Archive - Topic - Gender and Media

“I try to laugh about it cover it all up with lies I try and laugh about it hiding the tears in my eyes cause boys don’t cry boys don’t cry” – The Cure “Boys Don’t Cry,” Boys Don’t Cry 1980 “True to form, Dagger sulked, maintained his distance, and...

[1] A striking thing seems to be happening in contemporary male dance films. In the 1990s and into the new millennium, men suffering from masculinity crises often engage with dance in order to once again make a credible claim to their masculinity. So pervasive is this trend in films like...

“I am my little people’s star and slave.” – Imelda Marcos – Los Angeles Times, October 1980 “To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society, which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle...

“Heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself – and failing.” – Judith Butler 21 “It’s the most advanced amusement park in the entire world. I’m not talking about just rides….We’ve made living biological attractions.” – John Hammond, Jurassic Park’s creator [1]...

[1] In the early 1960s, a group of artists and filmmakers working primarily in New York City began to make and exhibit films that displayed the kind of willful excesses that would later define the decade as a period of cultural and sexual upheaval. For many audiences of the time,...

[1] FARMER: If as Susan Sontag claims in a celebrated formulation, “to talk about Camp [is] to betray it” (105), contemporary cultural theory might seem the site of a veritable mass treason. From Sontag’s own seminal contribution onward, an increasingly voluminous literature on camp has developed to the point where...

[1] The Verdict (1982), directed by Sidney Lumet, is not the kind of film that has received attention from feminists. Unlike Alfred Hitchcock’s films (a repeated source of inspiration for psychoanalytic feminist film theory), Lumet’s films are usually perceived as liberal rather than conservative in their politics, as strongly grounded...

[1] BERELOWITZ: In your book you discuss the embodiment of gender in American art of the first half of the 20 th century and trace an unfolding and connected discourse in American modernism from the early days of the Stieglitz circle in the 1920s through Regionalism in the 30s and...

You are my fire The one desire Believe when I say I want it that way. – Backstreet Boys, “I Want It That Way” [1] Among recent trends in youth music culture, perhaps none has been so widely reviled as the rise of a new generation of manufactured “teenybopper” pop...

[1] Video games have emerged as a dominant form of cultural expression in the new millennium. As a cultural and economic force, they have surpassed the Hollywood film industry in terms of total revenues, and they are a major source of technological innovation and creative imagination. Because of their unparalleled...