audience to be heard, their experiences recorded, the possibilities for resistance explored, and the potentially feminine pleasures of the horror film identified.

This dissertation is presented in two related components. The first part is The Supreme Price, an award-winning, feature-length documentary film that I directed and produced about women and the pro-democracy movement in Nigeria. In 1993, Nigerians elected M.K.O. Abiola as president in a historic vote that promised to end years of military dictatorship. Shortly after the election, there was a military coup. General Sani Abacha seized power and had Abiola arrested and jailed. While Abiola was in prison, his wife, Kudirat Abiola, took over leadership of the pro-democracy movement. She was assassinated by agents of the military junta in 1996. M.K.O Abiola died in prison two years later under mysterious circumstances. The film interweaves past and present as this story is told through the eyes of their daughter, Hafsat Abiola, who was about to graduate from Harvard when her mother was murdered. Determined not to let her parents’ democratic ideals die with them, Hafsat returns to Nigeria after years in exile and is at the forefront of a progressive movement to empower women and dismantle the patriarchal structure of Nigerian society. The second part of my dissertation consists of written critical reflections on the theoretical, technical, artistic and pedagogical aspects of my feminist filmmaking practice, grounded in my historical research on the political culture in Nigeria. Taking an interdisciplinary, pluralist approach within a theoretical framework of transnational feminism, I incorporated analysis of both Western and African perspectives. I used biography, trauma studies, political science, geographical, economic and foreign policy analysis, extensive audio-visual archival research and photographs to provide a detailed historical backdrop and theoretical context for understanding the life and legacy of Yoruba, Muslim human rights activist, Kudirat Abiola. I explore her and her daughter’s usage of media platforms to amplify their voices across borders, strategically creating archived, historical multimedia records of their opposition to the military regime in Nigeria. Through discussion of my in-depth work with archival footage, and through describing the distribution, impact and outreach of the film, I aim to show how The Supreme Price functions to represent and preserve a key aspect of women’s history in Nigeria, filling a void in the Nigerian educational system where history as an academic subject has been eliminated from most primary and secondary school curriculums. In my roles as director, producer and cinematographer, my documentary filmmaking practice was itself an act of transnational, multicultural solidarity, collaboration and synthesis resulting in a final film that is a hybrid artefact – simultaneously feminist and African. This dissertation illuminates how The Supreme Price has broken new ground in Nigeria where Nollywood has been the dominant framework for film productions and the genre of independently-made, transnational, feminist, political, historical documentaries directed by women and focused on women’s lives and legacies is nascent.

In this dissertation I explore a number of contemporary science fiction franchises in order to ascertain how the figure of the action heroine has evolved throughout her recent history. There has been a tendency in film criticism to view these strong women as ‘figuratively male’ and therefore not ‘really’ women, which, I argue, is largely due to a reliance on the psychoanalytic paradigms that have dominated feminist film theory since its beginnings. Building on Elisabeth Hills’s work on the character of Ellen Ripley of the Alien series, I explore how notions of ‘becoming’ and the ‘Body without Organs’ proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari can be activated to provide a more positive set of readings of active women on screen. These readings are not limited by discussions of sex or gender, but discuss the body in terms of its increased capacities as it interacts with the world around it. I do not argue for a Deleuzian analysis of cinema as such, because this project is concerned with aspects of representation which did not form part of Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema. Rather I use Deleuze and Guattari’s work to explore alternative ways of reading the active women these franchises present and the benefits they afford. Through these explorations I demonstrate, however, that applying the Deleuzoguattarian ‘method’ is a potentially risky undertaking for feminist theory. Deconstructing notions of ‘being’ and ‘identity’ through the project of becoming may have benefits in terms of addressing ‘woman’ beyond binaristic thought, but it may also have negative consequences. What may be liberating for feminist film theory may be also be destructive. This is because through becoming we destabilise a position from which to address potentially ideologically unsound treatments of women on screen.

El cine asiático, puede tomarse como un tipo de paradigma que se ha tratado de alejar del establecido por la casi monopólica industria del cine hollywoodense. Este cine se ha etiquetado eurocéntricamente como “cine periférico”, todo esto a causa de la simplificación a la que a veces se somete a estas cinematografías, desdibujando su rica diversidad. A veces un cine cargado de sensualidad cinematográfica pero no explícita necesariamente, sino más bien sutil. Desarrollan tramas no tan complejas, o en ocasiones si, pero que emplean un ritmo cinematográfico lánguido con elementos visuales y auditivos que atraen al público a comprometerse con el encuentro en la sala de cine. Expresando la figura de la mujer alejada de la idea falocentrista y del constructo estereotipado de: la buena (la virgen y la madre) y la mala (la prostituta y la femme fatal), la virtuosa (la acompañante fiel) y la viciosa (quien aparece como presa fácil de cualquier hombre). Todo lo que en occidente ha sido tratado desde la perspectiva del hombre, en su papel de guionista, director de cine, productor o crítico.
Asian cinema can be taken as a type of paradigm that has tried to move away from the one established by the almost monopolistic Hollywood film industry. This cinema has been labeled Eurocentrically as "peripheral cinema", because of the simplification that these cinematography’s are sometimes subjected to, deleting their rich diversity. Sometimes this type of cinema is loaded with cinematographic sensuality not necessarily explicit, but rather subtle. They develop plots that are not so complex, or sometimes they are, but totally inversed in a languid cinematographic rhythm that uses visuals and sounds elements that try to make the public committed with the experience of their movies. This cinema also, show us the figure of a woman far away from the phallocentric idea and the stereotypical construct of: the good woman (the virgin and the mother) and the bad woman (the prostitute and the femme fatal), the virtuous (the faithful partner) and the vicious (who appears as easy prey to any man). Everything that in the West has been telled from the perspective of man, in his role as screenwriter, film director, producer or critic.
Trabajo de investigación

This paper serves to explore how female subjects are represented in films featuring a woman on the road in ways that can create a female gaze, as an alternative to the male gaze. It looks for answers in four films from the 1970s to 2016, all made by female filmmakers, which are Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), Vagabond (Sans Toit Ni Loi) (1978), Wendy and Lucy (2008) and American Honey (2016). All four films share approaches that reject objectification in the depiction of females, but each is distinctive in their filmi strategies. Focusing on each work individually while attempting to make comparisons with others, this paper also aims to connect the shift of strategies in these works to the related discussion in feminist film theories.

While memoria is the fourth canon of rhetoric, its generative power remains essentially absent from rhetoric and composition studies. In my dissertation I use Mnemosyne's story as a way to reconceptualize memoria beyond the confines of mnemonic techniques and memorization. I provide an overview of memoria using the terministic screens of storehouse, invention, and subjectivity in order to explain its absence and the consequences of this gap. I posit that the generative, critical, and embodied qualities of memory shape our ways of knowing and being and our hermeneutical, inventive, and revisionary practices.I argue that memory is rhetorical: it's not just what is remembered/forgotten that matters, but how it is remembered, by whom, for what purpose, and with what effect. Rhetorical memory is a process and product(s) of remembering. Rather than remaining fixed, rhetorical memory is dynamic, relational, infused with emotion, steeped in imagination, and context dependent. It is also relational, not autonomous and continuous. When memory is written, it expresses, analyzes, connects, rebuilds, and transforms the links between private and public, past and present, self and other, reason and emotions, fact and fiction, and mind and body. Rhetorical memory is (re)visionary. In chapter two, I explicate the constructed/reconstructed nature of rhetorical memory as demonstrated by Maxine Hong Kingston in No Name Woman. I also examine how rhetorical memory enriches feminist pedagogy(s), especially how agency might emerge and be sustained. In chapter three, I focus on the critical aspects of rhetorical memory by investigating how the memory of Mary Magdalene was constructed to maintain cultural hegemony. I argue that rhetorical memory provides a critical tool for underrepresented groups to critique, disrupt, and revise truth claims often represented in traditional bodies of knowledge. In chapter four, I assert that rhetorical memory empowers writers to uncover white privilege and take action against such injustices. I also include a section on how I incorporate rhetorical memory into my pedagogical practices. I call on scholar teachers to address how our professional discourses and scholarly conventions impede how we communicate about the kinds of insights we gain from rhetorical memory.

Questa tesi si pone l’obiettivo di indagare le letture che la Feminist Film Theory ha fornito rispetto al cinema horror statunitense e a contestualizzare tale interesse in ambito culturale, attraverso casi studio concentrati nel periodo tra anni Sessanta e Settanta. La prima parte prevede un’inquadramento teorico della critica cinematografica femminista, del cinema horror e del contesto produttivo americano del periodo, anche dal punto di vista degli studi culturali. Nella seconda parte verranno prese in esame letture della critica femminista di determinate opere: partendo da Psycho, per passare ad esempi di cinema istituzionale (new horror) e di controcultura (slasher, exploitation).

This study conducts a narrative analysis of the film Turist, in order to explore how its portrayal of a contemporary Scandinavian family could provide insight into how gender roles are constructed. Drawing on classical feminist theory, film theory and giving special focus to explore how masculinity and the father’s role is portrayed in relation to femininity this essay uses a theoretical angle that is less explored than others. In the methodology, this study examines both the film’s characters and the many technical aspects that a film is constructed from. When relevant to the analysis in its entirety the study will consider parameters such as dialogue, editing, camera movement, framing of scenes and music. The results of the research show that the film is self-aware when constructing stereotypical gender roles that aligns itself with classical feminist theories. In the end the film implies that the family is comfortable to return to the traditional family hierarchy, because this is something they believe is expected from them.

In this project, I examine the relationship between female masochism, performance, and spectatorship in Michael Haneke’s film La Pianiste (2001). The film stages a relationship to sexuality that structures the subject’s excruciating negotiations with the other as always mediated by the law, the letter, or the body as instrument, which is allegorized by the protagonist’s occupation as a piano teacher. In my analysis, I identify the ways in which the film paradoxically offers a critique of mediation’s effect on the feminine position while encouraging viewers to confront the possibility that desire is only possible through these mediations. Contributing to feminist theory and psychoanalytic film theory, I foreground the way in which the film’s complex portrayal of female masochism produces indeterminacy via masochistic spectatorship. Ultimately, I argue that the unmarked position of feminine masochism, which is historically, psychoanalytically, and literarily reserved for male subjects, challenges the spectator to take enjoyment into account when approaching mediations of violence and sexuality.

This study investigated the cinematic representations of women in ‘Climates’ ‘Three Monkeys’ and ‘Once upon a time in Anatolia’ created by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It explored the image of women and the ideologies that affects them in the aforementioned films. For the analysis, semiotics is used and feminist film theory is applied. The findings indicated that the women images are affected by patriarchal ideology. Female characters were portrayed as weak or weakened by men regardless of their representative social group. The results showed similarities to Mulvey’s argument and to Friedan’s definition of feminine mystique. Male gaze dominates the visual pleasures and the female characters showed similar features as described by Mulvey and Friedan.

Media & Communication
Ph.D.
In this study, I use social constructionist feminist and queer theory and narrative analysis to identify messages about gender, sexuality, and sexual violence in both the book versions and film adaptations of The Hunger Games trilogy, the Divergent trilogy, and the Vampire Academy series. These three series are representative of a major pop culture trend in which young adult novels are not only popular and financially successful, but in which these types of novels are being adapted into major films. In this study, I demonstrate that the book and film series all generally privilege whiteness, able-bodiedness, and heterosexuality, and in doing so, these texts reproduce a narrow worldview and privilege normative ways of knowing and being. However, while the films strictly reinforce normative understandings of gender, sexuality, and sexual violence, each book series reimagines gender in important ways, disrupts normative scripts that denigrate women’s ownership over their sexuality, and represents sexual violence in graphic but not exploitative ways that portray the real life consequences and complexity of sexual violence. My analysis of these texts reveals that the book series employ a variety of mechanisms that empower the women protagonists including establishing their narrative agency and representing them as gender fluid, while the film series utilize a variety of mechanisms that both objectify and superficially empower women including an emphasis on women’s sexualized physical bodies especially in times of vulnerability, the pronunciation of “natural” sexual differences, and the strict regulation of women’s bodies by dominantly masculine men. I argue that the significant alteration of the books’ original messages are a product of logistical, historical, cultural, and economic elements of the film industry, which has continually constructed women’s roles in terms of their sexual availability, victimization, and need to be rescued by heroic men. In this study, I address the institutional imperatives of the film industry that dictate specific representations of gender, sexuality, and sexual violence, and I address what these representations might mean for audiences.
Temple University--Theses

Thesis (Master of Arts)--Miami University, Dept. of Mass Communication, 2005.
Title from first page of PDF document. Document formatted into pages; contains [1], iv, 63 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-63).

Typified rhetorical situations are often a result of normalized ideologies within cultures; however, they also have the capability to produce new ideology. Within these discursive sites, identities are constructed among these normalized social acts. More importantly, these identities are constructed across many layers, not limited to one social act, but many that overlap and influence each other. In this paper, I focus on the identities that are constructed in marginalized spaces within sites of interacting discourse. Focusing on the rhetoric of abjection posited by Julia Kristeva, along with McKenzie Wark’s exploration of gamespace, a liminal theoretical space that encompasses the sites of analysis and ideology formation from the perspective of gamers, I analyze disruptions of normalized social practices in the gaming genre in order to implement the use of abjection as a method of understanding how sites of difference produce meaning for minoritarian subjects.

Perhaps, under the consciousness of today, “neoliberalism” has defined our world during the previous and current centuries more than any other socioeconomic system. But the evolution of this ideology, which initially aimed to enhance, or rather, reinvent capitalism and individual freedom, has, in essence, induced an unrecognized problem. I argue that neoliberalism is the catalyst for much of the hostility in this globalized society where tensions and poverty are casualties of individual and corporate prosperity. Because of this revelation, I argue that neoliberalism inadvertently instills violence that is both unseen and gendered. In order to formulate my argument, I introduce a historical chronology to the ideological origins of neoliberalism and how it manifested its way to its socioeconomic prominence. I then concentrate my attention to neoconservatism, most notably, Reaganism, with the year 1984, which I feel is the official christening of neoliberalism. From that year, I bring forth, three films about the crisis of farming in the 20th century, Country, Places in the Heart, and The River. Through these “farm crisis films,”which centers their themes around pastoral virtues, I argue that the violence conveyed in these films critiques neoliberalism. On the surface, these films demonstrate violence through an invisible and unrecognizable antagonist. But at the heart of this violence is a gendered angle that has much more to do with neoliberalism than with feminist debates. The gendered violence of neoliberalism is, in actuality, linked to the characters’ struggle to maintain some sense of autonomy, but this possibility is always uncertain because of their failure to recognize their inevitable interdependencies.

This thesis deals with the “item number” genre of Bollywood song and dance sequences. I argue that the item song has evolved from a combination of the historically rich culture of prostitution in old India and the western influence of modern times; and that it contributes highly to the male dominated patriarchal society perpetuated by Hindi films by means of the voyeuristic male gaze and objectification of the female body. In conjunction with this research I choreographed a dance called Item No. 3 that was performed in Scripps Dances 2013. A discussion of the significance and decisions behind the choreography is also included in this written document. A record of the performance as available on DVD through the Scripps College Dance Department or at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVNztFuezEc.

Although teen film is littered with tales of young women coming of age, the messages presented in most of these films follow a formula centered on a patriarchal nuclear family ideal, which leads to damaging perceptions regarding gender roles in teenage society. There is the main traditional model of stay at home mother with a father in the role of the breadwinner; the rise of rape culture; and the glass ceiling in the workplace. The young females consuming a mass amount of this media then reflect negatively on themselves. The research following this conundrum was broken into two parts: the production of a film looking to remedy the many problems of female representation in teen media and then monitoring the reaction to said film against its target audience: young females between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. The purpose of this thesis is to explore what makes females within the teenage demographic react to certain kinds of media. If they react negatively or positively towards a media representation of themselves, to what extent does this affect the participants' activity in their daily lives? Therefore, through a process of screening three short films focused on teen issues - including the one made by myself for this study - and then conducting a survey focusing on questions regarding the participants' feelings towards the subject matter, their hopes for themselves, and teen media in general, there was an ability to gauge how deeply teen media affects the modern teenager.
B.F.A.
Bachelors
Arts and Humanities
Film

To See and Be Seen: Cinematic Constructions of Gender and Spectatorship in Contemporary Screen-Based Art addresses how gendered representation can be structured within visual art practice through a series of creative moving-image works. Using the aesthetic language of French New Wave cinema as its primary point of departure, this research project investigates how gendered representations are constructed by cinematic language. In doing this, it proposes latent possibilities present within the dominant gaze created by patriarchal relations of power. This project, in a series of creative works, demonstrates how the 'masculine' authorial gaze is learnt culturally, and by examining the gendered syntax of film, reveals how this can be recontextualised by the female artist.

This thesis focuses on three fashion industry themed female friendship films: Pret-a-Porter/Ready to Wear (1994) by Robert Altman, The Devil Wears Prada (2006) by David Frankel, and The September Issue (2009) by R.J. Cutler. Female interpersonal relationships are complex – women often work to motivate, encourage and transform one another but can just as easily use tactics like intimidation, manipulation, and exploitation in order to save their own jobs and reputations. Through the lens of post-feminist theory, this thesis examines significant female interpersonal relationships in each film to illustrate how femininity is constructed and driven by consumer culture in the fashion industry themed films.

More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively in literature and artwork. The war veteran—returning home transformed by the harsh realities of military training and service, having seen humanity at its extremes, and interacting with a society apathetic toward his or her experiences—should engage in the act of storytelling. This act of sharing experiences and crafting-self subverts stereotypes. Storytelling, whether in a book read by millions, or in a single conversation with a close family member, should instruct civilians on the topic of human resiliency; it should instruct veterans on the topic of homecoming. But typically, veterans do not tell stories. Civilians create barriers to storytelling in the form of hollow platitudes—“thank you for your service” or “I can never understand what you’ve been through”—disconnected from the meaning of wartime service itself. The dissonance between veteran and civilian only becomes more complicated when one considers the implicit demands and expectations attached to patriotism. These often well-intentioned gestures and government programs fail to convey a message of appreciation because they refuse to convey a message of acceptance; the exceptional treatment of veterans by larger society implies also that they are insufficient, broken, or incomplete. So, many veterans chose conformity and silence, adopting one of two identities available to them: the forever pitied “Wounded Warrior” or the superficially praised “Hero.” These identities are not complete. They’re not even identities as much as they are collections of rumors, misrepresentations, and expectations of conformity. Once an individual veteran begins unconsciously performing the “Wounded Warrior” or “Hero” character, the number of potential outcomes available in that individual’s life is severely diminished. Society reinforces a feeling among veterans that they are “different.” This shared experience has resulted in commiseration, camaraderie, and also the proliferation of veterans’ creative communities. As storytellers, the members of these communities are restoring meaning to veteran-civilian discourse by privileging the nuanced experiences of the individual over stereotypes and emotionless rhetoric. They are instructing on the topics of war and homecoming, producing fictional and nonfictional representations of the veteran capable of competing with stereotypes, capable of reassimilation. The Introduction establishes the existence of veteran culture, deconstructs notions of there being a single or binary set of veteran identities, and critiques the social and cultural rhetoric used to maintain symbolic boundaries between veterans and civilians. It begins by establishing an approach rooted in interdisciplinary literary theory, taking veteran identity as its topic of consideration and the American unconscious as the text it seeks to examine, asking readers to suspend belief in patriotic rhetoric long enough to critically examine veteran identity as an apparatus used to sell war to each generation of new recruits. Patriotism, beyond the well-meaning gestures and entitlements afforded to veterans, also results in feelings of “difference,” in the veteran feeling apart from larger society. The inescapability of veteran “difference” is a trait which sets it apart from other cultures, and it is one bolstered by inaccurate and, at times, offensive portrayals of veterans in mass media and Hollywood films such as The Manchurian Candidate (1962), First Blood (1982), or Taxi Driver (1976). To understand this inescapability the chapter engages with theories of race, discussing the Korean War veteran in Home (2012) and other works by Toni Morrison to directly and indirectly explore descriptions of “difference” by African Americans and “others” not in positions of power. From there, the chapter traces veteran identity back to the Italian renaissance, arguing that modern notions of veteran identity are founded upon fears of returning veterans causing chaos and disorder. At the same time, writers such as Sebastian Junger, who are intimately familiar with veteran culture, repeatedly emphasize the camaraderie and “tribal” bonds found among members of the military, and instead of creating symbolic categories in which veterans might exist exceptionally as “Heroes,” or pitied as “Wounded Warriors,” the chapter argues that the altruistic nature which leads recruits to war, their capabilities as leaders and educators, and the need of larger society for examples of human resiliency are more appropriate starting points for establishing veteran identity. The Introduction is followed by an independent “Example” section, a brief examination of a student veteran named “Bingo,” one who demonstrates an ability to challenge, even employ veteran stereotypes to maintain his right to self-definition. Bingo’s story, as told in a “spotlight” article meant to attract student veterans to a college campus, portrays the veteran as a “Wounded Warrior” who overcomes mental illness and the scars of war through education, emerging as an exceptional example—a “Hero”—that other student veterans can model by enrolling at the school. Bingo’s story sets the stage for close examinations of the “Hero” and the “Wounded Warrior” in the first and second chapters. Chapter One deconstructs notions of heroism, primarily the belief that all veterans are “Heroes.” The chapter examines military training and indoctrination, Medal of Honor award citations, and film examples such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Heroes for Sale (1933), Sergeant York (1941), and Top Gun (1986) to distinguish between actual feats of heroism and “Heroes” as they are presented in patriotic rhetoric. The chapter provides the Medal of Honor citations attached to awards presented to Donald Cook, Dakota Meyer, and Kyle Carpenter, examining the postwar lives of Meyer and Carpenter, identifying attempts by media and government officials to appropriate heroism—to steal the right to self-definition possessed by these men. Among these Medal of Honor recipients one finds two types of heroism: Sacrificing Heroes give something of themselves to protect others; Attacking Heroes make a difference during battle offensively. Enduring Heroes, the third type of heroism discussed in the chapter, are a new construct. Colloquially, and for all intents and purposes, an Enduring Hero is simply a veteran who enjoys praise and few questions. Importantly, veterans enjoy the “Hero Treatment” in exchange for silence and conforming to larger narratives which obfuscate past wars and pave the way for new ones. This chapter engages with theorists of gender—such as Jack Judith Halberstam, whose Female Masculinities (1998) anticipates the agency increasingly available to women through military service; like Leo Braudy, whose From Chivalry to Terrorism (2003) traces the historical relationship between war and gender before commenting on the evolution of military masculinity—to discuss the relationship between heroism and agency, begging a question: What do veterans have to lose from the perpetuation of stereotypes? This question frames a detailed examination of William A. Wellman’s film, Heroes for Sale (1933), in the chapter’s final section. This story of stolen valor and the Great Depression depicts the homecoming of a WWI veteran separated from his heroism. The example, when combined with a deeper understanding of the intersection between veteran identity and gender, illustrates not only the impact of stolen valor in the life of a legitimate hero, but it also comments on the destructive nature of appropriation, revealing the ways in which a veteran stereotypes rob service men and women of the right to draw upon memories of military service which complete with those stereotypes. The military “Hero” occupies a moral high ground, but most conceptions of military “Heroes” are socially constructed advertisements for war. Real heroes are much rarer. And, as the Medal of Honor recipients discussed in the chapter reveal, they, too, struggle with lifelong disabilities as well as constant attempts by society to appropriate their narratives. Chapter Two traces the evolution of the modern “Wounded Warrior” from depictions of cowardice in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), to the denigration of World War I veterans afflicted with Shell Shock, to Kevin Powers’s Iraq War novel, The Yellow Birds (2012). As with “Heroes,” “Wounded Warriors” perform a stereotype in place of an authentic, individualized identity, and the chapter uses Walt Kowalski, the protagonist of Clint Eastwood’s film, Gran Torino (2008), as its major example. The chapter discusses “therapeutic culture,” Judith Butler’s work on identity-formation, and Eva Illouz’s examination of a culture obsessed with trauma to comment on veteran performances of victimhood. Butler’s attempts to conceive of new identities absent the influence of systems of definition rooted in the state, in particular, reveal power in the opposite of silence, begging another question: What do civilians have to gain from the perpetuation of veteran stereotypes? Largely, the chapter finds, the “Wounded Warrior” persists in the minds of civilians who fear the veteran’s capacity for violence. A broken, damaged veteran is less of a threat. The story of the “Wounded Warrior” is not one of sacrifice. The “Wounded Warrior” exists after sacrifice, beyond any measure of “honor” achieved in uniform. “Wounded Warriors” are not expected to find a cure because the wound itself is an apparatus of the state that is commodified and injected into the currency of emotional capitalism. This chapter argues that military service and a damaged psyche need not always occur together. Following the second chapter, a close examination of “The Bear That Stands,” a short story by Suzanne S. Rancourt which confronts the author’s sexual assault while serving in the Marines, offers an alternative to both the “Hero” and the “Wounded Warrior” stereotypes. Rancourt, a veteran “Storyteller,” gives testimony of that crime, intervening in social conceptions of veteran identity to include a female perspective. As with the example of Bingo, the author demonstrates an innate ability to recognize and challenge the stereotypes discussed in the first and second chapters. This “Example” sets the stage for a more detailed examination of “Veteran Storytellers” and their communities in the final chapter. Chapter Three looks for examples of veteran “difference,” patriotism, the “Wounded Warrior,” and the “Hero” in nonfiction, fiction, and artwork emerging from the creative arts community, Military Experience and the Arts, an organization which provides workshops, writing consultation, and publishing venues to veterans and their families. The chapter examines veteran “difference” in a short story by Bradley Johnson, “My Life as a Soldier in the ‘War on Terror.’” In “Cold Day in Bridgewater,” a work of short fiction by Jerad W. Alexander, a veteran must confront the inescapability of that difference as well as expectations of conformity from his bigoted, civilian bartender. The final section analyzes artwork by Tif Holmes and Giuseppe Pellicano, which deal with the problems of military sexual assault and the effects of war on the family, respectively. Together, Johnson, Alexander, Holmes, and Pellicano demonstrate skills in recognizing stereotypes, crafting postwar identities, and producing alternative representations of veteran identity which other veterans can then draw upon in their own homecomings. Presently, no unified theory of veteran identity exists. This dissertation begins that discussion, treating individual performances of veteran identity, existing historical, sociological, and psychological scholarship about veterans, and cultural representations of the wars they fight as equal parts of a single text. Further, it invites future considerations of veteran identity which build upon, challenge, or refute its claims. Conversations about veteran identity are the opposite of silence; they force awareness of war’s uncomfortable truths and homecoming’s eventual triumphs. Complicating veteran identity subverts conformity; it provides a steady stream of traits, qualities, and motivations that veterans use to craft postwar selves. The serious considerations of war and homecoming presented in this text will be useful for Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans attempting to piece together postwar identities; they will be useful to scholars hoping to facilitate homecoming for future generations of war veterans. Finally, the Afterword to the dissertation proposes a program for reassimilation capable of harnessing the veteran’s symbolic and moral authority in such a way that self-definition and homecoming might become two parts of a single act.

Decades of horror film research and theorizations have shown us that there is a reason why this particular genre has been an important part of film history from the beginning: namely, the idea that horror both reflects and shapes our historically and culturally specific anxieties. By examining the Final Girl trope in Halloween (the 1978 original versus 2018 version), this paper traces the evolution of female protagonists and whether a more modern film accurately reflects the increasing role of feminism in society, or sticks to traditional conventions of misogyny and male-dominated visual pleasure. Placing the newer film in the context of the #MeToo era, this paper also addresses more contemporary anxieties over trauma, sexual assault and female anger.

Denna uppsats hanterar hur kvinnliga karaktärer porträtteras i romantisk komedi genom att närmare studera begreppet ”Manic Pixie Dream Girl”. Detta begrepp leder till missförstånd om kvinnans roll i filmens värld och skapar diskussioner om jämställdhet och västerländsk berättarkultur. Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka två kvinnor i två olika romantiska komedier uppfyller de kriterier som nämns av Manic Pixie Dream Girl-begreppets myntare, Nathan Rabin, har lagt fram och om det således är motiverat att argumentera att karaktärerna upprätthåller sexistiska synsätt. Den teoretiska grund som uppsatsen bygger på kommer främst från feministisk teori, men även från Laura Mulveys teori om skopofili och den manliga blicken. För att analysera det utvalda materialet används en skräddarsydd karaktärsanalytisk metod. Resultatet visar att, trots att de kvinnliga karaktärerna må uppfylla några eller flera av de kriterier som Rabin ställer fram så innebär inte det direkt att karaktärerna är endimensionella och, i förlängning, overkliga porträtt av kvinnor i allmänhet.
This essay deals with how female characters are portrayed in romantic comedies by studying the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl"-phenomenon closer. This concept leads to misunderstandings about women's roles in the world of cinema and creates discussions about equality and Western storytelling. The purpose of this essay is to study two women in two different romantic comedies and study if they meet the criteria Nathan Rabin, the man who coined the term “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”, has announced to be qualities of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and whether it is justified to argue that the female characters maintain sexist ideals. The theoretical basis on which the essay is based primarily comes from feminist theory, but also from Laura Mulvey’s theory of scopophilia and “the male gaze”. To analyze the selected material I have chosen to use a customized method of character analysis. The results show that, despite the fact that the female characters may meet some or more of the criteria Rabin have announced, the material does not directly imply that the characters are one-dimensional and, in extension, improbable and unreal portraits of women in general.

Denna uppsats handlar om rape-revenge film. Närmare bestämt undersöker den hur de kvinnliga karaktärerna representeras i de utvalda filmerna och om, och i så fall hur, de kan ses som ”empowering” eller om det endast handlar om en sexualiserande porträttering av våld mot kvinnor. Uppsatsen använder sig utav en film- och textbaserad analys och den grundläggande teorin för uppsatsen är den feministiska filmteorin, samt teorier om kvinnor i rape-revenge. De tre filmerna som står i fokus är I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978), Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981) och Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016). Slutresultatet visar att de tre filmerna inte porträtterar deras våldtäktsscener på ett sexualiserat eller erotiskt sätt utan snarare framhäver brutaliteten i våldet för åskådarna i form av bland annat karaktärsidentifiering med offret istället för våldtäktsmannen. Däremot, skiljer sig filmerna i hur deras respektive kvinnliga karaktärer väljer att hämnas och huruvida deras agerande kan ses som empowering eller inte. Av de tre filmerna är Elle den som tydligast uppvisar olika versioner av empowering och hur det som stärker en person är väldigt individuellt.

This essay deals with the idea of women as the ”the other sex” within the field of authorship, and aims to bring to together feminist, film and auteur theory with analysis of historic documentations of reception as well as context for academic treatments of Mai Zetterling as an auteur/director. This, in attempt to, through intertwined discussion, catch a glimpse of better understanding how gender specificity may have influenced and continue to influnce perceptions of auteurs of female gender and their works, yet keeping focus on the case of Mai Zetterling and hers in specific.

Denna kandidatuppsats undersöker och jämför tre olika metoder för analys av film med grund i ett genusperspektiv. De metoder som undersöks är Bechdeltestet, Connotation Frames och slutligen en analysmetod som vi valt att referera till som Film Actor-Network Theory (FANT). Med FANT kan man analysera film genom att se till karaktärerna och deras fiktiva sociala nätverk. Filmerna som används för analys av metoderna är Juno (2007) och Fight Club (1999). Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka dessa analysmetoder och se hur effektivt de belyser jämställdhet i film. Resultatet är att dessa metoder belyser jämställdhet på olika sätt. Connotations Frames och FANT analyserar på en djupare och mer ingående nivå än Bechdeltestet. Connotation Frames ser till makt och agens i handling och dialog, och Bechdeltestet gör en snabb analys om två kvinnliga karaktärer pratar med varandra om något annat än män. Appliceras alla analysmetoder på en film kan det visa på ett resultat som är närmare en heltäckande genusanalys.

Mohammad Khordadian is a gay, Iranian American dancer and entertainer who immigrated to the United States from Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution. Since his arrival to the United States, Khordadian has produced countless instructional and presentational dance videos which garnered enormous popularity among diasporic Iranians and Iranians in Iran alike. I locate a tension between his adoration by the public and the immense anxiety that male Iranian dancers can induce in other Iranians. Khordadian invokes the historical evolution of the archetypal Iranian male dancer/entertainers written about in Persian literature and poetry --the 12 to 16-year-old, handsome boys with older lovers. As Orientalists linked these sinful relationships to male homosociality and sexual repression in Islam, the memory of the male dancer has been repressed out of an Iranian desire to fold into the pale of Western modernity. Khordadian, with his over-the-top gestures (what I will call “queer gestures”), the transnational circulation of these gestures through instructional videos, and his lived experience as a gay Iranian man, transgresses the boundaries set by heteronormativity and Orientalism. However, this is not without a myriad of complications.

Germaine Dulac's 1928 avant-garde film, La Coquille et le Clergyman, based on a script written by Antonin Artaud, presents the idea of the woman as an object of desire, subjected to the male gaze through the cinematic process. Not only is the lone female character the object of desire of her two male suitors on screen, but she also becomes the object of desire for the presumably male viewer of the film, who has become a silent character in the film. Rather than simply being the spectator, the viewer's own identity becomes entwined with that of the on screen characters. While the idea of the woman as the object of desire subjected to the often male gaze in the cinema has been analyzed by many feminist film theorists, including Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman and Mary Ann Doane, the theories presented center on films directed either by male directors or female directors since the 1970's. Very little has been written about films directed by women in the 1920's, including La Coquille et le Clergyman. By examining Coquille et le Clergyman, I hope to fill in a gap in the discourse of the majority of feminist film theory. This thesis will not only attempt to understand how Germaine Dulac, an early feminist film director, approaches the idea of the female body as an object of desire subjected to the male gaze differently than her male film director counterparts, but will examine how the relationships between the female character and the two male characters differ from other male directed avant-garde films from the 1920's and how these relationships affect spectatorship. By examining La Coquille et le Clergyman, I hope to better understand how Dulac's cinematic interpretation of Artaud's script treats the idea of spectatorship, not only in 1928, but also today.