Feminist Phenomenology and the Film World of Agnès Varda

Through a discussion of Agnès Varda's career from 1954 to 2008 that focuses particularly on La Pointe Courte (1954), L'Opéra‐Mouffe (1958), The Gleaners and I (2000), and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), this article considers the connections between Varda's filmmaking and her femaleness. It proposes that two aspects of Varda's cinema—her particularly perceptive portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment—make a feminist existential‐phenomenological approach to her films particularly fruitful. Drawing both directly on the work of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and on some recent film‐ and feminist‐theoretical texts that have employed his insights, it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy in The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda's blurring of fiction and documentary, and the dialectical relationship of people with their environment often observed in her cinema. It concludes that both Varda's female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement, and relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which Varda's own subjectivity is registered within her film‐texts.     

African American Women Survivors of Sexual Assault:

More attention has recently focused on the psychological experiences of women survivors of sexual assault. However, little work has examined the experiences of African American women survivors, particularly with regard to the impact of race and class on survivors' experiences. We address these limitations by presenting a socio-historical analysis of African American women's rape experiences. This analysis considers the relationship between sexual and economic oppression in African American women's lives. Second, we discuss the influences of these socio-historical factors on African American women's post-assault experiences. Finally, recommendations for therapy with African American women survivors are provided.     

Honor and I: Differential relationships between honor and self-esteem in three cultural groups

Honor is often defined as one's self-esteem through one's own eyes as through the eyes of others. This definition assumes that endorsing honor values is universally related to one's self-esteem. Yet, prior work shows that the salience of honor in individuals' lives differs across cultures, which implies that honor would be differentially related to self-esteem across cultural groups. In the present study, we examined the contribution of three honor components (integrity, reputation, family honor) to the prediction of self-esteem in three cultural groups (Dutch, European American, Turkish). Consistent with prior work that describes the Dutch and (Northern) European Americans as low-honor groups, we found that none of the honor components were associated with self-esteem in these groups. In the Turkish group, which has been described as a high-honor group, honor integrity was associated with higher levels of self-esteem and family honor was associated with lower levels of self-esteem. Taken together, the findings indicate that honor cannot be universally defined as one's self-esteem, since the salience of honor endorsement for one's self-esteem differs across cultural groups.     

Representative Women: Slavery,Citizenship, and Feminist Theory in Du Bois's “Damnation of Women”

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's “The Damnation of Women,” which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.     

Race,sex, and juvenile inmate roles

Mate selection researchers have long assumed that surveyed listings of ''ideal traits'' indicate strong preferences by women for virtuous males. This assumption is contradicted, however, by increasing evidence of sexual abuse in dating relationships and suggests the possibility that the hero-centric Western culture of romance greatly complicates the mating process. A review of literary heroism revealed extraordinary individualism. Notably, George Gordon Byron's protagonists ('Byronic Heroes') are men of stupendous assertiveness and uncertain morality; derivatives abound in contemporary American popular culture. A comparison was made of three typologies; the third, domestic batterers being ''stand-ins'' for abusive dates. Byronic traits were found to much more closely resemble those of batterers than of hypothetical ideal mates. Thus, the development of intense admiration of fictional Byronic Heroes during socialization could lead to an admiration of same traits in encountered males with or even tragic results.     

The Visual Foucauldian: Institutional Coercion and Surveillance in Frederick Wiseman's Multi-handicapped Documentary Series

During the mid 1980s, the renowned American documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman produced a four-part series of films that sought to record the operations of institutions in Talladega, Alabama, devoted to the care and training of people with disabilities. These films—designated as the Multi-handicapped Series—have received much less attention than Wiseman's earlier work, as if films about disability mark a drastic departure from his previous award-winning productions, such as Titicut Follies (1965) and Hospital (1970). The Multi-handicapped Series takes up general categories of disabled populations as discrete documentary topics, Deaf (1986), Blind (1986), Multi-handicapped (1986) and Adjustment & Work (1986) as opposed to a specific location as in his earlier films. As a result, the latter series of films identify social and interpersonal structures developed in the name of specific conditions. Like Foucault's research on disciplinary tactics, Wiseman's films seek out many of the segregated social spaces typically occupied by persons classified as deviant: prisons, hospitals, charity networks, sheltered workshops, resident facilities, and vocational training structures. The Multi-handicapped Series focuses on the activities of professions and practitioners in education, administration, and therapy, as well as the institutional roles designed for bodies marked as disabled. Unlike its 19th century predecessor classification, feebleminded, the latter twentieth century U.S. policy answer has been waged as a matter of dividing disabilities into a binary structure of orthopedic or cognitive categories. Such a development has left many crossover bodies in a diagnostic no-body's-land. To analyze the history of these developments, this essay recognizes the formation of today's disability category as an effect of new regimes of power; a form of domination based upon the application of particularized diagnostic pathologies that provide the basis for cordoning off bodies which fail to fit neatly within the cognitive/orthopedic binary. As documents of the social spaces that are occupied by disabled people, Wiseman's films offer a rare contemplation of institutional practices and their application to populations viewed as nonnormative.     

Are there limits to collectivism? Culture and children's reasoning about lying to conceal a group transgression

This study explored the effects of collectivism on lying to conceal a group transgression. Seven‐, 9‐, and 11‐year‐old US and Chinese children (N=374) were asked to evaluate stories in which protagonists either lied or told the truth about their group's transgression and were then asked about either the protagonist's motivations or justification for their own evaluations. Previous research suggests that children in collectivist societies such as China find lying for one's group to be more acceptable than do children from individualistic societies such as the United States. The current study provides evidence that this is not always the case: Chinese children in this study viewed lies told to conceal a group's transgressions less favourably than did US children. An examination of children's reasoning about protagonists' motivations for lying indicated that children in both countries focused on an impact to self when discussing motivations for protagonists to lie for their group. Overall, results suggest that children living in collectivist societies do not always focus on the needs of the group. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mechanisms used by young children in the making of empathic judgments

Forty-four preschool children ranging from three to five years of age received a series of stones in which the protagonists experience happiness, sadness, or fear These protagonists were portrayed as either similar or dissimilar to the child, and the situations depicted were either familiar or unfamiliar to him/her as well The children's task was to infer the emotions experienced by the protagonists Results indicate that children were more accurate in judging the emotions of similar target persons than they were for dissimilar ones Familiarity with the situation, on the other hand, had no effect on accuracy Children were more accurate in identifying happiness and sadness than they were in judging fear, and age was positively related to judgmental accuracy for the former two but not for the latter These results help to resolve the controversy arising from earlier studies of empathy development which failed to disentangle the similarity and familiarity dimensions     

WAR FANTASIES: MEMORY,TRAUMA AND ETHICS IN ARI FOLMAN'S WALTZ WITH BASHIR

This paper explores the relationship between memory, trauma and ethics in the Israeli war film Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008). I argue that Waltz with Bashir highlights a traumatic rupture between history and memory, and points to the decline of national collective memory in Israel. In the film, the war is represented as the private memory of a distinct social group—soldiers who fought in the First Lebanon War—and is no longer a collective memory, a lived and practised tradition that conditions Israeli society. The film is constructed as a kind of lieu de mémoire that houses repressed traumatic events that have been denied entry into the nation's historical narrative, and which the protagonists feel duty bound to remember. This detachment from the national collective memory draws the film into a timeless world of dreams, hallucinations and fantasies. The film does not aspire to reveal the true details of the war. Rather, it is concerned with memory and the very process of remembering, as well as with the ethical questions that they pose to both the film's protagonists and its viewers. These questions are reflected both in the film's narrative and in its unique aesthetics.     

Why drive? Psychoanalytic reflections on the film Never let me go

The author presents a psychoanalytic interpretation of Mark Romanek's film Never Let Me Go, which concerns a society in which young adult clones have their internal organs ‘harvested’ for transplantation. Following some general remarks on the method of psychoanalytic film interpretation, strongly emphasising the aesthetics of form and artistic elements specific to film, the author develops the notion that through its cinematic perspectives and shots, Never Let Me Go dramatizes a specific relationship between the sublime and solitude. The film therefore deals with a particular intrinsic difference between expanse and constraint, as well as the limited and the eternal. This leads the viewer to participate directly in a film‐specific way in the inner conflicts at work both in the film's theme and in its protagonists. In terms of aesthetic content, these conflicts are revealed as those of an inescapable thanatological theme that is essentially intertwined with an erotic one. The film shows how love, sexuality, and internal and external images arise from thanatological forces, and it simultaneously provides a way of sublating them (Hegel's Aufhebung) – that is, the film itself represents a benign drive fusion. The film's protagonists, however, struggle with a lack of early parenting and thus with the helplessness of facing individual drive development and the longing for a holding object. Hence, in formal terms, the film deals with the sublime, and, as I will show, it also deals with sublimation at the level of its content.     

Relationships Between Dimensions of Depressive Experience and Perceptions of the Lives of People in General

This study examines relationships between depression and perceptions of the lives of people in general. One hundred fourteen college students completed the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (Radloff, 1977), the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (Blatt, D'Afflitti, & Quinlan, 1976), and two instruments that asked subjects to make judgments about the frequency of various positive and negative outcomes in other people's lives. Highly Dependent and highly Self-Critical women perceived people's lives as characterized by much misfortune, failure, and unhappiness. Unexpectedly, Efficacy scores, which are negatively related to depression, were also associated with negative perceptions of people's lives in women. Among the men, overall depression was not related to perceptions of how frequently people succeed at specific, concrete life tasks, but depressed subjects perceived others as experiencing a tow level of subjective well-being. Implications for the notion of a depressive negative bias toward the self are discussed.     

Nonsense on Stilts? Wittgenstein,Ethics, and the Lives of Animals

Wittgenstein is often invoked in philosophical disputes over the ethical justifiability of our treatment of animals. Many protagonists believe that Wittgenstein's philosophy points to a quantum difference between human and animal nature that arises out of humans' linguistic capacity. For this reason – its alleged anthropocentrism – animal liberationists tend to dismiss Wittgenstein's philosophy, whereas, for the same reason, anti‐liberationists tend to embrace it. I endorse liberationist moral claims, but think that many on both sides of the dispute fail to grasp the import of Wittgenstein's philosophy. My argument proceeds through close engagement with Michael Leahy's Against Liberation, which makes extensive use of Wittgenstein's ‘notion of language‐games’ as an ‘essential methodological aid’ in its defence and justification of the moral status quo. Leahy's understanding and application of that method exemplifies an entrenched interpretative stance in the wider Wittgensteinian scholarship which I seek to counter. This enables me to show that far from entailing conservatism, as some of his critics and followers contend, Wittgenstein's philosophical method is just as conducive to radical moral and political critique as it is to any other normative position.     

A Kenotic Struggle for Dignity

Although Booker T. Washington stands outside the theological canon, his writings offer a pragmatic theology that connects the desire for dignity to a kenotic Christology through an ethic of unceasing work. While Washington's project to improve the lives of African Americans in the Jim Crow–era South was severely compromised by political circumstances, problems within his theology of work made his project especially susceptible to those circumstances. The tragedy of Washington's theology stems from his making dignity contingent upon work being recognized as useful by a worker's community. His kenotic ideal of “Christlike” work can actually degrade workers, if their community refuses to recognize their work's merit. Workers’ anxiety about dignity causes them to pour themselves into their work, but a racist society sees African American workers as inherently undignified. Even without Jim Crow's pervasive violence, the postindustrial reappearance of economic doctrines that characterized Washington's era makes his theological ethic relevant again.     

Beyond disposition: The processing consequences of explicit and implicit invocations of empathy

People often report empathizing with the trials and tribulations of others. While some accounts characterize empathy as a general tendency that individuals possess to differing degrees, an alternative, understudied view is that empathy emerges out of similarity-driven matches between potential targets and empathizers. The current project examines whether these matches, even when not explicitly identified, influence experiences of empathy, and whether that empathy has consequences for comprehension experiences. In two experiments, participants read stories describing protagonists as highly extraverted, highly neurotic, or neither; participants' personalities were also measured along these dimensions. Personality scores predicted participants' self-reported empathy for story protagonists, over and above measures of general empathy. Similarity between readers and protagonists also enhanced more subtle evaluations of the events befalling empathic targets. The effects of empathy have important implications for mental simulation, the motivated pursuit of knowledge, and persuasion.     

Reinforcement or compensation? The effects of parents' work and financial conditions on adolescents' work values during the Great Recession

The Great Recession brought many changes to the work and financial lives of American families. Little is known, however, about how changes in parental work conditions in recessionary times influence children's vocational development. Drawing on data from the Youth Development Study, we examine whether parents' recessionary experiences shape adolescents' work values. The findings indicate that adolescents' work values are shaped through a cross-generational reinforcement model; both extrinsic and intrinsic values are stronger when parental work conditions are more rewarding. In an exception to this pattern, unemployment among parents with low levels of education (high school degrees or less) is positively associated with children's extrinsic and intrinsic orientations, more consistent with a compensation model.     

Life satisfaction among Iranian and American graduate students

This study aimed to find out if there were differences in the life satisfaction of Iranian students (who came to the United States after the Iranian revolution in 1979) as compared with American students. It also aimed at identifying students' perceptions of some of the variables, like social network, competence and stress, that affect the quality of their lives. Ninety-four Iranian students who were attending the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, and California State University, Long Beach, during the academic year of 1986-87 participated in this study. Multivariate analysis of variance was employed to compare the scores of the two groups, Iranians and Americans, on fifteen life satisfaction subscale scores. The results indicated that for both Iranians and Americans, perceptions of life satisfaction correlated significantly with perception of competence, social network, and hopes for the future. American subjects showed more satisfaction with their competence than Iranians. The Iranians, however, reported greater availability of social network resources than Americans. The results also indicated that both groups are tolerating the stress in their lives relatively well and that both are optimistic about their futures with regard to most aspects of their lives. Implications of these findings for cross-cultural counselling and the usefulness of a multivariate concept of life satisfaction are discussed.     

Birds of a feather bully together: Group processes and children's responses to bullying

Recent research has shown that a group‐level analysis can inform our understanding of school bullying. The present research drew on social identity theory and intergroup emotion theory. Nine‐ to eleven‐year olds were randomly assigned to the same group as story characters who were described as engaging in bullying, as being bullied, or as neither engaging in bullying nor being bullied. Participants read a story in which a bully, supported by his or her group, was described as acting unkindly towards a child in a different group. Gender of protagonists and the bully's group norm (to be kind or unkind to other children) were varied. Identification affected responses to the bullying incident, such that those who identified more highly with each group favoured this group. Moreover, children's group membership predicted the group‐based emotions they reported, together with the associated action tendencies. Implications for understanding the processes underlying bullying behaviour are discussed.     

The two Bernard Berenson cousins: The interplay among immigration,culture, and narcissism

The lives of two 19th century cousins, both of whom changed their names to Bernard Berenson, are considered from historical and psychodynamic perspectives, using a psychobiographical method. The Jewish cousins immigrated separately to Boston from Lithuania in 1875 and 1882. One cousin, later calling himself simply B.B., became a world‐renowned art historian. The other Bernard became a misanthrope after feeling deeply humiliated by his cousin's family in Boston. Many biographies were written about the famous B.B. The only histories of his cousin Bernard were family stories, as he was the author's great‐grandfather. The intersecting lives of these cousins are discussed. Both men faced the challenges of immigration as well as intense anti‐Semitism and prejudice in each country in which they lived. These cultural and historical conditions interacted with the cousins’ narcissistic vulnerabilities. Their lives demonstrate different manifestations of narcissistic suffering, with B.B's being more consistent with the construct of a “grandiose narcissist” and Bernard's being more consistent with that of a “closet narcissist.” The life stories of these two cousins with the same name offers an intriguing instance of a complicated relationship among immigration, prejudice, and narcissism and case examples of the manifestation of how narcissistic suffering can influence lives.     

(Re)presenting: Muslims on North American television

This article describes and analyzes the portrayal of Muslims on several North American television shows. Greatest detail is given to the two seasons of Sleeper Cell, the first show on American television created to deal with Muslim lives post 9/11. I deal briefly with Muslim characters on Oz for a look at portrayals of Muslim life pre 9/11. I also mention Muslim characters in Lost and 24 as well as some films to add further insights to my argument. These television dramas are compared with two comedies, Aliens in America as well as Little Mosque on the Prairie, the first Canadian television show to examine Muslim lives. The conclusion is that in dramas, Muslims are not recognized on American television as citizens of their own country, but instead are portrayed as dangerous immigrants with a religion that is both alien and wicked. Moreover, the religion as it is lived out on the television drama is one of violence—there seems to be no other substantive practice that embodies Islamic faith. The case is very different with regard to the television comedy.     

Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train and Leconte's Man on a Train: Denying and Befriending the Shadow

This paper offers an analysis of two films made 50 years apart. Both films deal primarily with the shadow archetype and with a pair of male characters who are at once opposites and doubles of one another and whose lives collide or converge in fateful ways. The relationship between persona and shadow archetypes is explored in both films, as are the negative and positive contents in the shadow. Hitchcock pairs a politically ambitious tennis player with a charming but psychopathic killer in order to examine how denying the shadow through repression and projection leads to dangerous and self-destructive shadow eruptions. Hitchcock's main character never fully acknowledges or integrates his shadow and never accepts his complicity in the murder commited by his double. French director Patrice Leconte pairs two unlikely characters, a retired teacher and a world-weary gangster. As their friendship deepens, each character comes to understand how his very different life represents the unlived life of the other man. Acknowledging their differences, learning from one another, exchanging gifts and roles and maintaining the tension of opposites, both men enrich their lives and integrate their shadows. The dynamics of the shadow archetype—the success or failure of characters to bring to consciousness, acknowledge, and integrate their darker sides—is the focus of this essay and the central concern of these two psychologically complex, entertaining films.