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My dissertation investigates the textual, intertextual, and contextual aspects of the Asian films that I identify as the 'New' Asian female ghost films; I focus closely on the films' visualizations of the monstrous feminine and other gendered/gendering representations. I examine how the Asian countries' traditions of female ghost filmmaking, cultural heritages (such as the religions of Buddhism and Confucianism, folktales, legends, myths, plays, and paintings), and other generic conventions for cinematic horror influence the particular 'hybrid' representational modes of the 'monstrous-feminine' in the 'New' Asian female ghost films. My dissertation also considers the ways in which the newly-revived female ghost films in East Asia and some Southeast Asian countries reflect the local people's anxieties about the 'compressed modernity' that resulted from the Asian economic crisis and some gendered parts of the relevant social discourse. In terms of the Asian genre's hybridity, I examine this significant feature as one of the grounds to explain the films' global popularity, especially in relation to the current trend of Hollywood's remaking of the Asian films. My dissertation, through a case study of four 'New' Asian female ghost films (Ju-On, Shutter, The Eye, A Tale of Two Sisters), responds to the question of how the discussed historical and contextual elements involved with the emergence and development of the 'New' Asian female ghost films and the culturally reciprocal relationships of the Asian films with other American/Western horror films are concretely reflected in the gender representations present in the individual films. I also analyze the American remakes of the four Asian films for the purpose of exploring the specific transformations that take place in the reworked versions, especially in terms of the monstrous feminine images and other representations divided along the lines of sex and gender. I postulate several factors that have influenced the transformations, such as the involved producers' and filmmakers' own readings of the differences and otherness in the original Asian texts; these individuals' own knowledge and assumptions about honor filmmaking; Hollywood conventions of the cinematic horror genre; and Western ideas about the geopolitical place of Asia: Asian cities and nations, and Asian women.

This dissertation interrogates the intertextual and intercultural exchanges that, since the 19th century, have consistently led to the uniform, exoticized, and limiting literary and cinematic construction of the Roma as freedom-loving misunderstood outcasts with outstanding musical skills. The formation and reiteration of these images is presented as the result of four key political and cultural moments: the emergence of nationalism as an ideology in the 19th century; the genesis of the motion picture as a dominant medium in the early 20th century; the cultural and ideological East-West dichotomy created during the Cold War; and, finally, the rapid development of new media and technologies (DVD, Internet, etc.), as well as new modes of production and distribution related to the opening of inter-European borders in a post-Cold-War world context. A number of literary and cinematic texts that illustrate these representational shifts are examined in roughly chronological order. In the 19th century, Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, Mérimée's Carmen, and Pushkin's "The Gypsies" were critical to the establishment of the image of the "Gypsy" as a traveling dancer, and as part of an interethnic romantic triangle. This image was then visualized in early cinematic adaptations of these texts, particularly through interpretations of the "Gypsy" embodied by the Hollywood star system in the 1930s and 1940s, including performances by Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, and Orson Welles that set the tone for later portrayals. Although such performances and ideological constructs were denounced by Cold-War-era Communist ideology, they were nonetheless reproduced in Eastern European cinematic variants, and became particularly prominent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as revealed in the work of Yugoslav (Petrović, Paskaljević) and Soviet (Loteanu, Blank) directors popular with East bloc audiences. In contemporary international cinema, French-Algerian-Romani director Tony Gatlif's and Bosnian-Serb Emir Kusturica's "Gypsy films" attempt a layered, multicultural approach to Romani representation, but fail to avoid earlier romanticized depictions of the ethnic group as carefree non-national musicians. The dissertation concludes by outlining the ways in which American, European, and even Asian cinematic and televisual texts continue to recycle 19 th century literary representations in current media narratives within a globalized culture.

This study investigates the transitioning terms of lesbian visibility and identity in the distinctive spatio-temporal context of Northampton, Massachusetts in the 1980s. Drawing on interviews with a diversified sampling of lesbian-, bisexual-, and queer-identified participants, I consider the coalescing of two lesbian communal formations – a social community and a social audience – as mediating sites for the interrelations between subculture and dominant culture. Informed by the literatures and methods of queer theory, cultural studies, and feminist film criticism, I examine the 1980s queer crossover from lesbian subcultural separatism to mitigated assimilation by the end of the decade. The 1980s crossover was a constellation of interlocking factors manifested through the entrance into national visibility of gay liberatory and feminist politics, the incorporation of overt lesbian sexuality into Hollywood and independent films, and the surfacing of the conservative and feminist backlashes alongside “Reaganomics.” These converged in an anti-lesbian backlash produced in Northampton in the 1980s through the interrelations between the rapid revitalization of the city’s downtown and the increasing visibility and concentration of the lesbian population. The emergence into public visibility of a lesbian social community and a lesbian social audience in 1980s Northampton prefigured questions about the desirability of a goal of cultural assimilation for lesbian and gay people along with concerns about the role of consumption in the assimilative process that were to become important to LGBT politics in the 1990s and 2000s. In this project, I consider the multidimensional and conflictual aspects of assimilation as well as the gender-specificities of lesbian film consumption and the lesbian Sex Wars as part of the crossover from subcultural separatism to mitigated assimilation. In spite of the strides in the acceptance of the lesbian population in Northampton in the 1980s, I argue that such changes were laden with tensions negotiated through the contradictions between appearances of tolerance and acceptance versus experiences of discrimination and violence. The constellation of factors that manifested in the 1980s queer crossover provided symbolic materials not only for a realignment of lesbian subjectivity, but also for a realignment of heterosexual subjectivity.

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