Disney's Violent Women In Quest of a 'Fully Real' Violent Woman in American Cinema (original) (raw)
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Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema
2016
Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema explores the representation of homicidal women in six contemporary films: Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001), Baise-moi (Coralie Thinh Thi and Virginie Despentes, 2000), Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994), Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003) and The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008). Violent women in cinema pose an exciting challenge to viewers—when women kill, they overturn cultural ideas of typical feminine behaviour. Janice Loreck explores how cinema creatively depicts the violent woman in response to this challenge. Departing from earlier studies that focus on popular and exploitation cinema, the book takes a unique focus on violent women in art films and other critically-distinguished forms. It explores the appeal that the violent woman holds for spectators within this viewing context. Furthermore, the book also examines how cinema responds to the cultural construction of the violent woman as a conundrum and enigma.
The cultural construction of the feminine through Disney�s films
EduLite: Journal of English Education, Literature and Culture
The question of gender roles in Disney�s films has been one of the relevant issues in their industry. Disney has for a long time been at battle with the public for being accused of depicting their characters, specifically females, in stereotypical ways. Gender roles can affect viewers in the manner they see themselves with the others around them. The roles of men and women pictured in Disney�s films have mirrored the cultural perspective and beliefs of social norms and expectations on gender roles and identity. This study tries to figure out the roles of the princesses and the female villains in Disney's films with regard to the cultural construction of the feminine. This study applied qualitative� descriptive� method with several steps taken during the data analysis. Finally,� the� analysis� was� informally presented� through� a descriptive representation in words. The findings demonstrate that despite displaying the characteristics of strength and power, female villains are fr...
Disney Classics between Feminism and Victimization of Women: A Historical Analysis
Technium Social Sciences Journal
This paper focuses on the two contradictory themes of feminism and victimizing women in Disney Classics, a series of films which are based on famous fairy tales and the development of the changes undergone by these stories over time. The study is carried out through an analysis of the themes of the stories with a critical feminist approach in three chronological stages. Previous studies have explored these themes, but no report to date has used a chronological approach to compare the significance of the mentioned themes with the stages of feminism. These stories develop in line with developments in society and widen their perspective when examined through a feminist lens, and this change is also reflected in the Disney treatments of these tales. Despite the similarities in the plots of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Little Mermaid, the representations of the voice and agency of the female characters in these films differs significantly, especially in the case of Snow White.
Diswomen Strike Back? The Evolution of Disney's Femmes in the 1990s.
Atenea Journal 27.2, 2007
Girls bored me-they still do, I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known, Walt Disney qtd, in Wagner, You Must Remember This T he tendency to rewrite traditional fairy and folk tales has flourished in the world of Hollywood cinema with the cultural and commercial icon of Walt Disney. The dramatic transformation of literary fairy tales, nonetheless, has been problematic, since Disney's animated fairy-tale adaptations have systematically undergone a process involving sanitization and Americanization, two distinctive features to compound the so-called "Disneyfication" of folklore and popular culture, Disney's machinery transformed a child-oriented genre into a mass-oriented vehicle disguised as innocent entertainment while simultaneously portraying power relations and adult sexuality. As Jack Zipes claims, "[Disney] employed animators and technology to stop thinking about change, to return to his films, and to long nostalgically for neatly ordered patriarchal realms" (40). By developing an appealing cinematic language of fantasy, Disney's fairy tales often manage to conceal a suspicious ideology concerning sexual, race and class politics. In this respect, the construction of Disney's heroines has become a controversial site for discussion in terms of stereotyped femininity and sexuality following the demands of a pervasive patriarchal system. Referring to the story of Snow White, Zipes argues that "the house for the Grimms and Disney was the place where good girls remained, and one shared aspect of the fairy tale and the film is about the domestication of women" (37). Like-
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Walt Disney as an individual, as a film-maker, and as a studio head, increasingly has become the subject of respectable academic enquiry. Despite a number of balanced, scholarly publications which have argued against many of the venomous (and often unsupported) attacks upon Walt, however, certain misconceptions about Walt persist in terms of his attitudes towards race, religion, politics, and sexual equality. This paper explores Walt Disney and his attitudes towards women, seeking to contextualize him within the era in which he lived and worked.
Film Noir's “Femme Fatales” Hard-Boiled Women: Moving Beyond Gender Fantasies
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2007
In her essay "Professions for Women," Virginia Woolf says "It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality" (1346). Nowhere is this insight truer than in the culture's preoccupation with the femme fatale, a figure I want to identify as a phantom, an illusion and myth that I wish not so much to kill, but to deconstruct as a category that feeds cultural gender fantasies. Feminist film critics have long recognized the ideological power of the femme fatale: first in terms of her role as a projection of male fear and desire; later, as a politically forceful symbol of unencumbered power. I want not only to extend recent emphases by critics such as Christine Gledhill, Elizabeth Cowie, and Jans Wager on how noir speaks to women but also to show the striking extent to which femme fatales-seductresses whose desires and malevolence are seemingly unmotivated-don't in fact exist in the noir movies in which so-called bad women appear. Instead film noir's lead female characters predominantly demonstrate complex psychological and social identity, resisting the spectator's habit (traced in criticism and cultural responses) of seeing past her as opaque or ambiguous (thus a screen on which to project male fears and desires) or of fixing on her as the thing, a dangerous body, to be labeled and tamed by social roles and institutions. This essay will point to the dearth of film noir's actual femmes fatales, evil women whose raison d'être is to murder and deceive, focusing on films in which the femme fatale is presented in terms of exigency. That is, I want to call attention to the many female characters in original-cycle noir who are shown to be limited by, even trapped in, social worlds presented as psychotically gendered. Exigency for most so-called femme fatales moves these women to express-in aggressive physical and verbal gestures-an insistence on independence, which is then misread as the mark of the femme fatale. Readings of and references to the femme fatale miss the extent to which her role depends on the theme of female independence, often misconceiving her motives and serving mainly to confound our understanding of the gender fantasies that surround these so-called bad women. Such myths are propelled by the culture now both by film criticism and popular culture. Indeed, critics have settled in their discussion of women in noir on the few female characters who conform to the notion of the quintessential femme fatale (as she is represented by Phyllis Dietrichson [Double Indemnity], Kathie Moffett [Out of the Past], and Brigid O'Shaughnessy [The Maltese Falcon]), who then define the category. This has two significant consequences: first, these few really bad women draw all of the attention; second the construction of a false binary opposition between femme fatales and other