scholarly journals Destabilizing Journeys: The Chicago Feminist Film Festival and The Fits

Author(s):  
Michelle Yates ◽  
Susan Kerns

The Chicago Feminist Film Festival aims to decenter and destabilize Hollywood norms, including Hollywood’s tendency to place cis-gendered white male protagonists at the center of films structured according to the hero’s journey. Thus, The Fits (2016) was a natural opener to the inaugural festival, embodying many of the festival’s values in destabilizing what constitutes “normal” ways of seeing the world. In particular, in centering black girlhood, The Fits subverts the white and male gaze. Main character Toni takes on the active gaze usually reserved for white and/or male characters, subverting the objectified status generally prescribed to female characters. The Fits also unsettles the heroine’s journey by troubling Toni’s transformative return. While it may seem that through “the fits” Toni is assimilated into normative gender relations, it is also possible to read Toni’s transformation in the film as form of insubordination, a resistance to this assimilation.

Author(s):  
Josef Steiff

In the past few years, there has been a proliferation of films and television series around the world that are set in forests. These stories’ structures often differ depending on the gender of the protagonist: If the protagonists are men, the forest is usually a site of horror, but when the protagonists are women, the forests become sites of transformation. Looking at Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, and Catherine Addison’s model for how the forest is represented in classical literature, this paper considers how the internal journey of female characters is reflected in or resonates with the woods. Films discussed range across multiple genres (drama, survival, crime, horror, science fiction) and include Leave No Trace, Deliverance, The Grey, Destroyer, Zone Blanche, The Ritual, The Hallow, Without Name, Dans la foret, The Blair Witch Project, The Forest, Mad Max: Fury Road, Annihilation, and Aeon Flux. The temptation to talk about these films in dichotomies, such as Hero/Heroine, Masculine/Feminine, illustrates our need for new terminology to reflect even newer ways of thinking about the complexity of gendered protagonists in stories.


Author(s):  
David Schlosberg

In the filmBeasts of the Southern Wild, the main character, Hushpuppy, lays out the dilemma of environmental management in the Anthropocene: “For the animals that didn’t have a dad to put them in the boat, the end of the world already happened.” The Anthropocene will not recede, and the central question of environmental management will be whether we can develop ways to reflexively and sustainably manage ecosystems, habitats, and human needs. This chapter examines four possible normative underpinnings for such management: traditional notions of preservation and restoration, the idea of ecological limits and boundaries, the continued hubris of promethean technological intervention, and a conception of ecological receptivity or a “politics of sight” that makes visible human immersion in natural systems. As sight is a particular characteristic of the Anthropocene, this form of receptivity may hold some promise for environmental management.


Author(s):  
Varvara A. Byachkova ◽  

The article raises the topic of space organization in writings by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The object of analysis is the novel A Little Princess. The novel, addressed primarily to children and teenagers, has many similarities with David Copperfield and the works of Charles Dickens in general. The writer largely follows the literary tradition created by Dickens. The space of the main character is divided into three levels: the Big world (states and borders), the Small world (home, school, city) and the World of imagination. The first two worlds give the reader a realistic picture of Edwardian England, the colonial Empire, through the eyes of a child reveal the themes of unprotected childhood, which the writer develops following the literary tradition of the 19th century. The Big and Small worlds also perform an educational function, being a source of experience and impressions for the main character. In the novel, the aesthetic of realism is combined with folklore and fairy-tale elements: the heroine does not completely transform the surrounding space, but she manages to change it partially and also to preserve her own personality and dignity while experiencing the Dickensian drama of child disenfranchisement, despair and loneliness. The World of imagination allows the reader to understand in full the character of Sarah Crewe, demonstrates the dynamics of her growing up, while for herself it is a powerful protective mechanism that enables her to pass all the tests of life and again become a happy child who can continue to grow up and develop.


Author(s):  
Gönül Dönmez-Colin

ISTANBUL INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Istanbul International Film Festival (31 March-15 April 2007) celebrated its 26th birthday this spring with more than 200 films from around the world. This year, for the first time in its history, the festival opened with a film by a Turkish director, Ferzan Özpetek although the Italian production Saturn Opposite about depressed 40-year olds nostalgic about their youth, featuring some of the well-known actors of Italy could hardly be considered a Turkish film. The closing film was the US production, The Good German by Steven Soderbergh featuring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. The films that compete for the Golden Tulip award are chosen for their relation to art and the artist or are adaptations from literary works. The fact that Istanbul takes place shortly before Cannes makes it rather difficult to find quality films for the International Competition, which had not been previously screened elsewhere....


Author(s):  
Ekawati Marhaenny Dukut ◽  
Nuki Dhamayanti

The world of literature can be a medium of expressing the writer's expressions and ideas. Universal topics such as, love, death, and war often become subject mailers in the world of literature. In the novel, of The Color Purple. Alice Walker describes the oppression experienced by Afro American women in the female characters of Celie, Nellie, Shug Avery, Sofia, and Mary Agnes who faced sexual discrimina!ions in a patriarchal society. Womanhood, education, and lesbianism are factors that help the Afro American women to free themselves from traditional values. The Color Purple puts into words the process of its main character, Celie, who tries to reject and escape from the male domination of her world. The other Afro American women characters that help Celie to find her selfidentity represent the manifestation of the rejection of the traditional values. This article. which uses the socio-historical alld feminism approach. is intended to analyse the Afro-American women's rejection of traditional values by focusing on the major character of' Walker's The Color Purple. Celie. as she develops from being a victim of traditional values to the rejoiceful discovery of her selfidentity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 126-138
Author(s):  
John-Paul Zaccarini

This essay follows the making of a queer of colour aesthetic space in the form of a music video entitled Brother, within a largely homogenous white University. The video places white heteronormativity on the periphery whilst intersectional brown bodies take the centre. It inverts racist and fetishistic tropes in music video culture and reverses the white male gaze. The making of the video created a small brown island in a sea of white as a vision of a future brown space protected from the ubiquitous, ambivalently festishizing white gaze; a gaze that projects its own narrative onto bodies of colour. It puts forward a thesis of racial agency, whereby the performance of “race” is scripted by the person of colour and not provoked by the construct of whiteness.


2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (4 SELECTED PAPERS IN ENGLISH) ◽  
pp. 125-150
Author(s):  
Magdalena Kasa

The Polish version of the article was published in Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 65, issue 4 (2017). The article focuses on Ernestyna Śniadowiczówna, the main character in a novel by Zofia Nałkowska, Węże i róże [Snakes and Roses] (1913). The main purpose of the work is to show that the character had its real counterpart in Zofia’s younger sister, the sculptor Hanna Nałkowska. The words of Zofia herself were crucial, who in her Diary confessed that all her novels were autobiographical to some extent. Still, researchers have not paid sufficient attention to the significant similarities between Ernestyna and Hanna Nałkowska. Węże i róże is the only piece in the writer’s output in which she analyzed the issues related to art and pointed out some characteristics of the artist. Zofia was writing her novel when Hanna was entering the world of art. A comparison between Ernestyna Śniadowiczówna and Hanna Nałkowska, as well as the information from Zofia’s Dziennik and reminiscences of their friends show that the literary character is likely to be based on a real person.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 1112-1122 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Lake

Drawing largely on my own career in academia, I elaborate on the need for greater gender, racial and other forms of diversity in International Relations. Although theories are thought to be “objective,” what goes into those theories and, in turn, their explanatory power is ultimately shaped by subjective, lived experiences. Different individuals with different life stories will develop different intuitions about how the world “works,” and thus will write different theories to capture those intuitions and, in turn, larger patterns of politics. I explain here how my life experience as a privileged white male has shaped the intellectual contours of my work on international hierarchy. Building from this foundation, I then explore how professional practices elevate as gatekeepers individuals with generally similar life experiences and, thus, intuitions about what constitutes “good” work in the field, which in turn reinforces those professional practices and priorities. The final section focuses on problems of eroding the disciplinary hierarchy and broadening the pipeline into the profession.


Author(s):  
Meryl Shriver-Rice

Meryl Shriver-Rice interprets Brothers, After the Wedding, and In a Better World in terms of the shared trope of the white male sojourner who travels from Denmark to locations that feature non-white, non-Western citizens. This chapter situates the Bier/Jensen trilogy within a wider trend of contemporary Scandinavian narratives of guilt. In assessing potential critiques of the trilogy on postcolonial grounds, Shriver-Rice argues that the “elsewheres” of these films do not ignore geographic location specifics and cultural contexts in order to assert a universalizing morality. Instead, the ethical trajectories of these films are not universal, and the idea that universalist ethics will inevitably fail takes precedence. Shriver-Rice argues that Bier’s drawing from non-industrialized non-Western space has more to do with speaking to the privileged-world guilt in the Danish viewer, and reminding him or her of the world at large beyond Western space.


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