Fullmoonblue Too (the Comp Lit zone)
DiscussieClub Read 2009
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1Fullmoonblue
Okay. I want to buckle down on school-related reading and writing during the second part of 2009. This needs to happen, as I've got three papers to write, a comprehensive exam to take asap (before the end of this year, I hope) and a dissertation to produce. So I've decided to begin a space as a place for notes specifically related to my pursuit of a doctorate in Comparative Literature. (shudder)
Why the fear? Well. Probably because it's nearing five years since I started my grad school journey. And I'm now living a 14-hour drive from my school/profs, so keeping myself on target needs to be a very personal project.
Hopefully, since I'm used to writing about my reading in Club Red already, keeping notes and journaling ideas here will feel natural.
I'll probably keep using the older thread (entitled simply 'Fullmoonblue') to log other reading.
So anyway -- best wishes to all reading,
E
Why the fear? Well. Probably because it's nearing five years since I started my grad school journey. And I'm now living a 14-hour drive from my school/profs, so keeping myself on target needs to be a very personal project.
Hopefully, since I'm used to writing about my reading in Club Red already, keeping notes and journaling ideas here will feel natural.
I'll probably keep using the older thread (entitled simply 'Fullmoonblue') to log other reading.
So anyway -- best wishes to all reading,
E
2Fullmoonblue
Project: finishing a paper involving film theory
Idea: Can I find a way to connect Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' (1958) and the late 1980s documentary of gay ball culture, 'Paris is Burning'...?
The two films have next to nothing in common in some ways. But I've always gotten the feeling that they'd work beautifully in conversation. Both involve the construction of idealized feminine figures, gender identity and anxiety, observation, representation... lots of good stuff
So. I've read a couple of books, such as Truffaut's Hitchcock, and some essays from A Hitchcock Reader (eds Deutelbaum and Poague). But I still need to get through Tania Modleski's The Women Who Knew Too Much, and I also want to feel more confident in my grasp of points raised by Laura Mulvey ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema") and Judith Butler (Gender Trouble and "Imitation and Gender Insubordination").
I've got assorted notes on the Mulvey and Butler, but haven't yet read Modleski, so here goes nothing...
Idea: Can I find a way to connect Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' (1958) and the late 1980s documentary of gay ball culture, 'Paris is Burning'...?
The two films have next to nothing in common in some ways. But I've always gotten the feeling that they'd work beautifully in conversation. Both involve the construction of idealized feminine figures, gender identity and anxiety, observation, representation... lots of good stuff
So. I've read a couple of books, such as Truffaut's Hitchcock, and some essays from A Hitchcock Reader (eds Deutelbaum and Poague). But I still need to get through Tania Modleski's The Women Who Knew Too Much, and I also want to feel more confident in my grasp of points raised by Laura Mulvey ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema") and Judith Butler (Gender Trouble and "Imitation and Gender Insubordination").
I've got assorted notes on the Mulvey and Butler, but haven't yet read Modleski, so here goes nothing...
3Fullmoonblue
Tania Modleski, Intro to The Women Who Knew Too Much
---
Introduction: I. Feminist Film Theory
Opens with reference to Laura Mulvey, and Modleski's belief "that the representation of women in film is more complicated than Mulvey's article allows" (2). Explains how her own work, along with Teresa de Laurentis's, helped to develop "a theory of the female spectator":
"According to de Laurentis, identification on the part of women at the cinema is much more complicated than feminist theory has understood: far from being simply masochistic, the female spectator is always caught up in a double desire, identifying at one and the same time not only with the passive (female) object, but with the active (usually male) subject." (2)
Modleski then identifies one of her own theses: "that time and again in Hitchcock films, the strong fascination and identification with femininity revealed in them subverts the claims to mastery and authority not only of the main characters but of the director himself" (3).
II. The Female Spectator
"As the figure of Norman Bates suggests, what both male and female spectators are likely to see in the mirror of Hitchcock's films are images of ambiguous sexuality that threaten to destabilize the gender identity of protagonists and viewers alike" (5).
{PARIS connection}
In Vertigo, the viewer is prepped from the start to question Madeleine's identity/stability, and to feel "a strong sense of identification with the (m)other" -- in this case, Carlotta Valdes. {Note: when Madeleine dies and Scottie has his breakdown, Hitchcock switches it up so that the viewer questions Scottie instead -- has he gone insane? Our ambivalence about Scottie's identity/stability is primed to be heightened when we see his treatment of Judy.}
Modleski explains how this manipulation of audience identification relates to the theory of the bisexuality of the female spectator: that the "double desire" theorized by de Laurentis posits a female spectator whose desire "is both passive and active, homosexual and heterosexual" (6). "Given Hitchcock's preoccupation with female bisexuality and given his famed ability to draw us into close identification with his characters," she continues, "his work would seem to provide the perfect ground for theories of female spectatorship" (8).
Modleski: "I want to suggest that a woman's bisexual nature, rooted in preoedipality, and her consequent alleged tendency to overidentify with other women and with texts {eg soap operas, chick flicks, the Lifetime channel}, is less a problem for women...than it is for patriarchy" (8). And WHY? Not merely because it would make women competitors for other women's attentions, but "because it reminds a man of his own bisexuality" (8).
{BECAUSE IT REMINDS A MAN OF HIS OWN BISEXUALITY: connect to Butler -- check, does Modleski? -- and to Paris is Burning}
Modleski, still page 8: "I will demonstrate how men's fascination and identification with the feminine continually undermine their efforts to achieve masculine strength and autonomy and is a primary cause of the violence toward women that abounds in Hitchcock's films." She thinks that it's important to explore the weaknesses and contradictions of patriarchal systems, since doing so keeps Patriarchy from appearing to be too Powerful, which can leave its critics feeling oppressed and nihilistic. Picking at problems, she notes, opens up avenues for action; it was a weakness of Mulvey that "her picture of male cinema was so monolithic that she made it seem invincible" (9). And what's intriguing about Hitchcock, she adds, is how his works CONTRAST with typical Hollywood cinema of the time. Hitchcock wasn't some simple misogynist; his films contain numerous "self-reflexive critiques of voyeurism and visual pleasure" (14).
---
In short -- looking ahead, I ought to be able to tie Modleski's interests (particularly her assertion that we'll have fewer Norman Bateses in the world when people, male and female, can deal with the "woman's voice" inside our heads (15)) with Butler's work on gender and with Paris is Burning.
---
Introduction: I. Feminist Film Theory
Opens with reference to Laura Mulvey, and Modleski's belief "that the representation of women in film is more complicated than Mulvey's article allows" (2). Explains how her own work, along with Teresa de Laurentis's, helped to develop "a theory of the female spectator":
"According to de Laurentis, identification on the part of women at the cinema is much more complicated than feminist theory has understood: far from being simply masochistic, the female spectator is always caught up in a double desire, identifying at one and the same time not only with the passive (female) object, but with the active (usually male) subject." (2)
Modleski then identifies one of her own theses: "that time and again in Hitchcock films, the strong fascination and identification with femininity revealed in them subverts the claims to mastery and authority not only of the main characters but of the director himself" (3).
II. The Female Spectator
"As the figure of Norman Bates suggests, what both male and female spectators are likely to see in the mirror of Hitchcock's films are images of ambiguous sexuality that threaten to destabilize the gender identity of protagonists and viewers alike" (5).
{PARIS connection}
In Vertigo, the viewer is prepped from the start to question Madeleine's identity/stability, and to feel "a strong sense of identification with the (m)other" -- in this case, Carlotta Valdes. {Note: when Madeleine dies and Scottie has his breakdown, Hitchcock switches it up so that the viewer questions Scottie instead -- has he gone insane? Our ambivalence about Scottie's identity/stability is primed to be heightened when we see his treatment of Judy.}
Modleski explains how this manipulation of audience identification relates to the theory of the bisexuality of the female spectator: that the "double desire" theorized by de Laurentis posits a female spectator whose desire "is both passive and active, homosexual and heterosexual" (6). "Given Hitchcock's preoccupation with female bisexuality and given his famed ability to draw us into close identification with his characters," she continues, "his work would seem to provide the perfect ground for theories of female spectatorship" (8).
Modleski: "I want to suggest that a woman's bisexual nature, rooted in preoedipality, and her consequent alleged tendency to overidentify with other women and with texts {eg soap operas, chick flicks, the Lifetime channel}, is less a problem for women...than it is for patriarchy" (8). And WHY? Not merely because it would make women competitors for other women's attentions, but "because it reminds a man of his own bisexuality" (8).
{BECAUSE IT REMINDS A MAN OF HIS OWN BISEXUALITY: connect to Butler -- check, does Modleski? -- and to Paris is Burning}
Modleski, still page 8: "I will demonstrate how men's fascination and identification with the feminine continually undermine their efforts to achieve masculine strength and autonomy and is a primary cause of the violence toward women that abounds in Hitchcock's films." She thinks that it's important to explore the weaknesses and contradictions of patriarchal systems, since doing so keeps Patriarchy from appearing to be too Powerful, which can leave its critics feeling oppressed and nihilistic. Picking at problems, she notes, opens up avenues for action; it was a weakness of Mulvey that "her picture of male cinema was so monolithic that she made it seem invincible" (9). And what's intriguing about Hitchcock, she adds, is how his works CONTRAST with typical Hollywood cinema of the time. Hitchcock wasn't some simple misogynist; his films contain numerous "self-reflexive critiques of voyeurism and visual pleasure" (14).
---
In short -- looking ahead, I ought to be able to tie Modleski's interests (particularly her assertion that we'll have fewer Norman Bateses in the world when people, male and female, can deal with the "woman's voice" inside our heads (15)) with Butler's work on gender and with Paris is Burning.
4Fullmoonblue
Modleski on Vertigo: "Femininity By Design"
---
Her stance is that theorists have too often approached Hitchcock's work, and the questions it raises about spectatorship and identification, too simply (87). But in films like Rear Window and Vertigo, Modleski says, the male spectator "is as much 'deconstructed' as constructed," and the films reveal "a fascination with femininity that throws masculine identity into question and crisis" (87). She summarizes Vertigo. Then she drops a great paragraph:
"If in Rear Window, the hero continually expresses a masculine contempt for the feminine world of fashion (while the film itself exhibits and elicits a near obsessional interest in what Grace Kelly is wearing), this is hardly the case with Vertigo's hero, Scottie. In attempting to re-create Judy as Madeleine, Scottie displays the most minute knowledge of women's clothing, to the point where the saleswoman twice remarks on how well the gentleman knows what he wants. To reinvoke the metaphor central to my analysis of Rear Window, the female character, Madeleine/Judy, is like a living doll whom the character strips and makes over according to his ideal image." (90)
The way that the director -- and the spectator -- seem primed to engage with this dressing up is a key issue to consider in terms of Paris is Burning...
"Ideed," Modleski goes on, "it might be said that the film's preoccupation with female clothing borders on the perverse" (90). This preoccupation is borne out by Midge's brassieres, Scottie's "corset", etc... "It is as if at this early moment in Vertigo, the film is humorously suggesting THAT FEMININITY IN OUR CULTURE IS LARGELY A MALE CONSTRUCT..." (91)
To be continued.
---
Her stance is that theorists have too often approached Hitchcock's work, and the questions it raises about spectatorship and identification, too simply (87). But in films like Rear Window and Vertigo, Modleski says, the male spectator "is as much 'deconstructed' as constructed," and the films reveal "a fascination with femininity that throws masculine identity into question and crisis" (87). She summarizes Vertigo. Then she drops a great paragraph:
"If in Rear Window, the hero continually expresses a masculine contempt for the feminine world of fashion (while the film itself exhibits and elicits a near obsessional interest in what Grace Kelly is wearing), this is hardly the case with Vertigo's hero, Scottie. In attempting to re-create Judy as Madeleine, Scottie displays the most minute knowledge of women's clothing, to the point where the saleswoman twice remarks on how well the gentleman knows what he wants. To reinvoke the metaphor central to my analysis of Rear Window, the female character, Madeleine/Judy, is like a living doll whom the character strips and makes over according to his ideal image." (90)
The way that the director -- and the spectator -- seem primed to engage with this dressing up is a key issue to consider in terms of Paris is Burning...
"Ideed," Modleski goes on, "it might be said that the film's preoccupation with female clothing borders on the perverse" (90). This preoccupation is borne out by Midge's brassieres, Scottie's "corset", etc... "It is as if at this early moment in Vertigo, the film is humorously suggesting THAT FEMININITY IN OUR CULTURE IS LARGELY A MALE CONSTRUCT..." (91)
To be continued.
6Fullmoonblue
Thanks, Lois. Makes me smile that you'd say so. :)
There was always so much tension about being watched wrapped up in grad school coursework for me. Now that I've got the physical distance, I want to try to create an emotional one too. Hopefully removing some of the secrecy will diffuse the sense of isolation and spur me to work more confidently, concisely, and consistently...
Here's to hoping!
---
Modleski, "Femininity by Design" cont.
The emphasis on fashion, identity construction and representation could connect Vertigo to Paris is Burning. (Clothes 'make' the man/woman. You're giving the viewer what he wants to see, making your image perfect as they say in PiB.) This project is both a building up and a stripping off: building up layers of clothing, make-up and mannerisms, and removing any 'flaws', from body hair to body parts, if they might detract from the intended effect and give away the 'original' body beneath.
Two images hint at a playful critique: Midge painting her own face atop Carlotta's portrait in Vertigo, and Willi Ninja turning the mimed compact back on the viewer in PiB.
In Vertigo, as Modleski notes, the mirror is turned back on the audience early on: Scottie follows Madeleine into a flower shop and, while he watches her covertly, she turns to face him. For a split second, it seems that she (and we) will see him (and us?) watching her. But there's a mirror on the back of the door Scottie's hiding behind so that, when Madeleine turns and "we expect the reverse shot to show that, as is usual in classical cinema, the man is in visual possession of the woman," instead we see Madeleine's reflection suddenly facing us: the audience becomes the mirror, or even "by implication" the reflection (Spoto, qtd 92). The image and audience meet through a portal that's both mirror and door. Madeleine Elster is M.E. (93), as well as an idealized eternal feminine, and a counterfeit, and Judy, and an actress named Kim Novak.
Modleski suggests that confusion over identity and identification are central to Scottie's struggles. He wants to help Madeleine, and also increasingly wishes to reach and take hold of the object of his obsess/affect-ion. He wants consummation, to merge with her. But chasing after Madeleine only leads him back to himself. One day, following her even takes him on a wild goose chase back to his own apartment. And losing her halfway through the film brings on a mental breakdown and nightmare during which Scottie actually lives out her own nightmare -- wandering toward an open grave, falling from a bell tower. His identity becomes entwined with Madeleine's, and even takes on aspects of "the mad Carlotta," the lover abandoned and left to search endlessly for someone lost forever (96).
His attempts at rationality, and efforts to deal with the world like the "smart young lawyer" he once was, fail. Instead, he's "plunged into the 'feminine' world of psychic disintegration, madness, and death. Even the form of the dream, which is off-putting to many viewers because it is so 'phoney,' suggests the failure of the 'real' that we have seen to be the stake of Scottie's confrontation with Woman," Modleski writes. Thus his desire to merge with a woman who doesn't exist brings him to the point of self-annihiliation (94), which itself recalls his problem with vertigo, a condition that's as much a fixation on falling as a fear of it. The sufferer falls prey to his own inability to tear his eyes from the chasms that open up below. Once Scottie looks, he sees that it's nothing but distortion all the way down. {No original gender, just copies of copies.}
Also. Scottie's anxiety about heights is intimately bound up with feelings of helplessness, impotence, and loss of control. The audience knows via point of view shots that tall buildings, with all their phallic connotations, have become too threatening for Scottie. Even Coit Tower, the landmark that anchors his neighborhood, benefits him only insofar as it leads Madeleine to his apartment. Unable to function in the masculine realm of skyscrapers and desks he once knew, Scottie is left to wander the shadowy twilight zone at the base of the redwood trees, at ground level with the likes of Carlotta, Judy and Madeleine. The 'power and freedom' enjoyed by men like Gavin Elster are part of a world towering out of his reach. Like the women, Scottie's condition estranges him from the men who the film shows controlling the realms of business, police work, and the courts. He is physically and psychologically/emotionally damaged goods.
The lone female character who is shown moving between the two spheres is Scottie's ex, Midge. Although typically shown surrounded by fashion sketches, flowers and soft music, Hitchcock makes it clear that this maternal pal is highly cognizant of the delicate high wire act required of women who hope to cross gendered lines. From her job sketching brassiere designed by an aircraft engineer, to her ability to access books and history via a man she calls Pop, Midge's character is presented as a pragmatic and worldly alternative to Madeleine's role as a pampered, pet-like wife. {Note: Midge's pragmatism would seem to be taken to a more "animal-like" extreme in Judy Barton, the jaded shopgirl who instrumentalizes her body so effectively that a bra isn't even necessary (she doesn't wear one -- Truffaut 188). Her efforts are counter-productive after a point, though; she is alienated from her parents, "ditched" by Elster, and used to being "picked up" by men. Midge, with the studied modesty and respectability of the mother-figure, appears to enjoy far more social capital than the fallen woman, Judy.}
Other items about Midge:
-- She wears glasses. (A significant thing for Hitchcock, and in terms of Vertigo?)
-- Scottie is disturbed and offended when Midge paints herself in Carlotta's garb. In Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games, Thomas Leitch suggests that this is a case of Midge playfully "offering herself as a romantic object" to Scottie and implying "that any woman can be idealized" (203). We could also see it as Midge admitting to Scottie that she's willing to compete for his attention (raising Scottie's anxiety about the notion that Carlotta may be fighting for Madeleine's). But while Scottie can unabashedly cry out to Judy that particulars of her physical appearance "can't matter to you!" when he wants to remake her as Madeleine, he is obviously shaken when Midge's painting of herself as Carlotta makes a similar suggestion.
-- Midge wears a grey suit jacket almost identical to Madeleine's at one point... but it doesn't seem to make Scottie want to spend any extra time with her.
-- The sketches shown on her apartment walls are not only female figures. There's a man in uniform visible in one. {Connectable to uniforms in PiB?}
-- Midge at the sanatorium: says "Mother is here!" and that she hopes Mozart will help "sweep the cobwebs away." Oh so motherly. And then she leaves with an odd statement whispered to the nonresponsive Scottie: "You don't even know that I'm here... but I'm here." (This seems totally ripe for connection to psychoanalytic theory stuff. Not my favorite kind of point, but maybe it could be linked to something in Freud and/or Butler etc.)
There was always so much tension about being watched wrapped up in grad school coursework for me. Now that I've got the physical distance, I want to try to create an emotional one too. Hopefully removing some of the secrecy will diffuse the sense of isolation and spur me to work more confidently, concisely, and consistently...
Here's to hoping!
---
Modleski, "Femininity by Design" cont.
The emphasis on fashion, identity construction and representation could connect Vertigo to Paris is Burning. (Clothes 'make' the man/woman. You're giving the viewer what he wants to see, making your image perfect as they say in PiB.) This project is both a building up and a stripping off: building up layers of clothing, make-up and mannerisms, and removing any 'flaws', from body hair to body parts, if they might detract from the intended effect and give away the 'original' body beneath.
Two images hint at a playful critique: Midge painting her own face atop Carlotta's portrait in Vertigo, and Willi Ninja turning the mimed compact back on the viewer in PiB.
In Vertigo, as Modleski notes, the mirror is turned back on the audience early on: Scottie follows Madeleine into a flower shop and, while he watches her covertly, she turns to face him. For a split second, it seems that she (and we) will see him (and us?) watching her. But there's a mirror on the back of the door Scottie's hiding behind so that, when Madeleine turns and "we expect the reverse shot to show that, as is usual in classical cinema, the man is in visual possession of the woman," instead we see Madeleine's reflection suddenly facing us: the audience becomes the mirror, or even "by implication" the reflection (Spoto, qtd 92). The image and audience meet through a portal that's both mirror and door. Madeleine Elster is M.E. (93), as well as an idealized eternal feminine, and a counterfeit, and Judy, and an actress named Kim Novak.
Modleski suggests that confusion over identity and identification are central to Scottie's struggles. He wants to help Madeleine, and also increasingly wishes to reach and take hold of the object of his obsess/affect-ion. He wants consummation, to merge with her. But chasing after Madeleine only leads him back to himself. One day, following her even takes him on a wild goose chase back to his own apartment. And losing her halfway through the film brings on a mental breakdown and nightmare during which Scottie actually lives out her own nightmare -- wandering toward an open grave, falling from a bell tower. His identity becomes entwined with Madeleine's, and even takes on aspects of "the mad Carlotta," the lover abandoned and left to search endlessly for someone lost forever (96).
His attempts at rationality, and efforts to deal with the world like the "smart young lawyer" he once was, fail. Instead, he's "plunged into the 'feminine' world of psychic disintegration, madness, and death. Even the form of the dream, which is off-putting to many viewers because it is so 'phoney,' suggests the failure of the 'real' that we have seen to be the stake of Scottie's confrontation with Woman," Modleski writes. Thus his desire to merge with a woman who doesn't exist brings him to the point of self-annihiliation (94), which itself recalls his problem with vertigo, a condition that's as much a fixation on falling as a fear of it. The sufferer falls prey to his own inability to tear his eyes from the chasms that open up below. Once Scottie looks, he sees that it's nothing but distortion all the way down. {No original gender, just copies of copies.}
Also. Scottie's anxiety about heights is intimately bound up with feelings of helplessness, impotence, and loss of control. The audience knows via point of view shots that tall buildings, with all their phallic connotations, have become too threatening for Scottie. Even Coit Tower, the landmark that anchors his neighborhood, benefits him only insofar as it leads Madeleine to his apartment. Unable to function in the masculine realm of skyscrapers and desks he once knew, Scottie is left to wander the shadowy twilight zone at the base of the redwood trees, at ground level with the likes of Carlotta, Judy and Madeleine. The 'power and freedom' enjoyed by men like Gavin Elster are part of a world towering out of his reach. Like the women, Scottie's condition estranges him from the men who the film shows controlling the realms of business, police work, and the courts. He is physically and psychologically/emotionally damaged goods.
The lone female character who is shown moving between the two spheres is Scottie's ex, Midge. Although typically shown surrounded by fashion sketches, flowers and soft music, Hitchcock makes it clear that this maternal pal is highly cognizant of the delicate high wire act required of women who hope to cross gendered lines. From her job sketching brassiere designed by an aircraft engineer, to her ability to access books and history via a man she calls Pop, Midge's character is presented as a pragmatic and worldly alternative to Madeleine's role as a pampered, pet-like wife. {Note: Midge's pragmatism would seem to be taken to a more "animal-like" extreme in Judy Barton, the jaded shopgirl who instrumentalizes her body so effectively that a bra isn't even necessary (she doesn't wear one -- Truffaut 188). Her efforts are counter-productive after a point, though; she is alienated from her parents, "ditched" by Elster, and used to being "picked up" by men. Midge, with the studied modesty and respectability of the mother-figure, appears to enjoy far more social capital than the fallen woman, Judy.}
Other items about Midge:
-- She wears glasses. (A significant thing for Hitchcock, and in terms of Vertigo?)
-- Scottie is disturbed and offended when Midge paints herself in Carlotta's garb. In Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games, Thomas Leitch suggests that this is a case of Midge playfully "offering herself as a romantic object" to Scottie and implying "that any woman can be idealized" (203). We could also see it as Midge admitting to Scottie that she's willing to compete for his attention (raising Scottie's anxiety about the notion that Carlotta may be fighting for Madeleine's). But while Scottie can unabashedly cry out to Judy that particulars of her physical appearance "can't matter to you!" when he wants to remake her as Madeleine, he is obviously shaken when Midge's painting of herself as Carlotta makes a similar suggestion.
-- Midge wears a grey suit jacket almost identical to Madeleine's at one point... but it doesn't seem to make Scottie want to spend any extra time with her.
-- The sketches shown on her apartment walls are not only female figures. There's a man in uniform visible in one. {Connectable to uniforms in PiB?}
-- Midge at the sanatorium: says "Mother is here!" and that she hopes Mozart will help "sweep the cobwebs away." Oh so motherly. And then she leaves with an odd statement whispered to the nonresponsive Scottie: "You don't even know that I'm here... but I'm here." (This seems totally ripe for connection to psychoanalytic theory stuff. Not my favorite kind of point, but maybe it could be linked to something in Freud and/or Butler etc.)
7Fullmoonblue
Currently reading an article on Paris is Burning that I hadn't known about before now, "The Slap of Love" by Michael Cunningham.
http://opencity.org/cunningham.html
ETA:
There's also this, a paper linking Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Paris is Burning, called "Shopping for a Change" by Jillian Sandell.
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/WomensStudies/ReadingRoom/AcademicPapers/shopping-for-a...
http://opencity.org/cunningham.html
ETA:
There's also this, a paper linking Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Paris is Burning, called "Shopping for a Change" by Jillian Sandell.
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/WomensStudies/ReadingRoom/AcademicPapers/shopping-for-a...
8Fullmoonblue
Reading Jill Dolan on The Feminist Spectator as Critic.
Also a short article by Richard Dyer on gay men and disco from the Summer 1979 issue of the journal Gay Left.
http://www.gayleft1970s.org/issues/gay.left_issue.08.pdf
Here's the thing. I'm hoping to 'say something new' about both Vertigo and Paris is Burning. I don't simply want to show how they can be 'read' according to a combination of ideologies and theories (that happen to intersect because of the films' subject matter). I want to do something more fun. I'm just not entirely sure what, yet. It might involve performance, dress-up, fantasy, spectatorship, voyeurism... and desire, of course.
Make-up. Dress-up.
Question to self: self, how do you plan to deal with the fact that Vertigo is a fictional thriller, and Paris is Burning a documentary...?
Also a short article by Richard Dyer on gay men and disco from the Summer 1979 issue of the journal Gay Left.
http://www.gayleft1970s.org/issues/gay.left_issue.08.pdf
Here's the thing. I'm hoping to 'say something new' about both Vertigo and Paris is Burning. I don't simply want to show how they can be 'read' according to a combination of ideologies and theories (that happen to intersect because of the films' subject matter). I want to do something more fun. I'm just not entirely sure what, yet. It might involve performance, dress-up, fantasy, spectatorship, voyeurism... and desire, of course.
Make-up. Dress-up.
Question to self: self, how do you plan to deal with the fact that Vertigo is a fictional thriller, and Paris is Burning a documentary...?
9fannyprice
I've got nothing intelligent to add to this thread, just wanted to let you know that I'm following it with interest. It is pretty cool that you're sharing with us.
10LisaCurcio
Yes, Elizabeth, even those of us who look at what you are doing in total bewilderment and awe are reading. I hope you will continue with this thread.
Lisa
Lisa
