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Male border crossing films: A feminist/postcolonial analysis
Abstract
This study is an analysis of a group of contemporary Western European and North American films, which are described as male border-crossing films and focus on a state of existential crisis experienced by their male protagonists. The study includes the analysis of Wim Wenders' Kings of the Road (1976); Michelangelo Antonionni's The Passenger (1975); Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Despair (1977) and his episode in Germany in Autumn (1978); and David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and M. Butterfly (1993). The study aims to develop a critical reading strategy informed by postcolonial and feminist discourses, and to read male border-crossing films on the basis of their cultural politics, rather than their aesthetic and "authorial" characteristics. The study engages in a theoretical exploration of postmodernist, postcolonial and feminist discourses in relation to their critique of the sovereign position occupied by the Western, white, male subject in the Western modernist/imperialist project. The distinction between the situations of a "tourist" and a "refugee" is applied as a metaphor to make sense of the disparate articulations of the notion of "border-crossing" in postmodernist discourse, and postcolonial and feminist discourses. It is argued that the notion of "border-crossing" which appears in male border-crossing films is most consistent with a postmodernist notion of "border-crossing." This study demonstrates that the cultural politics of male border-crossing films is ambivalent. In these films, the questioning of white, male authority can easily turn into its reaffirmation. Western, white, male identity can be restored at the moment when it is supposedly destroyed; or what appears to be border-crossing can as well be seen as border control.
Subject Area
Motion Pictures|Mass media|Womens studies
Recommended Citation
Suner, Feride Asuman, "Male border crossing films: A feminist/postcolonial analysis" (1996). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9639034.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9639034