Suchergebnisse

This book studies American science fiction films depicting invasions of the USA and Earth by extra- terrestrials within the context of imperialism from 19502020. It shows how such films imagine America and its allies as objects of colonial control. This trope enables filmmakers to explore the ethics of American interventionism abroad either by defending the status quo or by questioning interventionism. The study shows how these films comment on American domestic hegemonic practices regarding racial or gender hierarchies, as well as hegemonic practices abroad. Beginning with the Cold War consensus in the 1950s, the study shows how hegemony at home and abroad promotes division in the culture. Mark E. Wildermuth is Dunagan Professor of English at the University of Texas Permian Basin in Odessa, Texas, USA, where he has taught since 1992. He has published articles in journals like The Journal of Popular Film and Television and Philosophy and Rhetoric. He has published 4 books: Blood in the Moonlight: Michael Mann and Information Age Cinema; Print, Chaos and Complexity: Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Media Culture; Gender, Science Fiction Television and the American Security State, 1958Present; and Feminism and the Western in Film and Television.

This book works to complicate and push against common arguments that the Western from its inception is an anti-feminist genre. By focusing on representations of women professionals in Westerns, it shows that women in cinematic and televisual Westerns sometimes do acquire agency and empowerment in the private and public realms, despite our culture's tendency to gender the former as feminine and the latter as solely masculine. The study reviews the relationship of these progressive Westerns to both explicit and latent feminist ideologies relevant to their times, as the films evolved from the 1930s to the twenty-first century.