Tired Gaze: A Feminist Reading of Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber (2010)

Film Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-35
Author(s):  
Lauren Powell

Rubber (2010) could be read as a monstrous replication of a male-dominated society that sees women subordinated and exploited simply for their “otherness” to men. This article, however, argues that when a dynamic reading is performed, Rubber can be seen to question Hollywood’s dominant system of gender representation and should therefore be considered a feminist film. In dialogue with feminist theory, it will be claimed that by drawing attention to the artifice of cinema, Dupieux has delivered a feminine text that highlights and calls for change to inherently misogynistic codes and conventions present in traditional dominant cinema and society in general.

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Zaid Ibrahim Ismael ◽  
Jinan Waheed Jassim

Midwestern American dramatist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was one of the early voices in the American theater who explored gender issues and woman’s rights at the beginning of the twentieth century. She portrays women in distress, trying to find an outlet from the vicious circle of loneliness and abuse in which they live. Despite the fact that her characters resist oppression and degradation and try to defy the patriarchal authority that restrains them, they are often overwhelmed by this powerful male-dominated system. As a result, they grow defensive and resort to violence and murder in order to avenge themselves from the society that dehumanizes them. They ultimately fall prey to their tragic fate, not necessarily death, but psychological disintegration and incarceration. Glaspell’s tragic heroines are outsiders, living in a world that thwarts their dreams to have a free life beyond the prescribed roles and social demands of house management, domesticity, and social propriety. This study applies the feminist theory of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, introduced in their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic, to two of Glaspell’s major plays, namely Trifles and The Verge. It also aims at tracing the elements of the Restoration ‘she-tragedy’ in these plays to prove to what extent Glaspell is a master of this form of writing.


2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 444-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lan Duong

This article looks at two contemporary films by Vietnamese women. In Việt Linh's Travelling Circus (1988) and Phạm Nhuệ Giang's The Deserted Valley (2002), a female gaze is sutured to that of an ethnic minority character's, a form of looking that stresses a shared oppression between women and the ethnic Other. While clearing a space for a desiring female gaze in Vietnamese film, they nonetheless extend an Orientalist view of racialised difference. A feminist film optic, one that does not consider industry history and constructions of race, fails to mark out the layered relations of looking underlying Vietnamese filmmaking. This study attends to the ways women filmmakers investigate gendered forms of looking, sexual desire and otherness within the constraints of a highly male-dominated film industry.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberley Radmacher

""It's difficult to believe that after over 30 years of feminist theory "breaking the glass ceiling" is still a term often heard from women professionals. Still, while women continue to make up a trifling percentage of CEOs in Fortune 500 companies, and are continually paid 72% of the wages of their male counterparts, 2 small advances continue to be made by women in both these areas? Yet, one profession that stands out as persistently keeping women on the outside looking in is mainstream filmmaking, especially directing. Indeed, no woman has ever won an Oscar for directing, and women are rarely nominated in the category, most likely because women direct less than 1 % of mainstream films. While women continue to chip their way up the corporate ladder, albeit excruciatingly slowly, women directors of mainstream films are actually declining in numbers. It is ironic that it should be in the area of filmmaking that women have made such small progress. The implication of feminist film criticism's rifts and divisions, played out in theories of heterogeneity or what makes up a feminist aesthetic, typifies the continuing contribution that feminist criticism has made to critical and ultural studies on a whole. Much current critical theory is indebted to feminist film theory, but in tum, critical, psychoanalytic, post structuralist and cultural studies' influences on radical feminist theory have effected--or at least influenced--a shift that tends to privilege a critical practice dealing primarily with image/representation. As a result, feminist approaches to media have centred on '[re]reading' popular culture through a narrow feminist paradigm which in film criticism, especially, has meant that dominant critical strategies chiefly have been limited to a political tactic of "reading against the grain," rather than a tactic of producing contemporary feminist films."--Pages 2-3.


Text Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 106-118
Author(s):  
Anna Reglińska-Jemioł

The article discusses the evolving image of female characters in the Mad Max saga directed by George Miller, focusing on Furiosa’s rebellion in the last film—Mad Max: Fury Road. Interestingly, studying Miller’s post-apocalyptic action films, we can observe the evolution of this post-apocalyptic vision from the male-dominated world with civilization collapsing into chaotic violence visualized in the previous series to a more hopeful future created by women in the last part of the saga: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). We observe female heroes: the vengeful Furiosa, the protector of oppressed girls and sex slaves, the women of the separatist clan, and the wives of the warlord, who bring down the tyranny and create a new “green place.” It is worth emphasizing that the plot casts female solidarity in the central heroic role. In fact, the Mad Max saga emerges as a piece of socially engaged cinema preoccupied with the cultural context of gender discourse. Noticeably, media commentators, scholars and activists have suggested that Fury Road is a feminist film.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 76-93
Author(s):  
Genevieve Urbano ◽  
Roselyn Mae Balneg ◽  
Patricia Michaela Collantes ◽  
Rafaela Reese Diaz ◽  
Jeahn Oliver Fernandez ◽  
...  

Hip-hop has become a male-dominated industry, and it has reached all over the world, including the Philippines. This study analyzed two Original Pilipino Music (OPM) rap songs: Neneng B by Nik Makino feat. Raf Davis, and Pantsu by Zae. The two songs were examined to see how women are represented and how women's empowerment is promoted. Addressing the objectives, this study used a qualitative design that involved stylistics and text analysis. Using the Feminist Theory and applying Sara Mills' Feminist Text analysis model, the lyrics were examined in a word, phrase/sentence, and discourse level. This research revealed that a female artist's song promotes woman empowerment while the song written by male artists has more objectification tendencies.  This study further implicates the role and position of women in modern-day society with music.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberley Radmacher

""It's difficult to believe that after over 30 years of feminist theory "breaking the glass ceiling" is still a term often heard from women professionals. Still, while women continue to make up a trifling percentage of CEOs in Fortune 500 companies, and are continually paid 72% of the wages of their male counterparts, 2 small advances continue to be made by women in both these areas? Yet, one profession that stands out as persistently keeping women on the outside looking in is mainstream filmmaking, especially directing. Indeed, no woman has ever won an Oscar for directing, and women are rarely nominated in the category, most likely because women direct less than 1 % of mainstream films. While women continue to chip their way up the corporate ladder, albeit excruciatingly slowly, women directors of mainstream films are actually declining in numbers. It is ironic that it should be in the area of filmmaking that women have made such small progress. The implication of feminist film criticism's rifts and divisions, played out in theories of heterogeneity or what makes up a feminist aesthetic, typifies the continuing contribution that feminist criticism has made to critical and ultural studies on a whole. Much current critical theory is indebted to feminist film theory, but in tum, critical, psychoanalytic, post structuralist and cultural studies' influences on radical feminist theory have effected--or at least influenced--a shift that tends to privilege a critical practice dealing primarily with image/representation. As a result, feminist approaches to media have centred on '[re]reading' popular culture through a narrow feminist paradigm which in film criticism, especially, has meant that dominant critical strategies chiefly have been limited to a political tactic of "reading against the grain," rather than a tactic of producing contemporary feminist films."--Pages 2-3.


2014 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 111-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja Sobiraj ◽  
Sabine Korek ◽  
Thomas Rigotti

Men’s professional work roles require different attributes according to the gender-typicality of their occupation (female- versus male-dominated). We predicted that levels of men’s strain and job satisfaction would be predicted by levels of self-ascribed instrumental and expressive attributes. Therefore, we tested for positive effects of instrumentality for men in general, and instrumentality in interaction with expressiveness for men in female-dominated occupations in particular. Data were based on a survey of 213 men working in female-dominated occupations and 99 men working in male-dominated occupations. We found instrumentality to be negatively related to men’s strain and positively related to their job satisfaction. We also found expressiveness of men in female-dominated occupations to be related to reduced strain when instrumentality was low. This suggests it is important for men to be able to identify highly with either instrumentality or expressiveness when regulating role demands in female-dominated occupations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cherisse L. Seaton ◽  
Joan L. Bottorff ◽  
John L. Oliffe ◽  
Kerensa Medhurst ◽  
Damen DeLeenheer

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