2003 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
Performing Whiteness crosses the boundaries of film study to explore images of the white body in relation to recent theoretical perspectives on whiteness. Drawing on such diverse critical methodologies as postcolonial studies, feminist film criticism, anthropology, and phenomenology, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster examines a wide variety of films from early cinema to the present day in order to explore the ways in which American cinema imposes whiteness as a cultural norm, even as it exposes its inherent instability. In discussions that range from The Philadelphia Story to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Foster shows that, though American cinema is an all-white construct, there exists the possibility of a healthy resistance to cultural norms of race, gender, sexuality, and class.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Performing Whiteness
2. Inventing Whiteness
3. White Face, White Space
4. The Bad-White Body
5. Performing the “Good” White
6. Performing the “Bad” White
7. Performing White Otherness
Works Cited and Consulted
About the Author
Index
About the author
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska. Her previous books include
Captive Bodies: Postcolonial Subjectivity in Cinema, also published by SUNY Press, and
Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette, and Performance.
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