Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls examines the bizarre and fascinating range of gender portrayals in film at the end of the twentieth century. In order to view the screened face of gender in bold new ways, the contributors cover a wide variety of cinematic forms and styles--from the boy-girls of Hong Kong cinema to the on-screen modesty of post-revolutionary Iran to the New Hollywood's treatment of homosexuality, female power, and male intellectuality. Throughout, the works of important filmmakers are analyzed, including Ridley Scott, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Woody Allen, Rakhshan...

Celluloid Nationalism and Other Melodramas looks at representation and rebellion in times of national uncertainty. Moving from mid-century Mexican cinema to recent films staged in Los Angeles and Mexico City, Susan Dever analyzes melodrama's double function as a genre and as a sensibility, revealing coincidences between movie morals and political pieties in the civic-minded films of Emilio Fernandez, Matilde Landeta, Allison Anders, and Marcela Fernandez Violante. These filmmakers' rationally and emotionally engaged cinema--offering representations of indigenous peoples and poor urban women...

Focusing on two film traditions not normally studied together, Maria Pramaggiore examines more than two dozen Irish and African American films, including Do the Right Thing, In the Name of the Father, The Crying Game, Boyz N the Hood, The Snapper, and He Got Game, arguing that these films foreground practices of character identification that complicate essentialist notions of national and racial identity. The porous sense of self associated with moments of identification in these films offers a cinematic counterpart to W. E. B. Du Bois's potent concept of double consciousness, an...

Dancing on the White Page examines the popular autobiographies of six well-known Black women entertainers--Diahann Carroll, Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Whoopi Goldberg, and Mary Wilson--and makes a case for adding Black celebrity autobiography to the African American literary canon. As she explores these women's fascinating stories, Kwakiutl L. Dreher reveals how each one improvises the choreography of her life to survive and thrive in the film, television, and music industries, as well as the politically charged environment of the Black community, most specifically...