Reading and Writing Skills for
Students of Literature in English:
Postwar; Postmodern; Postcolonial
Enric Monforte
Jacqueline Hurtley
Bill Phillips
Gurinder Chadha
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http://www.gho-englisch.de
Filmography:
• Bhaji on the Beach (1993)
• What’s Cooking? (2000)
• Bend it Like Beckham (2002)
• Bride and Prejudice (2004)
• Paris, je t’aime (2006)
• Angus, Thongs, and
Perfect Snogging
(2008)
• It’s a Wonderful Afterlife
(2010)
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Bend It Like Beckham
• Bending the ball
• Gender-bending
Gender as a construct
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Who says?
“All I'm saying is, there's a reason why Sporty
Spice is the only one without a fella!”
What is the
significance of
these words?
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Female vs. Feminine
• Female: a matter of biology
• Feminine: a social construct (patterns of
sexuality and behaviour imposed by cultural and
social norms)
• Femininity: a cultural construct
Toril Moi, “Feminist, Female, Feminine.” The Feminist
Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary
Criticism. Eds. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore.
Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989.
• “One is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes
one”.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. New York: Vintage, 1973
(1949), p. 301.
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And Therefore
• Male
• Masculine
• Masculinity
Defining Gender
• “[A] social category imposed on a sexed body.”
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988.
• “Gender out not to be construed as a stable identity
or locus of agency from which various acts follow;
rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in
time, instituted in an exterior space through a
stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is
produced through the stylization of the body and,
hence, must be understood as the mundane way in
which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of
various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding
gendered self.”
• “If gender attributes … are … performative, then
these attributes effectively constitute the identity they
are said to express or reveal.”
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York and London: Routledge, 1990, pp.140-41.
• Gender becomes political
• An exhaustive revision of gender roles seems to
be the most effective way of changing the power
relations between men and women
• Towards abolishing gender stereotypes
The view of gender in Bend It Like
Beckham
• Which view of gender does the film encourage?
• Look for examples of the notion of gender as a
social construct in both its male and female
characters
Race: Multicultural Britain?
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The absence of sexuality
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"While Chadha presents Jess and Jules as brave
and independent 21st century women, the
director then mistakenly gussies things up with a
steady stream of shallow (and, for most girls,
unattainable) sexualized images."
-- Nick Schager, Slant Magazine
Do you agree?
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The invisibility
of lesbianism
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The
presence of
the closet
In favour of Bend It Like Beckham
• Overcoming race barriers (Jess, Jess’s father,
Joe)
• Overcoming gender barriers (Jess, Jules)
A critique of Bend It Like Beckham
• Absence of sexuality
• Invisibility of lesbianism
• Tony’s homosexuality: condemned to be in the
closet
• Treatment of race
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