Distancing Representations in Transgender Film: Identification, Affect, and the Audience PDF Download

Author: Lucy J. Miller
Publisher: Suny Series, Horizons of Cinem
ISBN: 9781438491998
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Argues that transgender representations in film make it more difficult for cisgender people to understand the experiences of transgender people and for transgender people to fully participate in public life.

Author: Lucy J. Miller
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438492014
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Distancing Representations in Transgender Film explores the representation of transgender identity in several important cinema genres: comedies, horror films, suspense thrillers, and dramas. In a critique that is both deeply personal and theoretically sophisticated, Lucy J. Miller examines how these representations are often narratively and visually constructed to prompt emotions of ridicule, fear, disgust, and sympathy from a cisgender audience. Created by and for cisgender people, these films do not accurately represent transgender people's experiences, and the emotions they inspire serve to distance cisgender audience members from the transgender people they encounter in their day-to-day lives. By helping to increase the distance between cisgender and transgender people, Miller argues, these films make it more difficult for cisgender people to understand the experiences of transgender people and for transgender people to fully participate in public life. The book concludes with suggestions for improving transgender representation in film.

Author: Jeremy Russell Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Transgender representations generally distance the transgender characters from the audience as objects of ridicule, fear, and sympathy. This distancing is accomplished through the use of specific narrative conventions and visual codes. In this dissertation, I analyze representations of transgender individuals in popular film comedies, thrillers, and independent dramas. Through a textual analysis of 24 films, I argue that the narrative conventions and visual codes of the films work to prevent identification or connection between the transgender characters and the audience. The purpose of this distancing is to privilege the heteronormative identities of the characters over their transgender identities. This dissertation is grounded in a cultural studies approach to representation as constitutive and constraining and a positional approach to gender that views gender identity as a position taken in a specific social context. Contributions are made to the fields of communication, film studies, and gender studies through the methodological approach to textual analysis of categories of films over individual case studies and the idea that individuals can be positioned in identities they do not actively claim for themselves. This dissertation also makes a significant contribution to conceptions of the gaze through the development of three transgender gazes that focus on the ways the characters are visually constructed rather than the viewpoints taken by audience members. In the end, transgender representations work to support heteronormativity by constructing the transgender characters in specific ways to prevent audience members from developing deeper connections with them.

Author: Traci B. Abbott
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030977935
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Due to the increase in transgender characters in scripted television and film in the 2010s, trans visibility has been presented as a relatively new phenomenon that has positively shifted the cis society’s acceptance of the trans community. This book counters this claim to assert that such representations actually present limited and harmful characterizations, as they have for decades. To do so, this book analyzes transgender narratives in scripted visual media from the 1960s to 2010s across a variety of genres, including independent and mainstream films and television dramatic series and sitcoms, judging not the veracity of such representations per se but dissecting their transphobia as a constant despite relevant shifts that have improved their veracity and variety. Already ingrained with their own ideological expectations, genres shift the framing of the trans character, particularly the relevance of their gender difference for cisgender characters and society. The popularity of trans characters within certain genres also provides a historical lineage that is examined against the progression of transgender rights activism and corresponding transphobic falsehoods, concluding that this popular medium continues to offer a limited and narrow conception of gender, the variability of the transgender experience, and the range of transgender identities.

Author: Jamie C. Capuzza
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498500064
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories brings scholarship in transgender studies to the forefront of the communication discipline. Leland Spencer and Jamie Capuzza provide a broad foundation that documents the evolution of transgender communication studies and challenges fundamental assumptions about the relationship between communication and identity. The contributors explore the political conditions these practices create for persons across the spectrum of gender identities and sexual orientations, placing them in the subdisciplines of human communication, media, and public and rhetorical communication. The collection also looks to the future of transgender research with suggestions and directives for continued work. This comprehensive study inspires critical thinking about gender identity and transgender lives from within the vocabularies and methodologies of communication studies.

Author: Leandra H Hernandez
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781433170324
Category : Gender nonconformity on television
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book investigates how contemporary media represent transgender and gender non-conforming people. Authors in this edited collection analyze the most popular films and television shows of all times and find how much (and how little) media portrayals of trans folks have changed or remained stagnant in the past 20 years.

Author: Seth Barry Watter
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438495102
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The Human Figure on Film asks what it is we look for when we look at human beings projected on a screen. People have appeared onscreen since film was invented. Nothing could be more common, and yet nothing confounds us more, than a filmed human being. Scholars and critics have attempted to reduce the mystery, creating methodologies that make this figure legible. Some of their efforts form the subject of this book. Each chapter is devoted to a single, central concept—the natural, the pictorial, the institutional, and the fictional—that viewers have used to make sense of what they see. Each concept, in turn, is tied to the work and methods of a particular kind of historical observer: the natural historian (Ray L. Birdwhistell), the aesthete or pictorialist (Victor O. Freeburg), the anthropologist of institutions (Hortense Powdermaker), and the critic of fiction (V. F. Perkins). All of these researchers have their own interests and criteria of understanding, ranging from a microscopic look at gestures to a broad view of characters. Using a combination of critical history, biography, and formal analysis, The Human Figure on Film offers a fresh approach to the problem of figuration in an age of digital cinema. It is, at once, a cross-section of the field of film studies, a handbook of methods, and an inquiry into the nature of inquiry itself.

Author: Hannah Holtzman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438497857
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The Franco-Japanese coproduction Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is one of the most important films for global art cinema and for the French New Wave. In Through a Nuclear Lens, Hannah Holtzman examines this film and the transnational cycle it has inspired, as well as its legacy after the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. In a study that includes formal and theoretical analysis, archival research, and interviews, Holtzman shows the emergence of a new kind of nuclear film, one that attends to the everyday effects of nuclear disaster and its impact on our experience of space and time. The focus on Franco-Japanese exchange in cinema since the postwar period reveals a reorientation of the primarily aesthetic preoccupations in the tradition of Japonisme to center around technological and environmental concerns. The book demonstrates how French filmmakers, ever since Hiroshima mon amour, have looked to Japan in part to better understand nuclear uncertainty in France.

Author: Matthew Cipa
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438497369
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Is Harpo Free? is a lively appreciation of film and television's ability to artistically explore concepts typical of philosophical metaphysics, such as free will, causality, and personal identity. Rather than using films and television programs as vehicles for philosophical arguments, the book instead celebrates the artistic ways in which they give life to various metaphysical concepts and how the artistic expression of these concepts and ideas helps us understand ourselves, the world, and our place within it. Through close analysis of a varied selection of works and their use of narrative, form, and style, Is Harpo Free? exemplifies a novel approach to appreciating the philosophical substance of films and television programs. Films and television programs discussed include A Night at the Opera; Run, Lola, Run; Shane; Harvey; Three Colours: Blue; The Americans; Dark; and Fargo.

Author: Daniel Varndell
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438493495
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
"Etiquette," as noted toastmaster Herbert V. Prochnow once pointed out, "is knowing how to yawn with your mouth closed"—that is, to spare the feelings of the other person, one must stifle one's own. To be polite, therefore, is to perform. Onscreen, closeups often reveal the effort that goes into maintaining that performance: with a fleeting frown or a slight scowl, an actor reveals the "torture" of mannered behavior. In Torturous Etiquettes, Daniel Varndell examines such gestures to reveal the difficulties of the social encounter. Drawing on the history of etiquette, the book deconstructs an array of examples from classical and contemporary Hollywood and European cinema, taking a close look at onscreen representations of rudeness, ridiculing, racist and sexist etiquettes, hospitality, table manners, and more. In doing so, it reveals etiquette to be a persistent theme in cinema and questions the role it plays in either upholding or denying the basic humanity of others.