{"title":"Double Trouble: Gender Fluid Heroism in American Children’s Television","authors":"Lou Lamari, Pauline Greenhill","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0127","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Gender fluidity makes only rare appearances on North American television, and remains almost completely absent from programming for children. In contrast, transgender characters are making inroads into mainstream North American TV for adults. Still, media depictions of transgender people in the late 1990s and early 2000s have largely shown them as aberrations, having illegible and/or unstable identities, joining mainstream Euro North American society which tends to medicalize and pathologize transgender identities. Thus, too often the representation provided serves only to reinforce binaries by making the character exceptional and noting their unconventionality, or to highlight gender fluidity as a problem. Examining the animated streaming TV series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018–2020), we use scholarship on gender fluidity to critique the show’s representations of genders in addition to and beyond male and female. Looking at She-Ra through this lens, the show challenges assumptions about princesses, villains, helpers, and heroes. Ultimately transgressing traditional categories, the princesses and their allies, in their own distinct embodiments and self-presentations, use their differing magical and other skills to fight enemies in the Evil Horde to protect their planet, Etheria.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"169 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43497328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Taiwan New Cinema to Post-New Cinema: The Transition of Identity in Cape No. 7 and the Naming Issue of Post-New Cinema","authors":"Yijiang Pan","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0130","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 2008, Taiwan’s cinema began to get back on its feet after an extended lull, with several directors successively releasing critically acclaimed first works. Compared with the well-known Taiwan New Cinema, this new film trend works within the conventions of genre and often focuses on local issues and ordinary life. In doing so, critics and scholars call it Post-New Cinema. Yet, its naming brings difficulties to our understanding on this epoch-making wave, since it neither intends to innovate the paradigm and the framework established by New Cinema, nor does it completely inherit the legacy left by it. Therefore, these uncertain interpretations motivate us to review the legitimacy of this naming. This essay will evaluate firstly the genealogy from the Taiwan New Cinema to the Post-New Cinema in aesthetic and historical–cultural representation, to further propose the paradox about the naming of Post-New Cinema. Secondly, we attempted, by comparing the two most representative films of the two periods, Cape No. 7 and A City of Sadness, an initial look at the transition and the transformation in terms of aesthetical demonstration, historical representation, and ethnic politics, to argue that a subtle change in identity has been created in Taiwanese cinema since 2008.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"284 - 294"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49427958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Tale of Two Trans Men: Transmasculine Identity and Trauma in Two Fairy-Tale Retellings","authors":"J. Jorgensen","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0128","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Transgender identities in fairy tale retellings are rare, but can reveal much about gender fluidity. Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Boy, Snow, Bird conflates transgender identities with mirrored falsehoods and fairy-tale spells, pathologizing a trauma victim who turns out to also become an abuser, while Gabriel Vidrine’s novella “A Pair of Raven Wings” depicts a queer transgender man with dignity, making it clear that the trauma he suffers is at the hands of bigots rather than being an invention of a sick mind or the cause of his transition. Pairing these fairy-tale retellings illuminates the topic of gender fluidity in fairy tales by demonstrating that gender is indeed fluid, but that representations of gender fluidity due to trauma are misguided at best and harmful at worst, while those representations that assert the dignity of transgender people, even as they face trauma at the hands of bigoted people, are another stellar example of the genre’s potential to represent people who are culturally marginalized, connecting identity to power in a classic magical fairy-tale move.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"181 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48729298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Queer Glow up of Hero-Sword Legacies in She-Ra, Korra, and Sailor Moon","authors":"Diana Burgos","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0135","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The narratives within Sailor Moon Crystal, The Legend of Korra, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power enlist gender fluid and queer protagonists to spearhead rebellions against the heteronormative domains of colonizers, imperialists, zealots, and hypercapitalistic military–industrial complexes. Magic is commodified by each villain; used to crown their exaggerated conquistador reputations and power their nuclear weapons. To defeat them and the toxic sociopolitical narratives and power paradigms they have spawned, Sailor Moon, Korra, Adora, and others must confront how these ideologies have stunted their power, corrupted their ethical systems, and distorted their understanding of their identities. By achieving self-actualization/self-acceptance and collaborating with their allies to do the same, they co-create new endings for themselves and reclaim a broader spectrum of gender and sexuality. Within the liminal moments of these reflective identity battles, protagonists and their allies enter a magical communal space, a social network for a Jungian collective unconscious. Here, they exchange their evolving powers, ideologies, and emotionally charged memories (her stories) and collaborate to liberate their communities. These champions, ambassadors of their (our) collective unconscious, urge us to commune within the liminal spaces of our social networks to self-actualize and collectively unearth a neohuman identity and system of governance.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"248 - 261"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47763235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of Image on Translation Decision-Making in Dubbing into Arabic – Premeditated Manipulation par Excellence: The Exodus Song as a Case Study","authors":"Rashid Yahiaoui, Marwa J. Aldous, A. Fattah","doi":"10.1515/culture-2021-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2021-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The emblematic connotations and ideological values of images affect the way iconographic and visual codes are interpreted in dubbing. Religion, culture, and politics are all primary variables that communicate evaluative views of the world, but also impose pressure on the translator when they stand in conflict with his or her attitudinal positioning and ethical judgement. Thus, this article aims to examine how the interplay between iconographic and linguistic codes of the visual sign in the musical animation This Land is Mine impacts translational decision-making in dubbing into Arabic. Simultaneously, the aim of this article is to evaluate how religious, cultural, and ideological dissonances between source text and target audience result in acts of manipulation and negotiation of meaning in the target text that explicitly channels the voice of the translator. We employ a dual theoretical approach combining narrative theory and appraisal theory in order to evaluate patterns of manipulation within a scaled system to provide graded analysis that exposes the ideological stance and bias of the source text’s producer/animator in representing reality via visual narrative.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"66 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2021-0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48283703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A “Fabulous Monster” and a “Wonderful Boy:” Gender and the Elusive Victorian Child in the Alice Books and Peter Pan","authors":"Friederike Frenzel","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0141","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” and J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” are highly critiqued and explored works of British children literature. Both queer and hermeneutic readings allow approaches that intrinsically question gender dichotomies, providing tools to pick out underlying themes. Thus, focusing on the concepts of the “child hero” and the “genderless child” of Carroll’s and Barrie’s respective Victorian and Edwardian backgrounds, spatial – the dream worlds of the Wonder- and the Looking-Glass land, the colonized Island of Neverland – as well as temporal aspects – the linear, episodic quest of Alice, the immortal, cyclical existence of Peter – point to the subversive elements of play, memory, and narration in the texts. While Alice is bridging dream and reality in an oscillating, paradoxical act of self-aware transformation, Peter is otherworldly and inhuman himself, actively rejecting heteronormative standards and demands. Both are trespassers and assume roles, and confuse, adapt, and bend supposedly fixed rules. Their transgressions are subdued in the pretended ahistoricity of children’s storytelling, referring to the responsibility of adaptions to further expand the hermeneutical circle.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"312 - 323"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44039227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From the Newspaper Serial to the Novel (1853–1863): Mediation of the Periodical Press in the Foundation of Alberto Blest Gana’s Narrative Project","authors":"H. Pas","doi":"10.1515/culture-2021-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2021-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Scholarly studies on Alberto Blest Gana have generally disregarded the author’s production prior to his narrative cycle, begun with his novel La aritmética en el amor [Arithmetic in Love] (1860), awarded first prize in a literary contest sponsored by the Universidad de Chile. Nonetheless, the canonical cycle of his first narrative period (which includes his famous Martín Rivas and El ideal de un calavera) shares with his earlier fiction the fact that the novels were originally published in the press. Indeed, with the exception of the award-winning novel and Juan de Aria – published in the Aguinaldo of the newspaper El Ferrocarril – all the author’s production from his first narrative period was published in periodical publications, decisive in consolidating his narrative project. This essay analyses the mediation of the periodical press (and its subgenres, such as the folletín [newspaper serial] and the artículo de costumbres [a literary vignette of customs]) in the foundation of Blest Gana’s narrative scheme, contemplating the diversity of his production. The main features of his project were embodied, materially speaking, in the space of the folletín. It was in this space, in short, where the author’s narrative managed to challenge an extended reading public, necessary for the constitution of a national literature.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"136 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2021-0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42626246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hery Prasetyo, Dien Vidia Rosa, Raudlatul Jannah, B. Handayani
{"title":"The Revival of the Past: Privatizing Cultural Practices in the Festival Era","authors":"Hery Prasetyo, Dien Vidia Rosa, Raudlatul Jannah, B. Handayani","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0125","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The issue of indigenous community revivalism is crucial related to identity problems and cultural practices in sustainable development. Capital accumulation through cultural commercialization becomes a means to create a cultural creative sector based on tourism. The case of Osing communities in Banyuwangi, East Java, explained and highlighted the cultural practices of indigenous identity to a political-economic agenda. The research used a discursive analysis method with the findings of several issues. First, there were discrepancies between the indigenous and village institutions over the vision of village development. Second, the emergent forms of elite domination in an indigenous village. Third, the economic profit which is introduced by the market system did not align with the constructed narratives of indigenous people as generous and selfless. Fourth, the revival of cultural tourism is followed by an improvement in the infrastructure as a development indicator. And fifth, the government did not effectively represent the will of the indigenous community. Those emerged the contradiction between maintaining and innovating the tradition as a challenge in cultural tourism projects. The conditions were examined as a politics of culture which is formulated by the state. Hence, cultural practices of indigenous community turned into festivals; notwithstanding, indigenous sustainability is still uncertain.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"194 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43737760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gender, Class, and Human/Non-Human Fluidity in Théodore and Hippolyte Cogniards’ féerie, The White Cat","authors":"A. Duggan","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0132","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Frères Cogniard produced immensely popular vaudeville féeries in the nineteenth century and among them most popular was The White Cat (1852), which grafts two tales together by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy: “The White Cat” and “Belle-Belle, or the chevalier Fortuné.” The féerie foregrounds gender, class, human/thing, and species fluidity, which undermines hierarchies supported by dichotomies that in very similar ways privilege men over women, the upperclass over lowerclass, persons over things, and human animals over non-human animals. The essay traces these different forms of fluidity, examining the role of marvelous in general and metamorphosis in particular in problematizing normative structures of identity and revealing their arbitrary nature.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"208 - 220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43239781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Bie zai tiqi” and You Mean the World to Me: Two Subversive Sinophone Malaysian Metatexts","authors":"A. Paoliello","doi":"10.1515/culture-2020-0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2020-0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article aims at exploring the subversive nature of two Sinophone Malaysian cultural products, namely “Bie zai tiqi” (2002) a short story by Ho Sok Fong and You Mean the World to Me (2017), a full-length feature film by director Saw Teong Hin. I argue that, despite their differences, both fictional products use powerful metafictional and metanarrative devices to challenge factuality. In doing so, they not only blur the fine line between fiction and reality, but they also question cultural power dynamics and ethnic politics in Malaysia. Moreover, they defy the truthfulness of Mandarin as the preferred Sinitic cultural language as well as the idea that, in Malaysia, literature and film can be considered Malaysian only if produced in Malay, the official language of the country. By performing an analysis of the linguistic choices made by Ho Sok Fong and Saw Teong Hin, I will suggest that both the short story and the feature film analysed in this article use metafiction and metanarration to subvert widely-accepted, yet problematic, notions of national culture and common ethnic language.","PeriodicalId":41385,"journal":{"name":"Open Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"59 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/culture-2020-0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45834560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}