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‘Intimacy and Distance' - domestic servants in Latin American women’s cinema: La mujer sin cabeza and El niño pez
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Introduction:Utopian Tropes and Troubled Teens
No full textIntroduction to Stone, R. & Shaw, D. (eds) (2024) Sex Education: Different Ways, New Rules. Bloomsbury. This introduction will describe the context of the show and track the storylines and main character arcs throughout the first four seasons. It will outline and examine the exceptional range of identities that are explored in the show as they are expressed in terms of sexuality and gender as well as the show’s rare sensitivity to matters of age, race, social exclusion and disparate, even antagonistic youth cultures. It will focus too on concerns about authenticity in the language, actions and interactions of the characters, while also considering the complex matrix of aesthetics and settings, which create a collage of modern-day Britain as a kind of mid-Atlantic post-Hughesian teen dream that is tangibly utopian but also uncannily ideal. Indeed, the borderline surrealism of the show is emphasised herein, with identification of those anachronisms such as dated household appliances and automobiles contrasting with the retro fashions and melange of musical styles on the soundtrack. The introduction will emphasise the peculiarity of Sex Education, which posits an American-style high school in rural South Wales, thus becomes its own metaphor for the self-determination of its teenage characters, whose friendships are at least equal to their sexual experiences in the formation of their adult selves. Whereas for some critics this otherworldliness of the series results in its dissolution and lack of portent, this introduction will contend that the fantastical nature of the series is essential to the effective realisation of a worldview that is hormonally febrile and precociously anxious about growing up. The introduction will also describe the main characters, noting innovations and problems, while also examining the critical and popular response to the series. It will identify some of the problems with the series, which include the problems of an unmoored unreality that dogs its utopian construct and the foreshortening of some of the secondary characters, which includes a tendency to identify and define these by their categorisable sexualities, resulting in a tick-box collection of personages that robs depth too from antagonists such as Hope Haddon (Jemima Kirke) the headmistress in S3. The introduction celebrates the many aspects of Sex Education that are groundbreaking, which include sexuality in relation to complex disabled characters, the treatment of mental health problems in teenagers, the many dimensions of queerness, and the overall sex-positive treatment of masturbation and other proclivities as well as the respect afforded asexuality (which was, in comparison, always missing from Sense8). But it also brings to the fore some of the less commented and problematic aspects of the series, including the cruelty that is exercised by several characters, the trivialisation of highly emotive themes such as IVF and, to a surprisingly large extent, the accumulative undermining of sex counselling by professionals such as Jean and her husband Remi (James Purefoy) and by extension their son Otis in favour of simple (and arguably simplistic) expressions of friendship and peer solidarity. The introduction will conclude with a guide to the reading of the volume and highlight the key aspects of the chapters from each contributor. <br/
Genre and Gender:Sex Education in Theory and Practice
No full textThe interplay between genre and gender in Sex Education is theorised by combining the ideas of British sociologist Anthony Giddens with those of the American philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler. This chapter thus establishes a critical framework that allows for assessment of the interplay between genre and gender throughout the four seasons of Sex Education. Reading Sex Education as a cultural product that revises generic formulas in order to respond to new and evolving ideas of identity, Shaw, Stone and Walters contend that the series has importance for genre studies because it prolongs and updates the teen genre, putting progressive, under-represented and even transgressive characters front and centre, while revising outmoded ideas of sexuality, gender and identity, not least in terms of how the series negotiates the evolution of feminist and queer ideas of equality and diversity over four seasons that constitute an enclosed world of outward-looking characters.<br/
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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