Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Encuentro Con La Precariedad: La Reaparición Del Gitano En El Cine Documental Español De La Crisis De 2008, María Julia De León Hernández

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

In 2008, Spain’s financial crisis had a great impact on the primary sector on which the nation’s ‘economic miracle’ was founded: housing.Land speculation, the increase in housing construction, and easy loans had become one of the hallmarks of twenty-first-century Spanish identity. The crisis del ladrillo (“brick crisis”) plunged the national economy into chaos and condemned many Spanish citizens to job insecurity, loss of earning power, threat of eviction, and put them at high risk of social marginalization. This dissertation studies the unusual proliferation of documentary films during the years surrounding this economic downturn about the ghettoization of the Spanish Gypsy …

East Asian "China Doll" Or "Dragon Lady"?, Joey Lee

Bridges: An Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Connections

This paper argues that the representation of East Asian women in popular media is harmful through its exaggerated portrayal of the ‘China Doll’, and ‘Dragon Lady’, ultimately further exoticizing and dehumanizing East Asian women, ensuring the dominance of the West. I will study these portrayals and their impacts through historical and modern film, modern magazines, and intersectional oppression that the restrictive categorizations place upon women of East Asian descent.

The Market, Claudia Zamora Valencia

Theses and Dissertations

The Market is a short science fiction essay film that explores ideas and values attached to the “local food” movement, and how they manifest themselves in the act of consumption at a farmers’ market in a gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

Geography Of The Middle East Through The Western Lens: A Survey Of Films Set In The Middle East And Filmed In The American Southwest, Jake Bryan Rowlett

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Representation of cinematic geography is a struggle in the world of film: a power balance between the work of the filmmakers and the place itself. Often, the filmmakers tip the scales in their favor and the true nature of the place is lost in translation. Throughout the history of cinema, the geography of the Middle East has been manipulated into a vision designed for Western audiences that is strikingly disjointed from reality.

The foundation of modern Orientalist interpretations of the Middle East in film can be seen in the early decades of the film industry, through the “Biblical Epic,” and …

The Representation Of Trans Women In Film And Television, Nikki Reitz

Cinesthesia

No abstract provided.

"We Control It On Our End, And Now It's Up To You" -- Exploitation, Empowerment, And Ethical Portrayals Of The Pornography Industry, Julie E. Davin

Student Publications

Documentaries about pornography are beginning to constitute an entirely new subgenre of film. Big Hollywood names like James Franco and Rashida Jones are jumping on the bandwagon, using their influence and resources to invest in a type of audiovisual knowledge production far less mainstream than that in which they usually participate. The films that have resulted from this new movement are undoubtedly persuasive, no matter which side of the debate over pornography these directors have respectively chosen to represent. Moreover, regardless of the side(s) that audience members may have taken in the so-called “feminist porn debates,” one cannot ignore the …

Indigenous Representation In The Media And The Importance Of Personal Narrative, Rehana E. Asmi

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Despite globalization, indigenous representation in the media continues to be unequal. Without personal narratives and self-representation in their stories, indigenous people continue to be negatively stereotyped in pop culture, film, television and news coverage.

Polarizing Narratives: Harmful Representations Of Mental Illness And Bipolar In Popular Media, Mary Jane Coppock

Scripps Senior Theses

Representations of mental illness in mainstream media have historically been infantilizing and dangerous. In the last century, dominant media has perpetuated inaccurate and damaging tropes about bipolar disorder in particular, perpetuating misunderstanding and stigma. Despite this fact, art can provide an outlet through which healthy images that promote understanding and sympathy can be dispersed. My project, Polarized, presents a more accurate representation of the disorder and its effects on individuals who struggle with it, as well as their loved ones. Bipolar disorders are a group of mental illnesses that cause dramatic shifts in an individual’s mood, energy, thinking ability, and …

French Women In Art: Reclaiming The Body Through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation Du Corps À Travers La Création, Liatris Hethcoat

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20^th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20^th century. I discuss pre-historical …

“Straight” Acting: Changing Image Of Queer-Masculinity In Media Representation, Zheng Zhu

Publications and Research

In this essay, I critically examine media representation of Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas, with a specific focus on the construction of his masculinity as an outing gay celebrity. The existing critical scholarship has studied various forms of media representation of queer images. But they did not examine how unconventional queer representation interacts with the normative gender performance. This paper investigates mainstream media’s discursive construction of masculine gay male. The findings call our attention to the emergence of macho gay characterization, which supports the hegemonic domination of heterosexual normativity. The stigmatization of gay-ness as the deviated other is rationalized through …

Lgbtqia Representation In College Media, Alexis Mccoy-Caso

Journalism

This study and project looks at LGBTQIA representation in college media and how there can be more and better. The purpose is to improve LGBTQIA representation college media outlets. The study includes three interviews with experts as well as a review of literature.

Lost In Adaptation, Caitlin S. Manocchio

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

philosophical societies that send us here as their representatives- can no longer, in this case, allow itself [the philosophical idea] to be enclosed in a single idiom, at the risk of floating, neutral and disembodied, remote from every body of language

(Derrida 1994: 14)

Introduction

In Sending: on representation (1994), Jacques Derrida questions the function of representation that we can use to offer a challenge to the experience and structure of representation as a practice in visual culture and for contemporary spectatorship. When the function of representation is being questioned, rather than its subject, the practice of representation is seen …

Becoming American: Constructing Mexican Immigrants In Local Newspapers, Zheng Zhu

Publications and Research

Media representation of Latino immigrants has been extensively studied by scholars across diverse academic disciplines. Particular to the U.S. context, preceding scholarships pertaining to the ways in which Latinos were represented centered on the media representation of Latino immigrants either as the exotic racial other or undesirable foreigners. In light of the important role that the Mexican immigrants played in understanding the current national debate on illegal immigration and the overall historical experiences of immigrants in Washington State (WA), this study critically investigated how news articles published in WA represented Mexican immigrants. As a crucial point of departure from prior …

The Great Mirror Of Fandom: Reflections Of (And On) Otaku And Fujoshi In Anime And Manga, Clarissa Graffeo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this thesis is to examine representations of otaku and fujoshi (i.e., dedicated fans of pop culture) in Japanese anime and manga from 1991 until the present. I analyze how these fictional images of fans participate in larger mass media and academic discourses about otaku and fujoshi, and how even self-produced reflections of fan identity are defined by the combination of larger normative discourses and market demands. Although many scholars have addressed fan practices and identities through surveys and participant observation, many of these studies work with Western groups of fans whose identities may not be consistent with …

Goldfield Studies, Dawn Roe

Faculty Publications

The dialogue within this essay serves as a response to the series, Goldfield Studies, a work itself prompted by the history and landscape of this eponymous region of Victoria, Australia. The imagery produced takes the form of paired and multiple still photographs and a digital video sequence, displayed in triple-projection. The discussion is framed by the artist’s introduction, which defines the project as a critical consideration of cultural memory in relation to the opposing perspectives of indigenous and colonial settler narratives, pastoral landscape representations, folklore and myth. A collaborative dialogue between an artist and art historian who share common research …

Seeing The Unseen: Underrepresented Groups In Prime-Time Television, Cherese E. Colston

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

Television is considered America's No. 1 pastime, occupying an average of four hours and 39 minutes of a person's time every day (Stelter, 2008). A majority of viewers are tuned in during prime time to live vicariously through their favorite fictional characters who reflect friends, family or even themselves. However, is prime-time television really representing everyone? The purpose of this study is to discover whether a media format as influential as TV reflects the people of the United States. This will be accomplished through coding the prime-time programing on major broadcast networks ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and the CW.

The Hidden Rhetoric In Hollywood's Closet: An Analysis Of The Conflict Over Homosexual Content And Representation, Lauren Beam

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

An Ethico-Politics Of Subaltern Representations In Post-9/11 Documentary Film, Joseph D. Parker

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

The World War Without End (WWWoE), formerly known as the War on Terror,ii is one of those rare occasions when a gendered subaltern population comes to the attention of the nation-state. If the subaltern is understood as something akin to illiterate rural women from the global South, then she now has the full attention of the White House and Downing Street, the US State Department, CNN and Time magazine.iii In official state positions and in media coverage, interest in the subaltern is often expressed in humanitarian attention to the rights or freedoms of these subaltern women in order to justify …

Positioning, Spectatorship, And Teen Films: Giving Students The Power For Effective Media Education, Bradley David Moss

Theses and Dissertations

What is the most effective curricular and pedagogical approach to use in increasing media literacy among students? This is the challenge that I and most media educators must address today. This thesis charts my exploration of that question and demonstrates the results of a unit of instruction created to enhance the critical media literacy of students by focusing on positioning theory, spectatorship, and considering teen representation in mass media films. In creating curriculum, I needed to define the end goal of the instruction. My research led me to critical media literacy and its focus on moving beyond media textual analysis …

Female Agency And Oppression In Caribbean Bacchanalian Culture: Soca, Carnival, And Dancehall, Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

In this essay Kevin Frank discerningly analyzes agency and gender in public sexual performances emanating out of what Paul Gilroy identifies as part of the compensatory politics of the subordinated within Black Atlantic culture, Jamaican dancehall (dancehall reggae/ dancehall queens).

Apotheosis Or Apparition? Bombay And The Village In 1990s Women’S Cinema, Rashmi Sawhney

Books/Book chapters

This article examines the representation of Bombay in Aruna Raje’s Rihaee (1988) and Sai Paranjpye’s Disha (1990). It has been argued here that in both films, Bombay functions as a narrative anchor to the fictive village, which is depicted as the locus of Indian modernity. Symbolism of the village-city trope is used to reorganise the syntagm of modernity-location-gender in new relations of power and also to present alternative visions of national development within the socio-economic context of 1990s liberalisation in India. The dialectic between city and village in these films emphasises the role of memory and migration in women’s cinema, …

Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces [Book Review], Marc Ouellette

English Faculty Publications

Recognizing the growing importance (at least for consumers) of video games as a popular form of narrative fiction, Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska situate their collection, ScreenPlay: cinema/videogames/interfaces as a text which is corrective, informative and explorative. In the first case, the editors sought essays which would move the critical discourse on video games away from the more familiar but reductive debates surrounding the "effects" of video games (especially on children) and their modes of representation (especially of the female form and violence). Indeed, these have become the sine qua non of video game criticism and one feeds the other …

L’Écriture De La Femme Musulmane Dans Loin Demédine D’Assia Djebar, Yvonne-Marie Mokam

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Assia Djebar is one of the most important figures in contemporary African literature. Her views are structured around a critique of the misrepresentation of Muslim women. It is precisely this challenge that is undertaken in Loin de Médine (1991), in which Djebar challenges various stereotypes in order to offer a new image of Asian women.

Introduction: Imaging, Representation, And Photography Of The Pacific Islands, Max Quanchi

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

White Shadows In The Darkness: Representations Of Polynesian Women In Early Cinema, Margaret Jolly

Pacific Studies

This article considers representations of Polynesian women in two early Hollywood films: Moana (1926) and Tabu (1931). It ponders the tensions not just between the cinematic visions of Robert Flaherty and F. W. Murnau, but between ethnographic recuperations and romantic celebrations of Polynesian women, in the light of de Lauretis’s contentions (in Technologies of Gender, 1987) that gendered identities are neither fixed nor immutable, but shifting and fluid effects.

Not So Nice Colored Girls: A View Of Tracey Moffatt’S Nice Coloured Girls, Caroline Vercoe

Pacific Studies

Nice Coloured Girls is Tracey Moffatt’s first film. Produced in 1987, this seventeen-minute film describes a tradition that has been passed down from her grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s generation—that of “picking up Captain.” Moffatt explains “since colonisation ‘picking up Captain’ has been a way for Aboriginal women to survive off white men.” Rather than creating new and empowered Aboriginal heroines for the 1990s, Moffatt chooses to site her characters within a colonial continuum. Her tradition begins with postcolonial contact and it is clearly formed by cross-cultural experiences. This essay focuses on the narrative structure of Nice Coloured Girls and discusses the …

Stuart Kirsch's Review Of Judith Hallet's Lords Of The Garden, Stuart Kirsch

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.