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Dissertation Information for Corinn Columpar

NAME:
- Corinn Columpar

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Women's Studies

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (2002)

ADVISORS:
- Matthew H. Bernstein

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Pamela M. Hall
- David A. Cook
- Gaylyn Studlar

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Hybridity as Spectacle: Borders and Their Transgression in Contemporary Cinema

Abstract: Many contemporary critics consider cultural hybridity to be the quintessential postmodern experience insofar as it conditions the erosion of boundaries between assumedly discrete identities and precipitates a re-visioning of the self as dynamic rather than static, multiplicitous rather than homogeneous, and mutable rather than fixed. In "Hybridity as Spectacle: Borders and Their Transgression in Contemporary Cinema," I engage with this much theorized concept by exploring the representation of cross-cultural exchange and identification in certain contemporary films from the United States and New Zealand. In featuring hybridized characters who, for a variety of reasons, transgress cultural boundaries, these films play with and at the very limits of certain categories of identity. Thus they are a particularly apt lens through which to view these categories as well as the assumptions--about, for example, the "authenticity" of culture and the "essential" nature of identity--that sustain them.

More specifically, this project takes as its focus the role that gender and race play in these representations. Given that male and female, white and non-white people assume different roles within community life and are represented in established iconographic traditions in very distinct ways, cultural hybridity on screen can assume many guises (such as imitation, integration, assimilation, or mockery) and produce multiple effects (ranging from the erasure of difference to the recognition of heterogeneity), depending on who embodies it. Thus, central to my inquiry are the following issues: the effect that a character's race and gender have on the way that hybridity is deployed visually, narratively, and discursively; the effect that hybridization, in turn, has on the presumed fixity of gender and racial categories and the prescribed rigidity of gender roles and racial norms; and, finally, the extent to which cinematic representations of hybridity can challenge or even subvert those iconographic traditions and looking relations (e.g., "the male gaze" and "the colonial gaze") that have historically served to naturalize difference within cinema and visual culture at large.

MPACT Scores for Corinn Columpar

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-02-03 00:32:21

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