E. Ann Kaplan

This book brings together carefully selected essays on feminism and film with a view to tracing major developments in theory, criticism, and practices of women and cinema from 1973 to the present day. It illuminates the powerful, if controversial role feminist research has played in the emergence of Film Studies as a discipline during these years, and reprints a variety of methods of feminist film study. As well as a wide-ranging introduction by Kaplan which sets her selection of essays in context, readers will find examples of social-role, psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, gay and lesbian, postmodern and postcolonial feminist film criticism, prefaced by introductory notes and including further readings.

Feminism and Film

In her new book, E. Ann Kaplan explores the racialized gaze: What exactly happens when whites look at non-whites? What happens when the look is returned - when "others" startle whites into knowledge of their whiteness? Looking for the Other employs Hollywood films about colonial or exotic travel, and those by women filmmakers of color, to address such questions. A secondary, linked theme of her book is the concept of "nation", with special focus on women's ethnic and transnational identities as imaged on film.

Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze

Looking for the Other

Trauma and Cinema - Cross-Cultural Explorations

Patrice Petro

Kristin Lené Hole

Dijana Jelača

Comprised of 43 innovative contributions, this companion is both an overview of, and intervention into the field of cinema and gender. The essays included here address a variety of geographical contexts, from an analysis of cinema. Islam and women and television under Eastern European socialism, to female audience reception in Nigeria, to changing class and race norms in Bollywood dance sequences. A special focus is on women directors in a global context that includes films and filmmakers from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North and South America. The collection also offers a solid overview of feminist contributions to thinking on genre from the "chick flick" to the action or Western film, to film noir and the slasher. Readers will find contributions on a variety of approaches to spectatorship, reception studies and fandom, as well as transnational approaches to star studies and essays addressing the relationship between feminist film theory and new media. Other topics include queer and trans* cinema, eco-cinema and the post-human. Finally, readers interested in the history of film will find essays addressing the methodological dimensions of feminist film history, essays on silent and studio era women in film, and histories of female filmmakers in a variety of non-Western contexts.

The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender

Department of English E Ann Kaplan

Theories, Practices

Postmodernism and Its Discontents

Ban Wang

This volume addresses the relation of trauma to transnational modern mass media. The first of its kind, Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations provides ten essays which explore the ways trauma works itself out as media — in images in (and as) film, photography, and video — in global cultural flows. The focus of our volume on the matrix of trauma, visual media and modernity seeks to engage and go beyond current tendencies in trauma studies. The book discusses how trauma presented in the media spills over national boundaries and can be found in images across divergent cultures in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and America. From the Holocaust to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, from Taiwan’s colonial experience to the catastrophe of Hiroshima, from attempted annihilation of Australian Aborigines to attempted reconciliation in South Africa, these essays offer the reader a plethora of images of trauma for comparison and contrast.

Cross-Cultural Explorations

Trauma and Cinema

From novels of the nineteenth century to films of the 1990s, American culture, abounds with images of white, middle-class mothers. In Motherhood and Representation, E. Ann Kaplan considers how the mother appears in three related spheres: the historical, in which she charts changing representations of the mother from 1830 to the postmodernist present; the psychoanalytic, which discusses theories of the mother from Freud to Lacan and the French Feminists; and the mother as she is figured in cultural representations: in literary and film texts such as East Lynne, Marnie and the The Handmaid's Tale, as well as in journalism and popular manuals on motherhood. Kaplan's analysis identifies two dominant paradigms of the mother as `Angel' and `Witch', and charts the contesting and often contradictory discourses of the mother in present-day America.

The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama

Motherhood and Representation

a ambos lados de la cámara

Las mujeres y el cine

Women in Film Noir

Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented, perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us feel a sickening sense of déjà vu, as though we have already seen the sad outcome to this story. Drawing from recent scholarship that analyzes climate change as a form of “slow violence” that humans are inflicting on the environment, Climate Trauma theorizes that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms “Pretraumatic Stress Disorder.” Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming. Examining dystopian classics like Soylent Green alongside more recent examples like The Book of Eli, Climate Trauma also stretches the limits of the genre to include features such as Blindness, The Happening, Take Shelter, and a number of documentaries on climate change. These eclectic texts allow Kaplan to outline the typical blind-spots of the genre, which rarely depicts climate catastrophe from the vantage point of women or minorities. Lucidly synthesizing cutting-edge research in media studies, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental science, Climate Trauma provides us with the tools we need to extract something useful from our nightmares of a catastrophic future.

Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction

Climate Trauma

Devoney Looser

In universities and colleges across the country, feminists are debating their histories and future legacies. Some older feminists accuse younger ones of being overly theoretical, insufficiently political, and ungrateful to previous generations. The younger ones consider their foremothers naive or elitist. GENERATIONS explores these conflicts and challenges between older and younger feminist scholars.

Academic Feminists in Dialogue

Generations

"Written with unequivocal enthusiasm for film, feminism and theory, "Women and Film" is a welcome and useful guide to a complex area."--"The Arts"

Women & Film

Laura Cottingham

Mary Beth Edelson

Alissa Rame Friedman

From 70s ritural performances to the post-feminism of a new century, Mary Beth Edelson has been destabilizing preexisting representations of women. Whether in her version of the Last Supper, in which Georgia O'Keeffe plays Christ to disciples Lee Krasner, Nancy Graves, Louise Bourgeois, and Yoko Ono; or in her isolation and re-narrativization of stereotypical images of Hollywood femmes fatales, Edelson never loses sight of what is at stake in her work: the construction, representation, and consumption of images of women. This book, a virtual scrapbook of the feminism movement, includes coversations between Edelson and such seminal feminist figures as Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, and Miriam Schapiro. Designed by the artist and full of 30 years worth of her multidisciplinary feminist and community-based work, The Art of Mary Beth Edelson offers Edelson the ultimate control over the construction of her own image in the present and the opportunity to recontextualize her past.

The Art of Mary Beth Edelson

These fifteen carefully chosen essays by well-known scholars demonstrate the vitality and variety of psychoanalytic film criticism, as well as the crucial role feminist theory has played in its development. Among the films discussed are Duel in the Sun, The Best Years of Our Lives, Three Faces of Eve, Tender is the Night, Pandora's Box, Secrets of the Soul, and the works of Jacques Tourneur (director of The Cat People and other features).

Psychoanalysis and Cinema

In Trauma Culture, E. Ann Kaplan explores the relationship between the impact of trauma on individuals and on entire cultures and nations. Arguing that humans possess a need to draw meaning from personal experience and to communicate what happens to others, she examines the forms that are used to bridge the experience.

The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature

Trauma Culture

Analyzes the treatment of women in American movies and examines the themes of a variety of contemporary movies made by women

Both Sides of the Camera

Women and Film

Michael Sprinker

Román De la Campa

"A diverse range of theoretically sophisticated and historically informed contributors take as given two fundamental facts about the culture of imperialism: firstly, that it has a long and complex history which, in the present epoch, merits its being designated 'late'; and, secondly, that its impact on the contemporary world is far from exhausted. Together they highlight the contradictions in the serried cultural practices of imperialism in its different historical periods."-- Publisher description.

E. Ann Kaplan

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