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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl
'Tomboy' Is Anachronistic. But The Concept Still Has Something To Teach Us, Lynne Stahl
Faculty & Staff Scholarship
This article explores the tomboy trope in film and literature and the "taming" that characterizes it, framing both in relation to contemporary debates about gender and sexual identity as well as cultural anxieties around queer, trans, and nonbinary identity. Examining texts from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women to the 1980 film Little Darlings, the article argues that even while the term tomboy may be obsolete, tomboy narratives document processes of rebellion that hold continuing value.
Chronic Tomboys: Feminism, Survival, And Paranoia In Jodie Foster’S Body Of Work, Lynne Stahl
Chronic Tomboys: Feminism, Survival, And Paranoia In Jodie Foster’S Body Of Work, Lynne Stahl
Faculty & Staff Scholarship
From Freaky Friday (1976) to Flightplan (2005), Jodie Foster has made a career of defying gender norms–a defiance predicated largely upon her characteristically tomboyish embodiment and a mode of being that combines activeness, visual agency, and a distinctively resistant demeanor that spans her body of work to the extent that one can hardly watch any one of her films without involuntary recourse to her earlier and later movies. This essay takes up David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002), which unites tomboy figures of two generations in Foster and Kristen Stewart and works, in light of the former’s corpus and its feminist …
Assuming Identities: Gender, Sexuality, And Performativity In The Silence Of The Lambs, Lynne Stahl
Assuming Identities: Gender, Sexuality, And Performativity In The Silence Of The Lambs, Lynne Stahl
Faculty & Staff Scholarship
In the introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discusses the instability of the ignorance/knowledge binary, which generally equates the latter with power and the former with impotence. She argues that ignorance (or the appearance thereof) can be a tool of power as well, citing as an example the 1986 ruling by the United States Justice Department that employers “may freely fire persons with AIDS” provided that those employers “can claim to be ignorant of the medical fact, quoted in the ruling, that there is no known health danger in the workplace from the disease” (5). That this …