Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re-Constructions in the Cinema (Suny Series in Postmodern Culture) - Softcover

Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791456285 ISBN 13: 9780791456286

Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr, 2003

Synopsis

Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Explores how whiteness is culturally constructed in American films.

Performing Whiteness crosses the boundaries of film study to explore images of the white body in relation to recent theoretical perspectives on whiteness.

Drawing on such diverse critical methodologies as postcolonial studies, feminist film criticism, anthropology, and phenomenology, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster examines a wide variety of films from early cinema to the present day in order to explore the ways in which American cinema imposes whiteness as a cultural norm, even as it exposes its inherent instability.

In discussions that range from The Philadelphia Story to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Foster shows that, though American cinema is an all-white construct, there exists the possibility of a healthy resistance to cultural norms of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Table of Contents

1. Performing Whiteness
2. Inventing Whiteness
3. White Face, White Space
4. The Bad-White Body
5. Performing the "Good" White
6. Performing the "Bad" White
7. Performing White Otherness

About this title

From the Author:

"Performing Whiteness crosses the boundaries of film study to explore images of the white body in relation to recent theoretical perspectives on whiteness. Drawing on such diverse critical methodologies as postcolonial studies, feminist film criticism, anthropology, and phenomenology, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster examines a wide variety of films from early cinema to the present day in order to explore the ways in which American cinema imposes whiteness as a cultural norm, even as it exposes its inherent instability. In discussions that range from The Philadelphia Story to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Foster shows that, though American cinema is an all-white construct, there exists the possibility of a healthy resistance to cultural norms of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

About the Author:

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Willa Cather Endowed Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is author of numerous books in the areas of film studies/cultural studies with books and articles on race, gender, and class, as well as film history and popular culture.

Foster's most recent book is entitled Disruptive Feminisms: Raced, Gendered, and Classed Bodies in Film, published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Visit gwendolynaudreyfoster.com for more information on Foster's publications.

About this edition

• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0791456285
• ISBN 13: 9780791456286
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224