[Review of] Jun Xing and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, eds. Reversing the Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender, and Sexuality Through Film

The fourteen essays collected in Xing and Hirabayashi\u27s new volume make a strong argument for serious intellectual work involved not only in the college-level study of moving images for their messages about minority groups but also in pedagogical approaches that take film and video as their primary texts. Written by a collection of scholars who work in ethnic and racial studies and various allied fields, the essays share a concern with pedagogy and with showing how visual media can be used to facilitate cross-cultural understanding and communications, particularly with respect to the thorny topics of ethnicity and race (3). Indeed, despite the book\u27s title, film/video\u27s treatments of minority races and ethnicities are the collection\u27s main focus; gender and sexuality are broached in their intersection with ethnic and racial categories (Elisa Facio\u27s chapter on The Queering of Chicana Studies and Marilyn C. Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi\u27s piece on teaching stereotypes of Asian American women, for example), and global/international identities are discussed when they can illuminate a United States context. An eclectic range of Hollywood, avant-garde, independent, and documentary film and video is examined in essays of a likewise broad range of rhetorical styles and methodologies-some firmly grounded in academic theory, others more accessible to the lay-people addressed in the introduction as potential readers

Film Studies and Disability Studies

Produced by Hawai'i University Affiliated Program on Disabilities, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawai'i, Frank Sawyer School of Management, Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts, and School of Social Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas for The Society for Disability Studies

Take me to your cinema...: Representations of blindness in popular film.

This dissertation examines depictions of blind characters within four film genres: the classical melodrama, the slasher film, the racial passing film, and the science fiction film. I draw upon cultural traditions of interpreting blindness, film spectator theory, and deconstructionist theories of representation to explore how popular film's blind characters challenge the very possibility of a distinct, masterful, and privileged sighted (spectatorial) subject. Furthermore, I argue that these representations express film's struggles with its own powers as a visual medium. In the classical melodrama and the slasher film, blindness poses a threat to generic visual conventions and ideologies. My chapter on the classical Hollywood melodrama argues that the blindness of each heroine in Dark Victory (1939) and Magnificent Obsession (1954) circumscribes a feminized realm of power (rather than powerlessness, as critics often claim) and thus necessitates a patriarchal plot that actively works to contain each woman's aberrant vision. My chapter on the slasher film interprets the tactile mode of perception of the blind victim-heroes in See No Evil (1971), Peeping Tom (1960), and Proof (1992) as threateningly independent of the genre's privileged expressive mode of visual spectacle. The following chapters take up films whose narratives explicitly privilege blindness. A Patch of Blue (1965), Smoke (1996), and Suture (1993) depict scenarios of racial passing, a practice that exploits the simplistic equation of the image with truth. These films' blind characters provide a means to critique the tropes of color-blindness and blindness as insight for their problematic association with the activity--upon which successful passing depends--of reading racial and other identities from visual clues. Finally, I examine the idealization of physical blindness in X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963), Death Watch (1979), and Until the End of the World (1991), analyzing the interrelation of human vision and visual prosthetics as it is represented both within these science-fiction films' narratives and in their spectators' prosthetic interaction with film technology and narrative.Ph.D.American literatureCommunication and the ArtsFilm studiesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130691/2/9811061.pd

Play[ing] her part correctly': Helen Keller as Vaudevillian Freak

Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy's 1920s vaudeville routine is compared to freak show entertainment. Vaudeville and freak show histories are used to show that Keller's act exemplifies the historical connection between the two entertainment forms. Deploying many of the freak show conventions catalogued by Bogdan (1990, 1996), her routine is examined through the critical debate over freak shows between Bogdan (1990, 1996) and D. Gerber (1996). Bogdan claims freak shows engage discursive conventions that showcase their performers' talents, whereas Gerber argues they exploitatively display anomalous bodies. Through analysis of publicity materials and newspaper reviews, it is concluded that Keller's routine appealed to audiences as a sideshow display but was carefully packaged to downplay its exploitative qualities