Penelope Eate

Saving virgins, saving the USA: heteronormative masculinities and the securitisation of trafficking discourse in mainstream narrative film

Sex trafficking has become a high-profile, celebrity endorsed issue, attracting much international attention. Accompanying this has been a proliferation of films, including full-length feature films, which address the topic and have done much to influence public perception of the issue. This paper analyses two of these films which were made for the mainstream US market: Trade and Taken. Both films present a conservative and heteronormative perspective revolving around middle-aged North American law enforcement officers rescuing innocent young girls. Hence, these films participate in the general securitisation of trafficking discourse in which the US has been a leader. In spite of their ostensible concern about the exploitation of women, these films present trafficking mostly as an occasion for the redemption and rehabilitation of the beleaguered white American male, appropriating the problem of trafficking in the service of a US-led neo-imperialism bolstered by masculinism and xenophobia, and implicitly problematising womens independence and justifying the control of their movements and sexuality.

Schooling the public on boys: the ongoing salience in media representations of the “crisis” in boys’ education

Abstract This paper explores the salience of the “crisis” in boys’ education as it is articulated in Australian print media. We will consider the ways in which this crisis is expressed through a gendered language which simultaneously represents boys as “forgotten” by teaching practices thought to be prioritising girls’ learning, and as an equity (disadvantaged) grouping who require specialised teaching methods different from those currently offered within the Australian school system. Further, we will examine the extent to which feminist-inspired reforms in education are either implicitly or explicitly referenced as an explanation for boys’ apparently poor education attainment, and relatedly consider the work of “experts” supporting claims of a pro-feminine bias that adversely affects boys’ learning outcomes, particularly those experts offering neurological or psychological/cognitive findings which assert a biological basis for gender difference. In this context, we argue that rather than advancing gender equity in schools, popular public discourse, as presented in Australian print media, reinforces and perpetuates notions of gender difference and masculine entitlement.

Kane and Edgar: Playing with Age in Film

In this chapter we explore how perspectives on age and ageing are shaped and revealed through film. Our interest stemmed from the above and other conversations, for example, about recent films which use older actors and celebrate renewal in late middle age (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Madden, 2011) and Hope Springs (Frankel, 2012)), to the curious phenomenon of Guy Pearce playing an old man in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012). As one sci-fi fan has written online: ‘Why take a young actor (no matter the skill level) and coat him in tons of aging make-up when you could just cast an old dude in the first place?’1 Why indeed. Our investigation is guided by the following questions: What does it mean that some films use technology in order to convey ageing while others mask age? What are the gendered implications for men and women when ageing is represented in film? And finally, how might the films that utilise these ageing technologies contribute to the ongoing maintenance of harmful cultural notions which posit the elderly as abject?