Herstories on Screen: Feminist Subversions of Frontier Myths

Kathleen Cummins

Published by Columbia University Press 2020

Herstories on Screen

Feminist Subversions of Frontier Myths

Kathleen Cummins

https://doi.org/10.7312/cumm18950

Overview
Contents

About this book

Herstories on Screen is a transnational study of feature narrative films from Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand/Aotearoa that deconstruct settler-colonial myths. Kathleen Cummins offers in-depth readings of ten works by a diverse range of women filmmakers, revealing how they skillfully deploy genre tropes.

Author / Editor information

Kathleen Cummins is a film professor in the Faculty of Animation, Arts, and Design at Sheridan College. She is also a filmmaker whose work has been broadcast and screened internationally.

Reviews

Berkeley Kaite, McGill University:
Herstories on Screen is a balanced and robust treatment of films by female directors who take up their home countries' national mythologies. Written in lucid prose, it engages with the feminist film theory canon and its revisions via queer, post-colonial and indigenous interrogations. Cummins deftly weaves theory with consistently astute textual analyses, making it an eminently teachable text. Urging the consideration of film as a political tool, this book addresses what these films do for representations of women, the subaltern, the maternal role, and landscape as metaphor, among many others.

Susan White, University of Arizona:
This compelling study explores how mainstream narrative films about former white-settler nations, in the hands of an emerging generation of female filmmakers, were reshaped into critiques of dominant frontier myth-histories. Herstories on Screen articulates how these directors explore the contradictions in the project of nation building, bringing to the forefront the roles of women—white, Black, and indigenous—whose stories have long been overlooked.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
INTRODUCTION: HERSTORIES IN THE COUNTER NARRATIVE TRADITION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. WOMEN’S STORYTELLING— NARRATIVE, GENRE, AND THE FEMALE VOICE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	20
2. DEBUNKING THE CULT OF TRUE WOMANHOOD/MOTHERHOOD ON THE FRONTIER Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	98
3. FEMINIST SYMBOLIC FRONTIER LANDSCAPES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
CONCLUSION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	241
APPENDIX: THE FILMS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	291
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 35 film stills

eBook

Published: May 18, 2020
ISBN: 9780231851299