Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema
Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema by Janet Staiger
English | August 1995 | ISBN: 0816626243 | 248 pages | PDF | 13 MB
English | August 1995 | ISBN: 0816626243 | 248 pages | PDF | 13 MB
The greeting card text quoted in the epigraph perhaps does not sum up life for women in the 1990s, but to some people it might have been an appropriate admonition for women in the 1890s. This book is about bad women, or more accurately, about cultural notions such as "bad women" in historical context. Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, and Judith Flax, among other theorists, argue that "woman," "gender," and other such apparent realities are discursive constructions.2 Specifically, I will be arguing that it is valuable to reconceptualize film history from the vantage point of its constitutive historical formations. At the time of cinema's beginnings in the United States, economic, social, and discursive conditions encouraged talk about women, men, sexuality, gender, and object choices. This talk about "woman" was symptomatic of changes in these conditions, but "woman" was a particularly useful concept upon which to focus. While this book will concentrate on a particular period of U.S. cinema (specifically 1907 to around 1915), the study has implications for other eras and media.
Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema
