Bringing Up Baby Film Friday This week I have been delivering a series of four lectures on “Women in Film” at the University of Ljubljana, where I was twice a visiting Fulbright lecturer. Tuesday’s talk was originally to have been about Katharine Hepburn and screwball comedies, particularly Bringing Up Baby (1938). Because people evinced an […]
Tag Archives: gender
Laughing at Male Anxieties–or Not
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Crossing the Great Gender Divide
In last Friday’s post on Twelfth Night, I talked about how Shakespeare uses cross-dressing to acknowledge that men and women have dimensions to them that are not acknowledged by the standard male and female categories. I understood this about the play at an early age. In a past post on Twelfth Night, I describe how […]
The Temporary Transvestite Comedy
Brown and Lemmon Film Friday Sometimes my different classes overlap in interesting ways. I am currently teaching Twelfth Night in my British Literature survey class and Some Like It Hot in my senior-level film genre class. Thanks to an article on the Billy Wilder classic by film scholar Chris Straayer, I can now label both […]
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Striving to Emulate Little Lord Fauntleroy
Children, when they start developing a sense of self, discover that there is a preset gender program they are expected to conform to. For some this is not a problem, but others feel constrained by their assigned designation. It’s not always that girls want to be boys and boys girls. Sometimes they just want to […]
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Shakespeare’s Cross-Dressing Fantasies
When I was a child, I was fascinated by works containing characters of ambiguous gender. Specifically, I was drawn to images of boys who either looked like girls or who were, unbeknownst to them, actually girls. I was also drawn to images of girls (and women) who passed themselves off as guys. The prevailing culture […]
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