Archive - Topic - Gender and Media

[1] At the end of the Xena: Warrior Princess episode, “The Play’s the Thing,” in which Gabrielle directs her own play, Minya, with her new friend Paulina in tow, exclaims: Gabrielle, I wanted to thank you. I never would have met Paulina here if it wasn’t for you. In fact,...

[1] Ursula Biemann’s Been There and Back to Nowhere is about minority women in border zones, the representations made of them in the media, and the efforts of artists working collaboratively with them to construct a different set of images. More specifically, it is about the ways that female bodies...

[1] JAGOSE: Your book on gay male spectatorships notes the cultural persistence, both homophobic and anti-homophobic, in reading the movie fan and the male homosexual in terms of each other. (figure 1) Indeed, a couple of times you offer incidents from your childhood – your grandmother’s gift to you, aged...

Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. – Donna Haraway Replicants are like any other machine. They can be a benefit or a hazard. – Deckard in Blade Runner. [1] Arguably the most influential Science Fiction (SF) film of all time, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) is one...

[1] JAGOSE: Given the Motion Picture Production Code’s determination to corral “sex perversion” outside the cinematic field of vision, classical Hollywood cinema might not seem a promising archive for the consideration of lesbian representability. Can you talk me through what your book takes as its founding paradox, the Production Code’s...

[1] Contemporary discussions of globalization and the transnational circulation of cultural products are often marked by celebratory exhortations of the imminent global village or by less optimistic perspectives that present the Third World as beleaguered and besieged. Countering these perspectives, through an examination of media commentary on the Canadian-Indian film...

[1] Fathers and fatherhood have long played an important role in the thinking and theorizing about law. From Abraham and Isaac to Supreme Court cases, like the now famous DeShaney v. Winnebago, 1 it seems that everywhere we turn law is commanding fathers or presenting itself in a fatherly way...

[1] "The camera has uncovered that cell-life of the vital issues in which all great events are ultimately conceived; for the greatest landslide is only the aggregate of the movements of single particles. A multitude of close-ups can show us the very instant in which the general is transformed into...

[1] I really like to watch soap operas. As a self-respecting feminist academic, I realize I am supposed to be ashamed to say so, but for reasons I hope this essay will make clear, I am saying so at once. I am not using "soap opera," as do many scholars,...

"A Case Very Near the Borderline" (1) Hollywood's Production Code explicitly banned "miscegenation" from the American screen for nearly thirty years. 1 The files of the Production Code Administration (PCA) which document the interpretation of that ban, however, demonstrate the PCA censors' utter confusion as to the meaning of the...