School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 6 of 6
-
ItemSeparating the men from the boys: gender representation and cross-dressing in the plays of Shakespeare( 2003)This paper was presented at a Melbourne Shakespeare Society meeting in August 2003. The written version aims to give readers an opportunity to read the talk as presented. The paper discusses the representation of female characters by boy actors in the age of Shakespeare.
-
ItemMuscles, hybrids and new bad futures( 1994)Since Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone made their respective debuts onto the cinematic screen the muscle phenomenon has become a dominant factor in the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Muscle, in all its hard and sweaty glory, has found a market especially in the big budget extravaganzas whose narratives centre around the spectacle of the built bodies of male stars such as Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Lundgren, Van Damme, Snipes and Seagal, and the more padded forms of actors such as Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. This new brand of cinema whilst harking back in part to an American tradition of genre cinema (the Western, Detective films, War Films etc.) appears to owe more to genres that emerged outside America: the Italian `gladiator' pictures of the 1950s and 1960s which retold the adventures of Hercules and other mythic heroes via the forms of bodybuilding stars such as Steve Reeves and Reg Park; and the martial arts action films popularized by Hong Kong Cinema and which found a very profitable market in the West ‐ and which also saw the migration of the genre into American cinema starring a series of martial arts experts including Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee and Jean‐Claude van Damme. Both genres revealed an unabashed display of the spectacle of action and the spectacle of the male body in action. The camera found any excuse to unapolegetically caress the bodies of the stars with pans, tracks and close‐ups of various fragmented body parts in ways that always denoted strength, agility and power.
-
ItemMuscle, excess and rupture: female bodybuilding and gender construction( 1995-02)In recent years bodybuilding culture has provided the backdrop to a series of debates centering around issues surrounding representations of gender and in particular the potential inherent in bodybuilding bodies to rupture preconceived notions regarding 'norms' of masculinity and femininity; for the meticulously controlled, predetermined construction and definition of mass and muscle on the bodybuilding figure has shifted the body from an arena dominated by assumptions centering around the natural to a sphere which exposes the body itself - and with it the power structures that impose meaning onto it - as informed by culture. The bodybuilding physique reveals the body as a socially determined construct, or to cite Kuhn, with the willed construction of bodies in bodybuilding, 'nature becomes culture'. (Kuhn 1988, 5) The question of marketability has, over the years, emerged as a key concern in bodybuilding. Of all sports, due to its tendency towards things excessive, bodybuilding tends to stand outside the mainstream appealing primarily to a select, cult following. There have been some exceptions of bodybuilders who successfully escaped the margins and entered mainstream culture, the most successful being Arnold Schwarzenegger (seven time Mr. Olympia) who opened the doors to big-time muscle in action cinema. More recently, female muscle has also started to make itself felt in the popular sphere, with Cory Everson (six time winner of the Ms. Olympia) appearing in films such as Double Impact alongside Jean Claude van Damme, and professional bodybuilders Raye Hollitt, Shelley Beattie and Tonya Knight starring in the successful U.S. television show American Gladiators. Despite breaking through to mainstream culture, however, these bodybuilders have served as examples of 'freaks' in a world of 'norms'; they signal a moment of excess allowed to seep through into the dominant, but these moments are always about controlled forms of excess - they, in a sense, constitute an orderly disruption.
-
ItemThe I, the eye and the orifice: an interview with Catherine Millet( 2006)The position of a woman as the object at a male orgy has always been a presence signifying only as orifice; a site without subjectivity around which male pleasure is organised and virility enacted for the gaze of other men. But what happens if the focal point shifts? If in lieu of this psychasthenia the body of a woman in an orgy becomes the focal point around which space is organised? And what if the woman then gives voice to this focal point articulating both its gaze and its pleasures? Catherine Millet makes such a shift in her sexual autobiography The Sexual Life of Catherine M., but critical responses to the text have shown little interest in the books re-spatialisation of sexual relations.
-
ItemRethinking the performance of Brecht: lines of flight, becoming and the female subject( 2000)This essay brings together a number of related but frequently separated discourses around the themes of performance, gender and Epic theatre within the frame of a feminist analysis of theatrical performance. It maps the possibilities of exchange across the borders of specific practices and their discourses in an effort to think about the productive value of border-crossing. I model this crossing-of-borders on a reading of the text and performance of Bertolt Brecht' s modernist classic, The Good Person of Sichuan, in which the theatrical notion of performance is examined through a feminist application of the Deleuzian concept of becoming. The Deleuzian analysis of Brecht adds a new dimension to performance analysis and helps to revise and historicise Brecht' s politics for a contemporary public. This task is an important one for Brecht is worth doing still. He returned to the Australian stage in 1998 and 1999 in two contrast ing productions - the true-to-Brecht Melbourne Theatre Company production of The Resistable Rise ofArturo Ui, directed by Simon Phillips and the 'renovated' Belvoir St. Theatre (Sydney) production of Caucasian Chalk Circle, directed by Michael Kantor - suggesting that a revival of interest in political theatre position s itself through a relation to Brechtian theatre. Finding a productive way forward for Brechtian theatre is crucial to the avoidance of the pitfalls that negate the cultural critique that the plays make possible.
-
Item'Anything for the house': recollections of post-war suburban dreaming(Department of History, University of Melbourne, 2004)In the post-war years, as the suburbs were expanding, older criticisms of suburban life as shallow and dull were re-invigorated. The suburbs of the 1950s became - and continue to be for some - an object of disdain and critique. But much of this analysis fails to engage with the real experiences of those who lived there, and is unable to explain the attractions of suburban life and its power over the Australian imagination. This paper - based on interviews asking elderly Australians about their experiences and meanings of work, family and community in the 1950s - suggests a more complex history. Despite the limitations built into restricted gender roles in the post-war years, the suburbs were often animated by the shared, powerfully gendered aspirations about domesticity, home-making and family life that were such a fundamental part of the political culture of the period.