Synopses & Reviews
This book opens up a new field at the intersections of transnational, feminist, and media studies. The collection brings feminist theories to bear on the discourses of transnationality embedded in a range of recent films and video art from diverse locations in North Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Paying particular attention to new frontiers of migration, an increasing vigilance vis-à-vis the foreign, and the gendered and racialized representations of mobility, the book charts innovative feminist strategies for the interpretation of contemporary visual cultures. This ambitious volume will be an important guide for scholars and students interested in approaching global media cultures from transnational feminist perspectives
Review
"For the impressive range of theoretical resources it draws on and, especially, the imaginative variety of new film texts it introduces and analyses, this volume is a very welcome contribution to the field of feminist film studies."--
Feminist Review"Transnational Feminism in Film and Media is a collective project that contributes in an innovative and effective way to the important and unavoidable debate concerning the crossing of borders in a global world, where borders are not simply meant to be geographical, but are also increasingly being recognized as related to issues of gender, identity, citizenship, and belonging. A great accomplishment of this book is to have put together two pressing contemporary disciplines, gender and media studies, and to have presented their relevance to the burgeoning concerns of transnationalism."--Textual Practice
"Transnational Feminism in Film and Media provides a solid introduction to topics of transnationalism, feminism, film and media studies (and is thus suitable as a textbook too) while at the same time often reframing familiar positions and perspectives, and reconsidering theoretical as well as pedagogical practices."--Third Text
"Transnational Feminism in Film and Media would serve as an excellent addition to any undergraduate film syllabus . . . Ultimately, this book should be read and engaged in multiple arenas, and its call to revalue and reexamine visual culture as a fundamental aspect of women's studies should be taken seriously."--Women's Studies International Forum
“The diversity of material here and the range of vantage points held by the amassed contributors is impressive, even unique. Although many are based in the U.S., they write from Hungarian, Turkish, British, Irish, Dutch, Swiss, Vietnamese, Polish, South Asian, and American perspectives. Among the strengths of the project are its attentiveness to a set of media texts that barely register within canonical film studies, its awareness of the new dynamics of transnational circulation, its exploration of the particular investments, pressures and exploitations endemic to globalization, and its interest in the conditions of representability for (among others) asylum seekers, domestic workers and sex-trafficked women in an era which has seen the broad feminization of migration. An engaging and necessary read.”--Diane Negra, University of East Anglia
"This collection of interdisiplinary essays examines current cinematic and media landscapes from the perspective of transnational feminist practices and methodologies, focusing on film, media art and video essay."--The Times Higher Education Supplement
Synopsis
This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines current cinematic and media landscapes from the perspective of transnational feminist practices and methodologies. Focusing on film, media art, and video essays, the contributors chart innovative strategies for exploring contemporary visual cultures. They offer critical interactions that include often neglected voices addressing the post-socialist Second World. They bring together two critical frameworks: transnational feminist studies and transcultural media.
About the Author
Katarzyna Marciniak is an Associate Professor of Transnational Studies in the English Department at Ohio University. She is the author of Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference (2006) and co-author of Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland (2010).
Anikó Imre is an Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Culture in the New Europe (2009) and editor of East European Cinemas (2005).
Áine OHealy is a Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She is the author of National Cinema in a Transnational Landscape: Filmmaking in Italy since 1980 (forthcoming from Indiana University Press).
Table of Contents
Introduction: Mapping Transnational Feminist Media Studies; Katarzyna Marciniak, Anikó Imre, and Ãine O'Healy
PART I: NEW FRONTIERS OF MIGRATION
1. Screening Unlivable Lives: The Cinema of Borders; Bruce Bennett and Imogen Tyler
2. Border Traffic: Reimagining the Voyage to Italy; Ãine O'Healy
3. Cinema without Frontiers: Transnational Women's Filmmaking in Iran and Turkey; Asuman Suner
4. Refusal of Reproduction: Paradoxes of Becoming-Woman in Transnational Moroccan Filmmaking; Patricia Pisters
5. 'Enter Freely, and of Your Own Will': Cinematic Representations of Post-Socialist Transnational Journeys; Alice Mihaela Bardan
PART II: CIRCULATION OF BODIES
6. Women's Resistance Strategies in a High-Tech Multicultural Europe; Ginette Verstraete
7. Videographies of Navigating Geobodies; Ursula Biemann
8. 'Affective Nationalism' and Transnational Postcommunist Lesbian Visual Activism; Anikó Imre
9. Long-Legged Girls and the Transnational Circuits of Vietnamese Popular Culture; Lan Duong
PART III: MODALITIES OF FOREIGNNESS
10. Palatable Foreignness; Katarzyna Marciniak
11. Translating Silences: A Cinematic Encounter with Incommensurable Difference; Priya Jaikumar
12. The Abjection of Patriarchy: Ibolya Fekete's Chico and the Transnational Feminist Imaginary; Marguerite Waller