Black and White Masculinity: in Three Steven Soderbergh Films

May 1, 2006

[1] Steven Soderbergh, director of both experimental films and big-budget genre films, has been unusually candid about racism in Hollywood. In a June 2003 New York Times profile of African American actor Don Cheadle, Soderbergh bluntly states that Cheadle would have advanced further at this point in his career if...

Stillborns, Orphans, and Self-Proclaimed Virgins: Packaging and Policing the Rural Women of Cane

Aug. 1, 2005

[1] “Would you like to know how it feels to be an American Negro? Would you like to know what Negroes are thinking and doing? Would you like to see their daily life pictured?” asks an advertisement for W.E.B. DuBois’s monthly magazine The Crisis, printed in the March 1925 issue...

Trauma Studies and Faulkner’s Sanctuary: Sex, Sexuality, Race, and American Literature

July 2, 2005

[1] Scholars in the United States have traditionally addressed ethical and political concerns, and especially questions of socio-historical critique, social justice and social change, by allying the process of critical inquiry with the formation and reformation of identity, such that what we know forms a reciprocal relationship with who we...

Daywalkin’ Night Stalkin’ Bloodsuckas: Black Vampires in Contemporary Film

July 2, 2004

(part of a series in Special Issue #40: Scared of the Dark: Race, Gender and the “Horror Film” – Guest Editor: Frances Gateward ) [2] For adults there are the novels of vampire lore in the style of classic horror, such as Richard Laymon’sThe Traveling Vampire Show; the eroticized tales...

Subversion of the In/Out Model in Understanding Hemingway Texts

March 1, 2004

[1] In Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Tennessee Williams’ 1980 ghost play about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway appears as a character who is anxious about his own gender and sexuality. While he lives up to his popular macho image, he also acknowledges another side of his character when...

Dialogues between Paul Virilio and Chela Sandoval: Towards a better understanding of uses and abuses of new technologies.

Feb. 1, 2004

“I sing sometimes for the war that I fight, ‘cause every tool is a weapon – if you hold it right.” -Ani DiFranco, “My IQ” “[We should] recognize that ‘fragmentation’ is neither an experience nor a theoretical construct peculiar to the postmodern moment. Indeed, the fragmentation of subjection is the...

Family, Sexuality, Gender, Art: Jo-Anne Berelowitz interviews Vivien Green-Fryd about her new book, Art and the Crisis of Marriage

Jan. 2, 2004

[1] BERELOWITZ: (1) In this book you examine debates about marriage, family, sexuality, and gender by focusing on the marriages of Edward and Jo Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. I was struck by a shift from your previous focus on race and ethnicity in your book Art and...

Disenfranchised Bodies: Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Writings on the Partition

Dec. 1, 2003

Introduction [1] Drawing upon oral histories and official records, recent feminist studies by Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Urvashi Butalia, and Veena Das document Hindu and Sikh families’ and communities’ refusal to accept women subjected to sexual violence in the riots that accompanied the Partition of British India in 1947. Contextualizing...

Utopia and Castration: How to Read the History of Homosexuality

Nov. 1, 2003

[1] For more than twenty years now, as I’m sure you know, scholars, theorists, and historians of sexuality have been engaged in a heated debate over the relationship between homosexuality, history, and society. Commonly referred to as the essentialist/constructionist debate, the controversy has centered around whether modern conceptions of homosexual...

Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism’s Third Wave: “I’m Not My Mother”

Aug. 1, 2003

“Popular culture is the politics of the 21 st Century” Gale Weathers, Scream 3 1] The 1990s might well be remembered as the decade of Girl Culture and Girl Power. New phrases began sounding in the air and new images surfacing in our media, changing the face of popular culture...

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