Constructing Gender
The Girl Who Goes to College: Gender and Education in the Ladies' Home Journal
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cheyanne Cortez
During the turn-of-the-last-century, the American Girl archetype permeated American mass culture as an icon of modern female sexuality and a tool of manipulation, redefining and reinforcing male-dominant gender roles. The American Girl was a mass-produced phenomenon utilized most effectively in the pages of the Ladies' Home Journal, the unpretentious and affordable magazine that appealed to American middle-class. My examination of the Journal, between the years of 1889 and 1917 – the tenure of its most influential editor, Edward W. Bok – is an investigation into the development and distribution of American women’s identities through the mass print media at the turn of the last century. My study is a consideration of the American Girl who goes to college: the College Girl. These young women, who pursue higher education, are presented in mass-media as commodities for consumption by an interested public. My paper argues that, displayed on the covers and within the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal, the use of the College Girl was as a benign character whose purpose is to assuage rising anxieties of gender roles that were being blurred because of women’s increased activity in the public sphere, the call for women’s suffrage, and their desire for higher education (whether they finish college was irrelevant).
When a Man Holds a Baby: Exploring the Pictorial Relationship of Men Cradling Infants in Iconography and Film
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kenneth DiMaggio
The image of a woman holding a newborn is ubiquitous across many cultures, ranging from the Eastern Orthodox icons depicting Mary holding an infant Jesus to Inuit soapstone carvings of mothers holding swaddled newborns. Such an image has also become a fully secularized icon, such as Dorothea Lange's famous Depression era photo "Migrant Mother." What is given lesser iconographic depiction, however, are men holding babies. In an era when more men are undertaking deeper roles in raising children, images celebrating such activity have yet to catch up. Though not as widely depicted as the image of the mother holding a child, there is strong historical iconic precedent of men holding infants, such as the religious figures Simeon and St. Anthony holding the Christ Child. The image of a man holding a baby has also recently gotten a secular, popular-culture depiction in the 2005 film, Tstosi (where the man holding the infant happens to be a young criminal who has inadvertently kidnapped this newborn). Whether saints or sinners, men have been holding babies for a long time, and how they are depicted can also reveal the lesser known gender relationship men have with infants, a role that is becoming culturally acceptable today.
How Louise Won the Fight Before the First Punch Was Thrown: Contesting Representations of Violence, Gender and Military Combat through a Deconstructivist Film Making Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kirsten Anna Adkins
In a 2019 reality show, Special Air Service (SAS) recruit Louise challenged Nathan to a fight. Nathan punched Louise in the head. The task was described as an exercise in equality. "Nowhere is the notion of war as a man's game more entrenched than in state militaries" (Basham 2016). "Simply put the infantry will be more effective in war if we include the best talent our country can breed - male and female" (MOD 2018). In 2016, women were invited to take up "close with and kill the enemy" fighting roles in the British military. The Ministry of Defense said these changes demonstrated equal opportunities. In the same year, the cultural theorist Victoria Basham wrote, "the relationship between armed forces and masculinities is possibly the most salient and cross-culturally stable aspect of gendered politics." But are these representations either stable or entrenched? This paper focuses on a deconstructivist methodology through which I explore instabilities associated with the gender construction of military warriors on British television. In some of the original films that I deconstruct, masculinities are conveyed through comforting motifs of tea and belonging. In others, female soldiers perform hand to hand combat and physical endurance roles. This paper outlines an interdisciplinary inquiry, using art and film making practice, that critiques the ways in which themes of equality and inclusion are adopted for the promotion of military force.
