1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910821485703321

Autore

Hagelin Sarah

Titolo

Reel vulnerability : power, pain, and gender in contemporary American film and television / / Sarah Hagelin

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Brunswick, New Jersey : , : Rutgers University Press, , [2013]

©2013

ISBN

0-8135-6105-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (226 p.)

Disciplina

791.43/655

Soggetti

Vulnerability (Personality trait) in motion pictures

Power (Social sciences) in motion pictures

Pain in motion pictures

Sex role in motion pictures

Motion pictures - United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Unmaking vulnerability -- part 1. -- The cinematic construction of vulnerability -- The furies, the men, and the method: cinematic languages of vulnerability -- Victimized, violent and damned: identification and radical vulnerability in The deer hunter, Full metal jacket, and Casualties of war -- part 2. -- New vulnerability after The Cold War -- The body at war: sexual politics and resistant vulnerability in Saving Private Ryan and G.I. Jane -- Matthew Shepard's body and the politics of queer vulnerability in Boys don't cry and The Laramie Project -- part 3. -- Vulnerability beyond the body -- The violated body after 9/11: torture, and the legacy of vulnerability in 24 and Battlestar Galactica -- Vulnerability by proxy: Deadwood and the future of television form -- Afterword -- Female power and Tarantino's basterds.

Sommario/riassunto

Wonder women, G.I. Janes, and vampire slayers increasingly populate the American cultural landscape. What do these figures mean in the American cultural imagination? What can they tell us about the female body in action or in pain? Reel Vulnerability explores the way American popular culture thinks about vulnerability, arguing that our culture and



our scholarship remain stubbornly invested in the myth of the helplessness of the female body. The book examines the shifting constructions of vulnerability in the wake of the cultural upheavals of World War II, the Cold War, and 9/11, placing defenseless male bodies onscreen alongside representations of the female body in the military, in the interrogation room, and on the margins. Sarah Hagelin challenges the ways film theory and cultural studies confuse vulnerability and femaleness. Such films as G.I. Jane and Saving Private Ryan, as well as such post-9/11 television shows as Battlestar Galactica and Deadwood, present vulnerable men who demand our sympathy, abused women who don't want our pity, and images of the body in pain that do not portray weakness. Hagelin's intent is to help scholarship catch up to the new iconographies emerging in theaters and in living rooms-images that offer viewers reactions to the suffering body beyond pity, identification with the bleeding body beyond masochism, and feminist images of the female body where we least expect to find them.