<p> Ethnic identity can be subject to both passive and overt review, which has the potential to cause traumatic fracture of identity. I am a second generation American-Puerto Rican, which can be defined as a person born in the United States of native Puerto Rican ancestry. Personal identity is constructed in part via social and linguistic associations that work with, and against, the cohesive development of an individual&rsquo;s claim to his or her identity. From the standpoint of a non-fluent Spanish speaker of Puerto Rican descent, I analyze the connection between place, language, and in particular, face-to-face communication, as these aspects come together in developing/disassembling identity. The major focus of this thesis concerns the power of the face as a point of (mis)recognition between people, the site in which a confrontation of identity takes place, in conjunction with spoken language. </p><p> The face is the essential locus on the body for recognizing that the person before you is indeed a person; from that point forth, identity is revealed and awareness of subjectivity constructed. Stuart Hall discussed the construction of identity through the concepts of the <i>enlightened subject,</i> the <i>sociological subject,</i> and <i>the post-modern subject. </i> I will be referring to an individual&rsquo;s identity in terms of these three models, while focusing on ethnic and cultural associations. It should be understood that in my discussion of face, &ldquo;face&rdquo; is not comprised solely of what rests above one&rsquo;s shoulders; rather, the concept incorporates the entirety of an individual&rsquo;s physical representation. I will question the ways in which language shapes identity, and how culture(s) and society reinforce it. I will also explore the conflict that unfolds when one is denied ownership of the identity that one has established as true. This analysis incorporates philosophy and cultural theory, including, but not limited to: Emmanuel Levinas&rsquo; &ldquo;Face of the Other,&rdquo; which professes that we must not inflict conceptual violence on the face of the person standing before us; additionally, Gloria Anzald&uacute;a&rsquo;s theory of the ethnic face and <i>haciendo cara</i> (making face), which states that minorities (women in particular) must construct layers of masks in order to adapt, and to deflect persecution. </p><p> Language defines the borders of &ldquo;face,&rdquo; and urges us to construct a binary of correct and incorrect, true and false. However, a person&rsquo;s identity cannot be false, because subjectivity exists beyond language. In the context of this thesis, I re-frame the individual&rsquo;s frustrations with misrecognition of ethnic identity, through my focus on face and fluency, or lack thereof, in a particular spoken language. Through my video practice, I have forged a new pathway to explore these dualities. In a self-revelatory process, this project guides the viewer through a mixed media visualization of ethnic authentication and judgment.</p>

<p> This thesis exposes unconscious gender bias in actor training and the entertainment industry. Such exposure will aid teachers and industry professionals in identifying language and practices that perpetuate this prejudice, and ultimately, effect revisions, forging a new standard for good acting. I posit that images generated by an industry that continues to drive this bias through unequal opportunities for women, double standards, and the preeminence of the male gaze in cinematic practices, contribute to situating women as objects of desire, rather than as subjects who command professional equity and respect. I will introduce the science behind this long-standing problem and the need to reorient the brain toward gender equality, thereby offering means through which students, educators, and industry professionals can forge an equitable environment, one that empowers young women to take ownership of their presence in the entertainment industry and thus society&rsquo;s perception of them.</p>

<p> The themes of crime and justice have captured the attention of Americans for decades. These themes are frequently portrayed in Hollywood films. While these stories capture the attention of Americans, both young and old, they propagate messages about what justice is, how it should be accomplished, who should serve it, and who is worthy to receive it. These messages have important implications for how Americans come to understand the American criminal justice system and its procedures. Reflective of lived experience, films about crime and justice have often drawn upon the victimization of women as an exigency for telling tales about justice as related to females. <i>The Bounty Hunter</i> (2010), <i>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</i> (2011), <i> Les Mis&eacute;rables</i> (2012), and <i>Safe Haven</i> (2013) are analyzed using ideological criticism to reveal their ideological constructions of justice for women, what subject positions these films interpellate female audience members into, and how women, as interpellated by these ideologies, should engage in the criminal justice system.</p>

<p> In the search for understanding a future for our selves with the potential merging of strong Artificial Intelligence and humanoid robotics, this dissertation uses the figure of the android in science fiction and science fact as an evocative object. Here, I propose android theory to consider the philosophical, social, and personal impacts humanoid robotics and AI will have on our understanding of the human subject. From the perspective of critical posthumanism and cyborg feminism, I consider popular culture understandings of AI and humanoid robotics as a way to explore the potential effect of androids by examining their embodiment and disembodiment. After an introduction to associated theories of humanism, posthumanism, and transhumanism, followed by a brief history of the figure of the android in fiction, I turn to popular culture examples. First, using two icons of contemporary AI, Deep Blue, a chess playing program and Watson, a linguistic artificially intelligent program, I explore how their public performances in games evoke rich discussion for understanding a philosophy of mind in a non-species specific way. Next, I turn to the <i>Terminator</i> film series (1984-2009) to discuss how the humanoid embodiment of artificial intelligence exists in an uncanny position for our emotional attachments to nonhuman entities. Lastly, I ask where these relationships will take us in our intimate lives; I explore personhood and human-nonhuman relationships in what I call the nonhuman dilemma. Using the human-Cylon relationships in the reimagined <i>Battlestar Galactica </i> television series (2003-2009), the posthuman family make-over in the film Fido (2006), as well as a real-life story of men with their life-sized doll companions, as seen in the TLC reality television series <i>My Strange Addiction</i> (2010), I explore the coming dilemma of life with nonhuman humanoids.</p>

<p> This dissertation seeks to make sense of historicist media in America and the ideological work that they do. It examines a variety of discourses that inflect the texts examined. It focuses on representations of the Anglo-American past since this history, more than any other, is selling to American media consumers and has been for the last thirty years. Consequently, media about Anglo-American history provides vital clues as to what motivates the dominant culture&rsquo;s invocation of the past. </p><p> In order to gain the broadest perspective possible on how historicist media function in America, the texts this dissertation examines come from a variety of media, including television, film, a Renaissance festival, and an experiential history museum. For a similar reason, this dissertation explores three distinct historical locales that have been especially marketable in the United States: the English country house of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Renaissance England, and the American Revolution. </p><p> This dissertation argues that the media studied is structured by a contradictory desire for the sense of stability promised by notions of pastness and the sense of freedom, flexibility, and novelty promised by notions of modernity and mass production. As a result of these conflicting desires, historicist media in America can best be characterized as contemporary versions of what Elizabeth Outka described as the nineteenth-century aesthetic of the &ldquo;commodified authentic.&rdquo; Like the &ldquo;commodified authentic,&rdquo; contemporary historicist media offer to help consumers negotiate anxieties caused by rapid social, technological, and economic change by holding history and modernity in productive tension with one another. Whereas the anxieties addressed in the nineteenth century stemmed largely from the Industrial Revolution though, the anxieties negotiated in contemporary media about the past have to do with digitization, neoliberalization, and the global economic crisis of 2007&ndash;2008. However, nineteenth century and current examples of the &ldquo;commodified authentic&rdquo; are similar in that by turning to history as a source of stability, they tend to reinforce conservative values, even when they incorporate various forms of liberal social critique. As a result, this dissertation pays special attention to the discourses of class-, gender-, and racial privilege that inflect the media texts examined, particularly when considering what kind of communal American identity (a la Benedict Anderson) my sample texts imagine or imply.</p><p>

This paper means to examine a Chinese language blockbuster in comparison to an American counterpart. The point is to examine the cultural differences and similarities in two similar stories produced in two different production environments. Two films that display both remarkable similarities and differences due to their respective cultural context of production. Here David Bordwell’s narratological schematics is applied to investigate how a Chinese film using a similar approach to Hollywood storytelling differentiates itself. In conclusion, the storytelling and plot construction are slightly less sophisticated in the Chinese film, and the reliance on computer generated imagery plays a bigger part than the physical performances usually associated with Chinese language action-cinema. The result of this study also highlight the differences in the depiction of the detective character and the analysis also raises the question of how we could attribute the cultural differences that emerges in this analysis.

This study aims to investigate and understand the educational potential of using Nazi-propaganda films as teaching material in Swedish high schools. The study is rooted in the theory about what purpose different historical uses can have. The scientific method used was a literature study aimed to investigate, compile and develop arguments for the use of these films, using previous research. These were also integrated and compared with the curriculum provided by the The National Agency for Education. This resulted in different aspects worth noting. These aspects are film didactics, media literacy and the teaching of disturbing parts of history. Some teachers may consider it too controversial or upsetting for students to understand these films. But as studies suggest, history is not seldom upsetting. Some students also perceive themselves as untouched by propaganda material, because they already have acquired a sense of reading films and other historical documents. However, studies claim that students and teachers overestimate the students’ ability to analyze films used as a tool of propaganda. Some studies also theorize that more recent cases of crimes against humanity in different parts of the world is evident of this claim, meaning that the education about propaganda has in many ways failed. The conclusion is that Nazi-propaganda should not be disregarded as an obstacle, and the hope of this study is that history teachers will recognize its potential to create debates around historical uses and what repercussions these uses can have.

No description available.

Tutta Rolf’s career. Rolf was one of the greatest stars in 1930s Swedish cinema. She was also a popular stage actress, vaudeville performer and recording artist. Despite her prominence she has been largely neglected in scholarly work. This thesis aim to bring new knowledge about this underresearched star by conducting basic research. I situate her within the field of star studies by deploying Richard Dyer’s influential theory to abstract a method on how to look at the praxis of Tutta Rolf’s stardom. Thus, I deploy her films, newspapers, Filmjournalen and archival material to tell the story of her early career. My basic assumption, i.e. hypothesis is that there existed a Swedish star system in the 1930s. Earlier there has been a lack of research regarding a potential Swedish star system. Hence, this is an inductive study that will try to bring forward new knowledge about Tutta Rolf, Swedish stardom and its star system that may be used for future research.

The primary target for this thesis is to examine what characterizes Nordic slasher films. When the subgenre became successful in North America in the beginning of the 1980’s, the genre was almost nonexistent in the Nordic countries. When a boom of horror films emerged in the beginning of the new millennium almost every Nordic country within a couple of years had produced at least one slasher film each. To outline the purpose of this essay three research questions have been formed: (1) how do gender roles differ? (2) what narrative and stylistic features are used in the films? (3) how is gender specific violence represented? Since the essay aims at defining Nordic slasher films and not a specific country, at least one film from every Nordic country has been employed as a case study. Sweden is represented by Camp Slaughter (Martin Munthe, 2004) and The Drowning Ghost (Strandvaskaren, Mikael Håfström, 2004), Iceland by Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (Júlíus Kemp, 2009), which is the country´s very first horror film, Denmark by Room 205 (Kollegiet, Martin Barnewitz), Norway, where most of the horror films from this period were produced, by Cold Prey (Fritt vilt, Roar Uthaug, 2006), Cold Prey 2 (Fritt vilt II, Mats Stenberg, 2008) and Manhunt (Rovdyr, Patrik Syversen, 2008) while Finland is represented by Lake Bodom (Bodom, Taneli Mustonen, 2016). The analysis is based on research about the slasher films produced in North America, where the authors have pointed out two particular cycles: the classical, which extends from 1974 to 1996, and the postmodern which began with Scream in 1996. The Nordic slasher films are produced in the postmodern cycle, but, based on comments and the few surveys that have been done, the films are highly influenced by the classical genre cycle. My study shows that the Nordic slasher films employ conventions and features from both the North American cycles, but differ for various other reasons. First, the killer is not per se the main antagonist per se, he is just an extension of Nordic nature which is the real threat. Moreover, the last surviving character, the one who famously has been called the “final girl” (Clover), is represented in a more progressive manner, not being punished for having sex, drinking alcohol and doing drugs. And, finally, my thesis shows that there is no gender bias with regards to violence against individuals.