Call#: Van Pelt Library BS1485.2 .F465 1993
This is an anthology of critical studies from feminist perspectives. Several of the studies are particularly useful, including Phyllis Trible, "Love's Lyrics Redeemed" and Francis Landy's responses; M. Deckers, "The Structure of the Song of Songs and the Centrality of nepesh"; Carol Meyers, "Gender Imagery in the Song of Songs"; Richard N. Soulen, "The wasfs of the Song of Songs and Hermeneutic"; and Marcia Falk, "The wasf"; and Athalya Brenner, "'Come Back, Come Back the Shuammite' (Song of Songs 7.1-10): A Parody of the wasf Genre".
tagged critical feminist literary song_of_songs by jtreat ...on 15-JAN-10
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Jessica Brent makes the claim that with the advent of sound, Hitchcock was able to marginalize the feminine image. The sound age forced a change in aesthetic and style with the feminine being destroyed and replaced with the investigative gaze. She asserts that the visual pleasure beyond the gaze is removed from Hitchcock's work. Women and feminine figures are forced into the narrative demands of the male eye.
On one hand, I'm still not entirely convinced of this argument or completely sure of its meaning. However, I think that scene in which Alice kills Crewe escapes Brent's interpretation should it be true. Alice kills Crewe behind a curtain, away from the eyes of the portraits and the audience. The only male eyes that see her are Crewe's and she is usurping his position. Therefore, at the crucial moment of the film where Alice asserts herself and confronts her anxieties, she is separate from any narrative demands that might be forced upon her.
tagged feminist films gaze hitchcock silent vaudeville by terwilig ...on 02-DEC-08
This article argues that psychoanalysis is unable to properly theorize women's subjectivity and desire and posits instead that female subjectivity can be defined without the burden of sexual differences. Rather than look at feminist film theory through the narrow terms of psychoanalysis such as repression, subjectivity, and passive desires it should be looked in terms of genealogy. By looking at feminist film theory as stylistic changes over time and as themes in many films, feminist theory is not restricted to irrelevant psychoanalytic terminology.
While this article discusses films of the 1940's, many of its concepts can be applied to Blackmail. In essence, the film is an illustration of Alice's anxieties towards sex, love, and marriage. The moment she tries to deviate from the norm of seeing her steady, but dull, boyfriend, she becomes the victim of an attempted rape. By stabbing the portrait of the jester in the studio, she refuses the shame that Crewe and the jester as society want to force upon her. What on the surface seems a cautionary tale actually serves as a manifesto for Alice's right to be sexual and not feel any shame.
tagged 1940's feminist film gothic psychoanalysis theory by terwilig ...on 02-DEC-08
Freeland, Cynthia A. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000.
In Chapter 4 of The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror, Freeland offers a feminist interpretation of Stoker’s novel, Dracula, and three of its film incarnations, including Browning’s Dracula (1931). She focuses on the sexual transformation of Dracula and the changing nature of his evil through his incarnations in these works.
This section of the book is ordered chronologically and charters the evolution of Dracula through Stoker’s original novel Dracula (1897), Browning’s Dracula (1931), Badham’s Dracula (1979), and Coppola’s Dracula (1992). In the novel, as in Nosferatu, Dracula is unremittingly evil, symbolized by his ugly, disgusting appearance, hairy palms and nostrils, and bad breath. He is an abomination of nature, a thing that causes revulsion and disgust. Freeland asserts that, for this Dracula, “the threat of gender transgression lurks amid scenes of erotic abnormality and rape.” She compares this Dracula to Browning’s, noting Dracula’s transformation into a “sex icon with continental flair.” Perhaps this sort of Dracula was more appealing to contemporary audiences. The nature of this Dracula’s evil was primarily that of a sexual threat and male predator, not that of the intrinsically foul. Freeland goes on to analyze more recent films, in which Dracula is increasingly portrayed in a sympathetic light and with a greater depth of character.
Krolokke begins her essay by recapping recent research in gender and language in cyberspace, including the role of "grrrls" who specifically resist male domination. She then describes her study of 5 MSN channels of Internet Relay Chat (IRC): gay chat, lesbian chat, transgender/transsexual chat, politics2000 chat, and African-American chat for what she calls "playful chat". She analyzes the transcribed speech for 4 types of language play: abbreviations, paralinguistic cues, hybrid language, and insulting speech. Krolokke uses performance theory to explain gender play online such that she considers "linguistic gender" to mean performing a speech pattern that follows social and cultural expectations or stereotypes associated with the speech of that gender. She explains that in some cases, "IRC provides a space for participants to play out their most convincing performances of parodic linguistic identities." As such, she provides an argument away from earlier linguists who argued about the inherent differences in male/female communication and towards later "third wave" linguists who see all communication and all contexts as marked for gender, not the speaker him or herself.
tagged IRC chat chatroom conversation dialog feminism feminist gender internet linguistics online speech by belfiore ...on 01-DEC-05


