By Katrin Horn Excerpt: “Clara Bradbury-Rance’s book Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory addresses a deceptively simple question with broad implications: can there be a lesbian cinema after queer theory’s critique of politics that are built around stable gender and sexual identities? The question is made more urgent by the crucial changes our media landscape has…
Rom-com without romonormativity, gays without homonormativity: examining the People Like Us web series By Eve Ng Excerpt: “Certainly, rom-coms featuring same-sex relationships may be narrativelyflawed, including retreading the ground of straight rom-coms. LGBTQ themed media have been critiqued for failing to offer more radical challenges to sociopolitical norms, instead homonormatively (Duggan 2002) reinscribing discourses about…
2020 SCMS Queer & Trans Caucus Chris Holmlund Graduate Student Writing Prize By Tory Jeffay Excerpt: “This formal emphasis on surface mirrors the film’s rejection of a mode of seeking truth through uncovering hidden, authoritative knowledge. Flatness, as I theorize it, critiques the logic of the trial, in which the only evidence admissible in court…
By Deborah Jermyn Excerpt: “Bigelow’s distinct brand of edgy but desirable, and, it must be recognised, white femininity has been instrumental in her admission to what remains principally a ‘masculine’ club…this article draws on a cultural breadth of print media coverage of Bigelow from the broadsheet press to women’s magazines, focusing largely but not only…
By Carl Sweeney Excerpt: “Bigelow’s short documentaries represent an extension to her other work concerning terrorism. I Am Not a Weapon (2018), for instance, sees her and journalist Dionne Searcey co-direct nine videos featuring female survivors of terrorist acts carried out by the Nigerian group Boko Haram, as part of a campaign made to tie…
By Vincent M. Gaine Excerpt: “This is a distinctive aspect of Bigelow’s place within new action realism – narratives are left unresolved and goals unachieved… Bigelow openly presents a contradiction: the viewer participates in the action but does not understand it, the film presenting an inexplicable experience in minute detail that should allow understanding, and…
By Kirsten A. Adkins Excerpt: “Traces of Atalanta’s story can be found in Bigelow’s treatment of Maya. Like Atalanta, she is responsible for locating and targeting the enemy. Yet her successes are largely uncelebrated, and she is often rewarded for being ostracised by her male colleagues. Atalanta’s story provides an aesthetic patrimony or cultural template…
By Benjamin Halligan Excerpt: “My intention is to scope Bigelow’s soft or nascent fascism through a textual consideration of how she sutures ideas of destiny between man and landscape. Finally, and to return to her more recent work, the article then turns to the expression of this philosophy to brazenly imperial ends in Bigelow’s Last…
By Thomas Britt Excerpt: “While much of the existing scholarship employs a metatextual view of this nexus, between Bigelow embedded within a rigid Hollywood system and her characters embedded within stultifying and distorting cultural/political systems, my goal is to illustrate the ways in which Bigelow and her characters reject externalities for the sake of the…
By Christa Van Raalte Excerpt: “The obsessive commitment of Bigelow’s heroes can be said to fuel both the stylistic excesses that hold the spectator at a reflexive distance and the diegetic excesses that mark her characters, challenging the spectator’s allegiance. Blue Steel makes explicit the relationship between commitment and obsession, on the one hand clearly distinguishing between them…
