A Feminist Study of Otherness in A Streetcar Named Desire and Its Iranian Film Adaptation, The Stranger (original) (raw)
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The representation of women’s gender roles In the Iranian cinema: a study of the stranger (2014)
2018
espanolLa pelicula irani La forastera (Bigāneh, 2014) dirigida por Bahram Tavakoli, es una adaptacion libre de A Streetcar Named Desire, de Tennessee Williams. Tanto la obra como su adaptacion versan sobre la condicion de las mujeres. Pretendemos explorar comparativamente los roles de genero de las mujeres, representados en el drama y en su adaptacion. Tras examinar los roles genericos de las mujeres como esposas, madres y hermanas, se concluye que el director irani ha adaptado exitosamente el personaje de Stella a la cultura irani, como Sepideh. Manteniendo el argumento del texto fuente, ha creado un nuevo personaje que se imbrica en la cultura irani-islamica. En cambio, ha incorporado el personaje de Blanche-Nasrin para contrastar con una mujer ideal en el contexto irani. Nasrin perteneceria mas al mundo de Williams, debido a sus pautas de comportamiento, ajenas a los codigos culturales de Iran, de raiz islamica EnglishThe Iranian movie The Stranger (Bigāneh, 2014), directed by Ba...
TRANS-MEDIATION OF GENDER IN ELIA KAZAN'S ADAPTATION OF A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
Littera Aperta 6 (2018), 63-77, 2018
is among the first directors who adapted Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) for the cinema. Kazan's film adaptation was almost faithful to the original manuscript by sticking to Williams's words and sentences. However, even if one ignores the cultural and historical contexts, the alterations that take place in the process of trans-mediation cannot be disregarded, since the telling mode in the text changes to the showing mode in the media. With this hypothetical basis, the present study aims to detect the possible alterations in the adaptation of the play to examine gender roles in both texts. Using the ideas of Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation (2013), the authors have studied the verbal signs in the play together with the verbal and visual codes in the movie to assess how the film adaptation has incorporated the ideas of femininity, which are the main concerns of the play, too. The results of the study suggest that the alterations from the literary text to film have contributed to the development of female identity.
Deconstructing Gender in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire
International journal of languages and culture, 2022
Tennessee Williams' famous play A Streetcar Named Desire uses a discourse that warrants explication in terms of certain popular parameters of feminist reading. The author's attitude with regard to phallocentric orientation is rather complicated with the discourse used in the play falling into two distinct categories, that is, the dialogues attributed to characters and the stage directions. In fact, just as deconstructing the oppositions helps establish the sexist orientation in the play, defeating the attempts at entitization/totalization in respect of ideas and characterization, the author too develops fractured dimensions in the light of the notion of trace or self-difference.
Understanding the 'Terrible Passions' in A Streetcar Named Desire and Woman's Struggle for Identity
The project of this study is to investigate how the censorship is arrived at in the film adaption of "A Streetcar Named Desire" and see how feminist criticism is related with the debated discussion of gender representation in cinema. The research scrutinizes woman's struggle for identity under the social and historical context in the U. S. as the creation of cultural production is merely for entertainment, and the artistic value appears to be undervalued.
Thinking About the Concept of Social Gender With a Film
Advances in Media, Entertainment, and the Arts, 2020
The concept of social gender is an interdisciplinary matter of debate and is still questioned today. Making sense of this concept is understood by the ongoing codes in the social order. However, the fact that men are still positioned as dominating women in the contrast of the public sphere/private sphere prevents the making sense of the concept of gender. This study questions the concept of social gender through the female characters and male characters presented in the film Tersine Dünya (1993) within the framework of Judith Butler's thoughts regarding the notion of the subject. The thoughts of feminist film theorists also bring the strategies of representation of female characters up for discussion. Butler's thoughts and the discourses of feminist film theorists will enable both making sense of social gender and a more concrete understanding of the concept of the subject. The possibility of deconstruction of patriarchal codes by using classical narrative cinema conventions...
2020
This paper analyses central female characters in Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) and Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). It argues that both Dreiser’s Carrie and Williams’ Blanche are “fallen women” who act and present themselves as someone they are not. It also contends that in their attempt to escape poverty and the miseries of life, bothcharacters are led by strong desires, but that eventually, they attain the opposite from what they hoped for. Even though, unlike Blanche, whose madness and trajectory of decline reveal that she obviously gets punished for her transgressive behaviour, Carrie gets “rewarded” through her social ascent, Dreiser’s heroine is also indirectly punished as she eventually fails to find happiness and her desires remain unfulfilled. Apart from exploring the relation of these texts to their respective socio-historical backgrounds, the analysis also focuses on elements of naturalism – determinism in particular – that shape ...
On the Female Sexual Objectification in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire
Objectification theory, sexual objectification of women, and female self-objectification are new trends in gender studies. When a woman is observed only through her body parts, i.e. as an instrument, she is believed to be sexually objectified. Likewise, when a woman exploits her sexuality, either through wearing revealing clothing or displaying lustful behavior, she is engaged in self-objectification. This paper focuses its attention on the female characters in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire based on the female objectification theory. It examines Blanche's past and present behavior and argues that Blanche has undergone sexual objectification and consequently self-objectification. She unconsciously suffers from psychological repercussions resulting from her objectification, namely, her drinking problem and her immersion in a false sense of reality. Furthermore, this paper narrows its scope of analysis down to Stanley's character as an agent of violence and women subordination and examines his relationship with women objectification.
The concept of social gender is an interdisciplinary matter of debate and is still questioned today. Making sense of this concept is understood by the ongoing codes in the social order. However, the fact that men are still positioned as dominating women in the contrast of the public sphere / private sphere prevents the making sense of the concept of gender. This study questions the concept of social gender through the female characters and male characters presented in the film Tersine Dünya (1993) within the framework of Judith Butler's thoughts regarding the notion of the subject. The thoughts of feminist film theorists also bring the strategies of representation of female characters up for discussion. Butler's thoughts and the discourses of feminist film theorists will enable both making sense of social gender and a more concrete understanding of the concept of the subject. The possibility of deconstruction of patriarchal codes by using classical narrative cinema conventions is also brought up for discussion in the examined film. INTRODUCTION Cinema is one of the strongest among the media tools. Everything presented in the cinema has the power to change the world of spectators. The worldwide spectator prefers to watch mainstream movies. The number of spectators of art films is less than the number of spectators of mainstream films because art films put their audience in an intense process of thinking and do not approve the existing codes. Although the film Tersine Dünya is a mainstream film in Turkish Cinema, it raises many questions that the spectator will query because the film is important in terms of discussing the concept of social gender in Turkish Cinema. For centuries, feminist theorists have discussed the position of women and men in the differentiation of the public sphere and private sphere, and they offer strategies for the change of the male-dominated order. The public space without equality of opportunity also causes inequality of social order. In the public sphere where the discourse of men is considered more important, women are secondary. That is why they are the subordinate ones. These realities are presented to spectators through films. However, the presentation of realities reinforces the continuation of existing rules. It is also necessary to present a world where female characters and male characters are equal in terms of representation strategies in the films and understanding of gender codes in the social order. The spectators are trying to understand life through the films they watch continuously. However, if the films that provide the unknown facts about social gender are produced and if the possibility of a world, where there is equality of opportunity between women and men, is shown then the points of view of individuals on the codes in life will change.
Gender and Perspective in Scarlet Street
Since Stanley Cavell started reading comedies and melodramas from the 30's and 40's, the study of films as sources where traditional philosophical subjects are explored has become a fever in the U.S and in Europe. These genres helped Cavell scrutinize relations of recognition and avoidance between couples and, in a wider perspective, expressions of skepticism about other minds. In this paper I would like to follow Pippin in his convictions about film-noir. He groups these films as a genre in its own right and reads them as expressions of philosophical investigations. Of course, film as a source of philosophical reflection has some differences in comparison to the traditional textual form, for when reading films we are introduced to a world that sometimes philosophical texts hide for historical reasons, to a context richer in details than philosophers usually present in their examples, and to characters whose psychological complexity is more troubling than the commonly used first person point of view. Although film's fantasy world is somehow dependent on the mise en scène, the studio technology, editing and some director's choices, there should be some common features in both philosophical texts and films that produce in the audience the capacity to experience a sort of reflection upon human problems. Also, we must acknowledge that there are a few pieces of information a text is unable to convey.-Textual form is cognitively different from audiovisual form-the main difference is that philosophical texts usually work using conceptual edifications, arguments and more rigid linguistic constructions, while films develop narratives and touch our more spontaneous visual and emotional capacities. So acknowledging some differences and following these steps, my first task in this paper is just to show how Cavell's philosophical project echoes through other film genres. I hope my analysis of Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street-a forbidden film of 1945 due to its violence and picturing of a failing justice-can convince my readers that film-noir is a genre that is the perfect soil for some specific seeds blooming, where the fusion of elements can help us to understand not only skepticism, but also the constitution of gender identity.