Memory, Dreams, Representation & Research

TOMBOYS,  DRAG KINGS, & WARRIOR WOMEN There is a long line of female characters that have made their mark on popular culture by refusing to be "feminine" or to take on the typically confining roles that have been given to women in mainstream media. In Female Masculinity (1998),  J. Halberstam describes the term female masculinity as “masculinities without men” in a project that sought to highlight and honor masculine women and individuals who are not male but are masculine. Halberstam also analyzed several examples of masculine women or individuals from popular films and novels. In Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape (2006) Bobby Noble disagreed with the assertion that there are "masculinities without men" because female masculinity is actually in conversation with other masculinities which are more layered in terms of intersections of identity than simply female/male. MASCULINITY CONTINUUMS In Indigen...

VERTIGO: GENDER IS PERFORMATIVE Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) is still a remarkable film (perhaps one of the greatest films ever made) despite the fact that it was created in an era that is rightfully associated with repression and oppression (the 1950s). However, there was also a lot of subversion going on within 1950s culture if you knew where to find it. Vertigo (1958) is an interesting example of this subversion. Physique photographers of the 1950s such as Bob Mizer, Walter Kundzicz, and Alonzo Hanagan to name a few, were providing gay and bisexual American men images of semi-nude men under the guise of  promoting "aspirational" physical fitness culture and bodybuilding. I'll create a post about that phenomenon as well, I mention that because the 1950s is thought of as an almost "Victorian" time but, like the Victorian era this was a time where the dominant culture was actually quite obsessed with gender and sex...