Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls

Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century

Edited by Murray Pomerance

Subjects: Cultural Studies
Series: SUNY series, Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video
Paperback : 9780791448861, 365 pages, March 2001
Hardcover : 9780791448854, 365 pages, March 2001

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

1. Introduction: Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century
Murray Pomerance

PART I. Screened Gender beyond the Hollywood Hills

2. No Safe Place: Gender and Space in Polanski's Recent Films
Steven Woodward

3. Veiled Voice and Vision in Iranian Cinema: The Evolution of Rakhshan Banietmad's Films
Hamid Naficy

4. Boy-Girls: Gender, Body, and Popular Culture in Hong Kong Action Movies
Lenuta Giukin

5. The Gender of GenerAsian X in Clara Law's Migration Trilogy
Gina Marchetti

PART II. Genders and Doings

6. Eating and Drinking, Men and Women
Rebecca Bell-Metereau

7. Boys Will Be Boys: David Cronenberg's Crash Course in HeavyMettle
Murray Forman

8. The Wabbit We-negotiates: Looney Tunes in a Conglomerate Age
Kevin S. Sandler

9. "Real Men Don't Sing and Dance": Growing Up Male with the Hollywood Musical--A Memoir
Garth Jowett

10. Cruise-ing into the Millennium: Performative Masculinity, Stardom, and the All-American Boy's Body
Gaylyn Studlar

11. Strange Days: Gender and Ideology in New Genre Films
Barry Keith Grant

PART III. Paragons and Pariahs

12. She-Devils on Wheels: Women, Motorcycles, and Movies
Frances Gateward

13. Howard's First Kiss: Sissies and Gender Police in the "New" Old Hollywood
John Sakeris

14. Hipsters and Nerds: Black Jazz Artists and Their White Shadows
Krin Gabbard

15. "Let's Keep Goin'!": On the Road with Louise and Thelma
Janice R. Welsch

16. Jews in Space: The "Ordeal of Masculinity" in Contemporary American Film and Television
David Desser

17. Gender and Other Transcendences: William Blake as Johnny Depp
Michael DeAngelis

18. Marion Crane Dies Twice
Murray Pomerance

List of Contributors

Index

Examines gender roles in contemporary foreign and Hollywood films amid changing social, political, cultural, and economic conditions.

Description

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls examines the bizarre and fascinating range of gender portrayals in film at the end of the twentieth century. In order to view the screened face of gender in bold new ways, the contributors cover a wide variety of cinematic forms and styles—from the boy-girls of Hong Kong cinema to the on-screen modesty of post-revolutionary Iran to the New Hollywood's treatment of homosexuality, female power, and male intellectuality. Throughout, the works of important filmmakers are analyzed, including Ridley Scott, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Woody Allen, Rakhshan Banietemad, Kathryn Bigelow, Bertrand Tavernier, Roman Polanski, and many others.

Murray Pomerance is Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson Polytechnic University, and the author of Magia D'AmoreBang Bang, Shoot Shoot! Essays on Guns and Popular Culture.

Reviews

"This book addresses a significant aspect of film studies and cultural studies today, namely, how gender is both represented and reconfigured in the artifacts of mass culture. In a myriad of ways, it builds on the important feminist criticism of the seventies and eighties, while at the same time reflecting the overall broadening of focus that occurred in the nineties—away from strictly psychoanalytic approaches and toward a more wide-ranging variety of both formal and sociological concerns. " — Steven Shaviro, author of The Cinematic Body

"From the first words of Pomerance's introduction to his clinching essay on the fortunes of Psycho, this book reads with foe and wit. It speaks not only to issues of gender or sexuality, but more directly—and compellingly—to the present state of cinema in a phase of globalization. " — Tom Conley, Harvard University