Reel vulnerability : power, pain, and gender in contemporary American film and television / Sarah Hagelin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hagelin, Sarah.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Vulnerability (Personality trait) in motion pictures.

Power (Social sciences) in motion pictures.

Pain in motion pictures.

Sex role in motion pictures.

Motion pictures--United States.

Motion pictures.

United States.

Physical Description:

ix, 211 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2013]

Summary:

Wonder women, G.I. Janes, and vampire slayers increasingly populate the American cultural landscape. What do these figures mean in the American cultural imagination? What can they tell us about the female body in action or in pain? Reel Vulnerability explores the way American popular culture thinks about vulnerability, arguing that our culture and our scholarship remain stubbornly invested in the myth of the helplessness of the female body. The book examines the shifting constructions of vulnerability in the wake of the cultural upheavals of World War II, the Cold War, and 9/11, placing defenseless male bodies onscreen alongside representations of the female body in the military, in the interrogation room, and on the margins. Sarah Hagelin challenges the ways film theory and cultural studies confuse vulnerability and femaleness. Such films as G.I. Jane and Saving Private Ryan, as well as such post-9/11 television shows as Battlestar Galactica and Deadwood, present vulnerable men who demand our sympathy, abused women who don't want our pity, and images of the body in pain that do not portray weakness. Hagelin's intent is to help scholarship catch up to the new iconographies emerging in theaters and in living rooms-images that offer viewers reactions to the suffering body beyond pity, identification with the bleeding body beyond masochism, and feminist images of the female body where we least expect to find them. Book jacket.

Contents:

Unmaking vulnerability

pt. 1.

The cinematic construction of vulnerability

The furies, the men, and the method: cinematic languages of vulnerability

Victimized, violent and damned: identification and radical vulnerability in The deer hunter, Full metal jacket, and Casualties of war

pt. 2.

New vulnerability after The Cold War

The body at war: sexual politics and resistant vulnerability in Saving Private Ryan and G.I. Jane

Matthew Shepard's body and the politics of queer vulnerability in Boys don't cry and The Laramie Project

pt. 3.

Vulnerability beyond the body

The violated body after 9/11: torture, and the legacy of vulnerability in 24 and Battlestar Galactica

Vulnerability by proxy: Deadwood and the future of television form

Afterword

Female power and Tarantino's Basterds.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780813561042

0813561043

9780813561035

0813561035

OCLC:

816498988