This article explores how the current gender politics, and especially negotiations of gender inequality, gender violence and sexual harassment via the #MeToo movement, impact audience perception of David Mamet’s film adaptation Oleanna (1994). How does the meaning of Oleanna transform in the era of #MeToo? Sexual harassment and abuse have gained particular visibility in the West in 2017, through multiple stories posted on Twitter and other social media. The #MeToo movement emphasizes that frequently women are used as sexual objects by men who are in power and that women are perpetually denied power as such. The movement also foregrounds gender inequality as a serious, global issue. This article examines how watching Oleanna today impacts the viewer’s perception of gender inequality, including in academia, as well as how the film reshapes the meanings of gender, sexual politics and power in the era of #MeToo. The article uses Oleanna as a popular culture text through which the current negotiations of gender equality can be taught and women’s subjugation recognized.
This article follows the transformation of Estella into Cruella de Vil from the movie Cruella, directed by Craig Gillespie, from a screenplay by Dana Fox and Tony McNamara, and a story by Aline Brosh McKenna, Kelly Marcel and Steve Zissis. This transformative process is analysed through two perspectives. The first one is the sociocultural and political background of London in the 1970s, during the rise of the punk aesthetic and its anti-elite subversive resistance ideology. The second interpretative line requires the theoretical background from the book Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters by Jack Halberstam – extraordinary academic work focused on analysing the political, social and economic technologies and fears that are in the background of the production of the monstrous body. Through the analysis, I will also refer to the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Lacan, etc. These two interpretative lines – the more general political and ideological technologies for producing the monster and the particular sociopolitical context in which the character Estella/Cruella is struggling – have proven equally important in the process of unravelling the societal, cultural and economic nets that create the monster, casting it out as a threat, but also in showing its potential to build a new system of power, that is a form of compromise between the former power and the resistance.
Jomo Menmo, the yogini of Cherku village, her disciple Mingma Yangzi and the goddess Palden Lhamo are three fictional female characters in the video game Cursed Mountain (2009, Sproing Interactive and Deep Silver Vienna). They play a key role in the rescue mission undertaken by Eric Simmons on the cursed mountain of Chomolonzo. This article aims to analyse the female characters of this game, their role, intention and place in Eric’s adventure. The actions of various characters are explained through some terms present in Chöd Buddhism. The relationship between the hypotext, the hypertext and urban folklore is also briefly explained. The methods of analysis and synthesis should help to better understand the role of the female characters in this game and how they are framed in the storyline.
Hayao Miyazaki, the acclaimed Studio Ghibli director, has long been known for crafting complex portraits of women and girls in his films. Arguably, the most popular and compelling of these characters is Princess Mononoke’s self-determining San, a monstrous woman who has attracted scholarly attention in work from scholars like Rayna Denison. However, a more overlooked figure in Miyazaki’s pantheon of female characters is Ponyo, the ningyo star of the titular film who transforms into a human and causes a spectacular tsunami in Miyazaki’s reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. In this sense, Ponyo is a fascinating re-evaluation of this fairy tale character, altered from a symbol of pubescent curiosity and feminine irresponsibility to a powerful figure that serves as a rare female example of the feral child in fiction (Brodski 2019). In doing this, Miyazaki transforms the character into a feminist symbol of girlhood joy and agency, diverging from conventional male depictions of feral children. This article examines the history of the fictional feral child and Ponyo’s deviation from this tradition, particularly in the context of animation and Ghibli’s own oeuvre. Utilizing narratological theories and aspects of adaptation studies, this work seeks to position Ponyo as an especially disruptive figure in the Ghibli canon, with a feminine trajectory all her own.
This research aims to explore the relationship between the film La Sinfónica de los Andes (2020), directed by legendary Colombian documentarist Marta Rodríguez, and the folkloric practices of the Nasa, an Indigenous community located in the south-western Andes mountains of Colombia. The film has a relevant presence of female reflection through Nasa women who work to protect their culture, defend their native language, vindicate the value of working on the land and resist the Colombian armed conflict that significantly affects this part of the country. This documentary summarizes the anthropological work that Rodríguez has carried out for more than 50 years in this region and her cinematic observation of folkloric practices in these populations. This qualitative research includes a film analysis of the documentary and an in-depth interview with Marta Rodriguez, where she expresses her main motivations, as well as her narrative and cultural concerns in making this film.
