E. Ann Kaplan

Feminism and film

PHASE ONE: PIONEERS AND CLASSICS: THE MODERNIST MODE PHASE TWO: CRITIQUES OF PHASE ONE THEORIES: NEW METHODS PHASE THREE: RACE, SEXUALITY, AND POSTMODERNISM IN FEMINIST THEORY PHASE FOUR: SPECTATORSHIP, ETHNICITY, AND MELODRAMA

Global trauma and public feelings: Viewing images of catastrophe

Scholars have begun to discuss new digital viewing contexts, but few have explored processes involved in responding to images of catastrophe. Many assume that cognition (meaning) is primary in image‐reception, but I’ll show the complex interaction of cognition and affect. Drawing on research in psychology and cultural studies, I explore how proliferation of images may produce a culture of trauma. I define, analyze and critique three kinds of possible response to images of catastrophe. These are: a) secondary or vicarious trauma (VT), a response in which the viewer is shocked to the extent of being emotionally over‐aroused; b) what I call “empty empathy,” to indicate the fleeting nature of empathic emotions that viewers often experience; and finally c) witnessing – a response that transforms the viewer in a positive pro‐social manner, and that, unlike the first sorts of response, involves ethics along with empathy. The argument is supported by images drawn from the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and recent art by Witkin and Harden.

Sex, work and motherhood: The impossible triangle

This essay explores how current representations of sex, work and motherhood, in select recent films and womens science fiction, manifest and give meaning to contradictory discourses about women. Discourse analysis shows that what at first appear to be polarized discourses may be part of a larger societal need to control female sexuality, and reposition the nuclear family with woman safely within it. Ideological textual analysis may help feminists gauge how far their own discourses about abortion, female sexual adventurousness, mothering, reproductive technologies collude with, or challenge, dominant ones in relation to sex, work and motherhood.

Psychoanalysis and Ideology as Signified in the Staircase: Nancy Meckler's Sister, My Sister and Tracey Moffatt's Laudanum

No abstract.