"Academy" of Motion Pictures: Exercises in Film Analysis

This assignment sequence for American Voices: Tomboys in Time, includes preparatory work and three essays. It is designed to develop proficiency in the practice of formal film analysis through a set of tomboy films while posing a series of stylistic challenges. Beginning with a still image and progressing to full sequences and theoretical texts, it asks students to write about film in multiple ways and to construct arguments about the relationship between form and content, foundational texts in gender studies, critical work on tomboys, and various extradiegetic aspects of film

Mad Max Fury Road Introduction

Transcript--Introduction to Mad Max: Fury Road Lynne Stahl, WVU Libraries 9/4/201

Chronic Tomboys: Feminism, Survival, and Paranoia in Jodie Foster’s Body of Work

From Freaky Friday (1976) to Flightplan (2005), Jodie Foster has made a career of defying gender norms–a defiance predicated largely upon her characteristically tomboyish embodiment and a mode of being that combines activeness, visual agency, and a distinctively resistant demeanor that spans her body of work to the extent that one can hardly watch any one of her films without involuntary recourse to her earlier and later movies. This essay takes up David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002), which unites tomboy figures of two generations in Foster and Kristen Stewart and works, in light of the former’s corpus and its feminist bent, to refuse the trope that sees tomboyism capitulate to heteronormative strictures in adolescence. Instead, Panic Room reproduces that embodied resistance in an adult through interactions with her daughter. The essay then proceeds further into the films of an iconic tomboy actress to posit a mode of queer feminist reproductivity enacted through Foster’s star image and a recuperation of feminist “paranoia” through the consistent critique of heteronormativity that her aggregate body of work performs. Moreover, it addresses debates within queer theory about time, refuting antisocial currents—the push against “for-the-child” sentiments predominant in contemporary political rhetoric—and proposing an alternative, recursive temporality, and within the field of feminist film studies, demonstrating a subversive potential within commercial narrative film across the span of one Hollywood star’s career

The Right Tool for the Job? Ignorance, Evolution, Reflection, and the #Resistance

“Librarians are Swiss Army knives for the #Resistance,” tweeted musician and activist Neko Case on January 27, 2017, a characterization both fortifying and thought provoking for library workers everywhere. Like any tool, a knife is useless without an agent to wield it—and destructive if applied incorrectly or to the wrong material. If library workers are instruments to be plied to all manner of social ills, what are the potentialities and limits of our agency, and how can we best equip those who would put us to use? This essay works to unpack Case’s metaphor within the context of Oregon libraries, casting its gaze back to Mary Frances Isom’s early push to democratize libraries, ahead to librarian Angelica Novoa de Cordeiro’s efforts to serve immigrant populations in rural areas, and around at evolving political discourses and circumstances as well as their precursors. In many ways, the challenges Isom identified and addressed were akin to those that now confront libraries on a national scale as they contemplate means of resisting the multiphobic, and shortsighted rhetoric and policy that suffuse the contemporary political climate while adhering to the ALA’s core values of democracy, diversity, equitable access, intellectual freedom, privacy, and professionalism

Volume 23 Issue 1 Introduction

I feel honored and fortunate to have been asked to introduce this issue of the OLA Quarterly, and, having lived in Oregon for less than two years, not a little daunted in light of my relative newness to the state. Neither a longtime Oregonian nor even yet a fully credentialed librarian, I am hardly the fittest person imaginable to introduce a journal issue focused on Oregon librarians’ response to broad and dramatic changes. And yet, in the same way that one can benefit greatly from the distanced perspective of a different set of eyes looking over a draft of writing in which one has become deeply immersed, perhaps my outsider’s view can offer useful observations even at its degree of remove. This issue’s contributors and topics span academic and public institutions, rural and metropolitan libraries, political activism and personal narrative, and programming as well as abstraction. I undertook the task of introducing it with humility, but also with genuine hope that my experiences living in some of the most conservative and some of the most liberal parts of the United States, working in academic and public libraries, and teaching classes founded in feminism and critical race theory would enable me to offer something productive to this conversation, as I have learned abundantly from its constituents

\u27Tomboy\u27 is Anachronistic. But the Concept Still Has Something to Teach Us

This article explores the tomboy trope in film and literature and the taming that characterizes it, framing both in relation to contemporary debates about gender and sexual identity as well as cultural anxieties around queer, trans, and nonbinary identity. Examining texts from Louisa May Alcott\u27s Little Women to the 1980 film Little Darlings, the article argues that even while the term tomboy may be obsolete, tomboy narratives document processes of rebellion that hold continuing value

Teaching with Wikipedia

Learn about techniques for using Wikipedia in the classroom, including how to develop assignments that allow students to write for a wide range of audiences by editing, contributing to, or authoring Wikipedia articles while conducting relevant research

Assuming Identities: Gender, Sexuality, and Performativity in The Silence of the Lambs

In the introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discusses the instability of the ignorance/knowledge binary, which generally equates the latter with power and the former with impotence. She argues that ignorance (or the appearance thereof) can be a tool of power as well, citing as an example the 1986 ruling by the United States Justice Department that employers “may freely fire persons with AIDS” provided that those employers “can claim to be ignorant of the medical fact, quoted in the ruling, that there is no known health danger in the workplace from the disease” (5). That this very fact was made explicit in the ruling itself preposterously encourages and makes advantageous misknowledge of the law with regard to AIDS, and it implicitly facilitates discrimination against homosexuals, who at the time of the case were (and to some extent, are still today) conceived of as promiscuous, selfish vectors of contagion, imposing their scourge upon the heterosexual world. The ruling essentially sets forth that ignorance is safer than information, at least for employers, and that they ought to limit themselves to knowing or assuming only what serves them. Such a privileging of assumption serves to “enforce discursive power” by discouraging anyone to look past stereotypes—if one employs a gay man, evidently, it would be safest to presume not only that he has contracted HIV, but that he will also engage in behaviors that would put others at risk as well (6). Written and released during the peak years of the United States AIDS panic, both Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and Jonathan Demme’s cinematic adaptation (1991) take the form of a detective story, the quest for knowledge incarnated in a search for serial killer Buffalo Bill’s identity. Every character, of course, has his or her unique background and methods, which in turn structure the way they handle knowledge and ignorance and their conceptions of not only Buffalo Bill’s identity but also their own, the instability, performativity, and ambivalence of which manifest themselves throughout. The movie presents endless chains of dichotomies both relational and conceptual, prompting the implied spectator to ask, “which?”—and the film invariably responds with, “some of both.” The question driving the plot is that of Buffalo Bill’s identity, an unresolved muddle of gender, sexuality, and the ambiguous link between the two, which sets up the implied audience to examine the complicated identities of Jame Gumb and the rest of the characters as they perform and function within the parallel real and diegetic worlds of 1991, both dictated by hegemonically-encouraged incomplete readings and self-servingly willful misinterpretations and oversimplifications

Primary Source Databases for Humanities Research

This hands-on session will introduce participants to a variety of primary source databases with access to resources including literature, newspapers, multimedia, images, government information, and other archival materials. Participants will have the opportunity to explore these databases themselves during the session