David William Foster – författare

Viewing contemporary Latin American films through the lens of queer studies reveals that many filmmakers are exploring issues of gender identity and sexual difference, as well as the homophobia that attempts to defeat any challenge to the heterosexual norms of patriarchal culture. In this study of queer issues in Latin American cinema, David William Foster offers highly perceptive queer readings of fourteen key films to demonstrate how these cultural products promote the principles of an antiheterosexist stance while they simultaneously disclose how homophobia enforces the norms of heterosexuality. Foster examines each film in terms of the ideology of its narrative discourse, whether homoerotic desire or a critique of patriarchal heterosexism and its implications for Latin American social life and human rights. His analyses underscore the difficulties involved in constructing a coherent and convincing treatment of the complex issues involved in critiquing the patriarchy from perspectives associated with queer studies. The book will be essential reading for everyone working in queer studies and film studies. The films discussed in this book are: De eso no se habla (I Don't Want to Talk about It) El lugar sin lÍmites (The Place without Limits) Aqueles dois (Those Two) Convivencia (Living Together) Conducta impropia (Improper Conduct) The Disappearance of GarcÍa LorcaLa Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins) DoÑa Herlinda y su hijo (DoÑa Herlinda and Her Son) No se lo digas a nadie (Don't Tell Anyone) En el paraÍso no existe el dolor (There Is No Suffering in Paradise) A intrusa (The Interloper) Plata quemada (Burnt Money) Afrodita (Aphrodite) Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate)

Since the 1991 publication of his groundbreaking book Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing, David William Foster has proposed a series of theoretical and critical principles for the analysis of Latin American culture from the perspectives of the queer. This book continues that project with a queer reading of literary and cultural aspects of Latin American texts. Moving beyond its predecessor, which provided an initial inventory of Latin American gay and lesbian writing, Sexual Textualities analyzes questions of gender representation in Latin American cultural productions to establish the interrelationships, tensions, and irresolvable conflicts between heterosexism and homoeroticism. The topics that Foster addresses include Eva Peron as a cultural/sexual icon, feminine pornography, Luis Humberto Hermosillo's classic gay film DoÑa Herlinda y su hijo, homoerotic writing and Chicano authors, Matias Montes Huidobro's Exilio and the representation of gay identity, representation of the body in Alejandra Pizarnik's poetry, and the crisis of masculinity in Argentine fiction from 1940 to 1960.

"Gender is an absolute ground zero for most human societies," writes David William Foster, "an absolute horizon of social subjectivity." In this book, he examines gender issues in thirteen Brazilian films made (with one exception) after the 1985 return to constitutional democracy and elimination of censorship to show how these issues arise from and comment on the sociohistorical reality of contemporary Brazilian society. Foster organizes his study around three broad themes: construction of masculinity, constructions of feminine and feminist identities, and same-sex positionings and social power. Within his discussions of individual films ranging from Jorge um brasileiro to A hora da estrela to Beijo no asfalto, he offers new ways of understanding national ideals and stereotypes, sexual dissidence (homoeroticism and transgenderism), heroic models, U.S./Brazilian relations, revolutionary struggle, and human rights violations. As the first study of Brazilian cinematic representations of gender ideology in English or Portuguese, this book will be important reading in film and cultural studies.

Writers and editors of Spanish have long needed an authoritative guide to written language usage, similar to The MLA Style Manual and The Chicago Manual of Style. And here it is! This reference guide provides comprehensive information on how the Spanish language is copyedited for publication. The book covers these major areas: Language basics: capitalization, word division, spelling, and punctuation. Language conventions: abbreviations, professional and personal titles, names of organizations, and nationalities. Bibliographic format, particularly how Spanish differs from English. Spanish language forms of classical authors' names. Literary and grammatical terminology. Linguistic terminology. Biblical names and allusions. A dictionary of grammatical doubts, including usage, grammatical constructions of particular words and phrases, verbal irregularities, and gender variations.

Just as Mexican national life has come to center on the sprawling, dynamic, almost indefinable metropolis of Mexico City, so recent Mexican cinema has focused on the city not merely as a setting for films but almost as a protagonist in its own right, whose conditions both create meaning for and receive meaning from the human lives lived in its midst. Through close readings of fourteen recent critically acclaimed films, this book watches Mexican cinema in this process of producing cultural meaning through its creation, enaction, and interpretation of the idea of Mexico City. David William Foster analyzes how Mexican filmmakers have used Mexico City as a vehicle for exploring such issues as crime, living space, street life, youth culture, political and police corruption, safety hazards, gender roles, and ethnic and social identities. The book is divided into three sections. "Politics of the City" examines the films Rojo amanecer,Novia que te vea,Frida, naturaleza viva, and Sexo, pudor y lÁgrimas. "Human Geographies" looks at El CallejÓn de los Milagros,MecÁnica nacional,El castillo de la pureza,Todo el poder, and Lolo. "Mapping Gender" discusses DanzÓn,De noche vienes,Esmeralda,La tarea,Lola, and Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda.

Mexico has a rich literary heritage that extends back over centuries to the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. This major reference work surveys more than five hundred years of Mexican literature from a sociocultural perspective. More than merely a catalog of names and titles, it examines in detail the literary phenomena that constitute Mexico's most significant and original contributions to literature.Recognizing that no one scholar can authoritatively cover so much territory, David William Foster has assembled a group of specialists, some of them younger scholars who write from emerging trends in Latin American and Mexican literary scholarship. The topics they discuss include pre-Columbian indigenous writing (Joanna O'Connell), Colonial literature (Lee H. Dowling), Romanticism (Margarita Vargas), nineteenth-century prose fiction (Mario MartÍn Flores), Modernism (Bart L. Lewis), major twentieth-century genres (narrative, Lanin A. Gyurko; poetry, Adriana GarcÍa; theater, Kirsten F. Nigro), the essay (Martin S. Stabb), literary criticism (Daniel Altamiranda), and literary journals (Luis PeÑa). Each essay offers detailed analysis of significant issues and major texts and includes an annotated bibliography of important critical sources and reference works.

A taboo subject in many cultures, homosexuality has been traditionally repressed in Latin America, both as a way of life and as a subject for literature. Yet numerous writers have attempted to break the cultural silence surrounding homosexuality, using various strategies to overtly or covertly discuss lesbian and gay themes. In this study, David William Foster examines more than two dozen texts that deal with gay and lesbian topics, drawing from them significant insights into the relationship between homosexuality and society in different Latin American countries and time periods.Foster's study includes works both sympathetic and antagonistic to homosexuality, showing the range of opinion on this topic. The preponderance of his examples come from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, countries with historically active gay communities, although he also includes material on other countries. Noteworthy among the authors covered are Reinaldo Arenas, Adolfo Caminha, Isaac ChocrÓn, JosÉ Donoso, Sylvia Molloy, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Luis Zapata.

Argentina, one of the most dynamic societies in Latin America, is known for its impressive level of cultural production. This examination of the social and cultural institutions of Argentine society contains a series of comprehensive and informative essays that focus on the most important forms of cultural production in terms of major works, major artists, and major venues.Students and interested readers will discover what is unique about Argentina's culture and customs in this thorough and engaging overview. The authors describe the issues that have dominated Argentine society and place everything in its proper context by including a chronology of major historic events. This volume also contains chapters on Religion, Social Customs, Broadcasting and Print Media, Cinema, Literature, Performing Arts, and Art (including Sculpture, Photography, Architecture, Painting).

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Gay and lesbian themes in Latin American literature have been largely ignored. This reference fills this gap by providing more than a hundred alphabetically arranged entries for Latin American authors who have treated gay or lesbian material in their works. Each entry explores the significance of gay and lesbian themes in a particular author's writings and closes with a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.The figures included have a professed gay identity, or have written on gay or lesbian themes in either a positive or negative way, or have authored works in which a gay sensibility can be identified. The volume pays particular attention to the difficulty of ascribing North American critical perspectives to Latin American authors, and studies these authors within the larger context of Latin American culture. The book includes entries for men and women, and for authors from Latin American countries as well as Latino writers from the United States. The entries are written by roughly 60 expert contributors from Latin America, the U.S., and Europe.

Argentina, one of the most dynamic societies in Latin America, is known for its impressive level of cultural production. This examination of the social and cultural institutions of Argentine society contains a series of comprehensive and informative essays that focus on the most important forms of cultural production in terms of major works, major artists, and major venues.Students and interested readers will discover what is unique about Argentina's culture and customs in this thorough and engaging overview. The authors describe the issues that have dominated Argentine society and place everything in its proper context by including a chronology of major historic events. This volume also contains chapters on Religion, Social Customs, Broadcasting and Print Media, Cinema, Literature, Performing Arts, and Art (including Sculpture, Photography, Architecture, Painting).

Spanish literature is one of the major European literatures, with an extensive array of canonical and important writers from the Middle Ages to the present. Because Spain was a crossroads of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic cultures, its cultural traditions weave together issues related to homoerotic practices and beliefs from these diverse origins. Homoeroticism, as a consequence, has always been a highly charged issue for Spain. But only since the return to a constitutional society after the death of Franco in 1975 and the international growth of interest in queer issues has it been possible to establish a reliable history of homoeroticism in Spanish culture. Many of these issues have been treated in Spanish literature, since the literature of a country so closely records its culture. This reference book examines the prominence of gay and lesbian themes in the works of Spanish writers and thus illuminates the homoerotic element in Spanish culture from the medieval period to the twentieth century.The volume presents entries for more than 50 Spanish writers, such as Federico García Lorca, Ignatius of Loyola, Juan de la Cruz, Miguel de Unamuno, María de Zayas, and Esther Tusqueto. The writers included fall chiefly into two groups: those of the canon whose works contain elements of interest to an agenda of sexual dissidence, and those who constitute a lesbigay inventory for contemporary Spain. Included are those writers whose works are of interest to lesbigay scholarship, regardless of whether the writers themselves were lesbigay. The volume also includes entries for several Spanish cultural figures such as filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and painter Salvador Dalí, who were not writers but nonetheless inform the homoerotic background of Spanish writing and culture. Entries are arranged alphabetically and are written by expert contributors. Each includes a brief biographical profile, a discussion of gay and lesbian themes in the writer's works, and a bibliography. The volume also includes an extensive introductory essay and a list of major studies.

Notable Twentieth-Century Latin American Women is a powerful testimony to the outstanding contributions 72 of the most noteworthy women have made to their fields and to society. This volume covers a broad range of women excelling in the fields of politics, art, religion, government, education, literature, popular culture, and the sciences, with substantial, up-to-date biographical and career overviews. Many notables are international figures, such as former Nicaraguan President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, Cuban Queen of Salsa Celia Cruz, and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Others, such as the Mirabal sisters, founders of a resistance movement against a repressive Dominican Republic regime, and Carmen Naranjo, a prolific Costa Rican author and champion of culture, merit the wider recognition offered here.An excellent introduction detailing the status of Latin American women in the twentieth century is the ideal framework for appreciating the struggles of these women. In the entries, information given includes family and background details, education, influences, obstacles faced and overcome, and achievements. Each entry includes a Further Reading section to enable students and other interested readers to learn more about the woman's life. Numerous photos enhance the text.

Gay and lesbian themes in Latin American literature have been largely ignored. This reference fills this gap by providing more than a hundred alphabetically arranged entries for Latin American authors who have treated gay or lesbian material in their works. Each entry explores the significance of gay and lesbian themes in a particular author's writings and closes with a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.The figures included have a professed gay identity, or have written on gay or lesbian themes in either a positive or negative way, or have authored works in which a gay sensibility can be identified. The volume pays particular attention to the difficulty of ascribing North American critical perspectives to Latin American authors, and studies these authors within the larger context of Latin American culture. The book includes entries for men and women, and for authors from Latin American countries as well as Latino writers from the United States. The entries are written by roughly 60 expert contributors from Latin America, the U.S., and Europe.

This work examines the cultural impact of photography in Argentina following the end of the country's military dictatorship in the early 1980s. The interpretive study surveys nine modern photographers in Argentina - Marcelo Brodsky, Gabriel Valansi, Eduardo Gil, Gaby Messina, Adriana Lestido, Gabriel Diaz, Marcos Lopez, Silivio Fabrykant and Gabriela Liffschitz - and covers the major themes in each of their works. The author details each photographer's cultural and artistic contributions and provides a listing of the websites where their works can be viewed.

Part of the self-image of Phoenix is that the city has no history and that anything of importance happened yesterday. Also that Phoenix, the Arizona state capital, is a "clean" city (despite a past of police corruption and social oppression). The "real" Phoenix, easygoing, sun-drenched, a place of ever-expanding development and economic growth, guarantees, it is said, an enviable lifestyle, low taxes, and unfettered personal freedom and opportunity.Little of this is true. Phoenix has been described as one of the least sustainable cities in the country. This sixth largest urban area of the United States has an alarmingly superficial and tourism-oriented discourse among its leaders. This book examines a series of narrative works (novels, theater, chronicles, investigative reporting, personal accounts, editorial cartooning, even a children's television program) that question this discourse in a frequently stinging fashion. The works examined are anchored in a critical understanding of the dominant urban myths of Greater Phoenix, and an awareness of how all the newness, modernity and fun-in-the-sun mentality mask a uniquely dystopian human experience.

This study traces the development of Roa Bastos's concern with the reality of his people and their history and focuses on the mature techniques employed in the creation of a literary myth of a social reality.

The years 1930 to 1950 were a period of considerable activity in the Argentine novel, in great part as a reaction and response to the military coup of September 1930 that inaugurated what has come to be known as the Infamous Decade of Argentine social history. In this work, David Foster offers a reassessment of social realism in the Argentine literature of the time.The writers considered include Berbardo, Kordon, Leonidas, Barletta, Jose Rabinovich, Bernardo Verbitsky, Max Dickmann, Elias Castelnuovo, and Alvaro Junque. The focus of the study is an examination of the elements of narrative strategy that make the works of these writers of particular interest within the context of contemporary postmodernist writing, especially as regards documentary and mixed-generic texts.

Distinguishing figural or typological allegory -- a method adapted from the Christian exegesis of the Old Testament -- from the broader Hellenistic concept of allegory, this book examines its use in representative poems of early Hispanic literature. The author focuses on the thematic and structural employment of this originally nonliterary device and comments on the literary problems it posed and the artistic effects which were achieved by it. The development of this particular allegorical method in medieval Hispanic literature -- works in Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan -- he shows, was fully equal to that found in the medieval Latin, Italian, and English literatures, and an understanding of its use serves to clarify the interpretation of many individual poems.

Distinguishing figural or typological allegory-a method adapted from the Christian exegesis of the Old Testament-from the broader Hellenistic concept of allegory, this book examines its use in representative poems of early Hispanic literature. The author focuses on the thematic and structural employment of this originally nonliterary device and comments on the literary problems it posed and the artistic effects which were achieved by it. The development of this particular allegorical method in medieval Hispanic literature-works in Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan-he shows, was fully equal to that found in the medieval Latin, Italian, and English literatures, and an understanding of its use serves to clarify the interpretation of many individual poems.

This volume brings together papers on various theoretical questions that have been raised in recent debates in Spanish American literary studies. It provides varying perspectives and explores diverse theoretical approaches to colonial culture, testimonial writing, gender studies, postmodernism, ethnic issues, politics and nationalism, and other important subjects.

These critical studies propose innovative readings and overall reformulations of the texts and authors that stand as representative of the period for the contemporary reader. The first group of articles refers to reports, chronicles, and Renaissance epics, a vast block of texts that fall in most cases halfway between history and narrative fiction, and examine the experiences of the discovery, the conquest, and the colonization of the new territories. The second group concentrates on regionally marked texts from the Baroque period, especially those of the central figure of the Mexican nun poet and intellectual, Sor Juana In s de la Cruz. Finally, there are some essays on representative texts of the latter part of the colonial period.

The 19th century in Latin America begins with the weakening of the political institutions established by the Spanish Crown, the emergence of a native consciousness and the diffusion of the ideas of the French Revolution and the United States. These articles examine the phenomena that mark the onset of the new century: the series of revolutions and long military struggles for independence that placed large areas of territory under arms and resulted in the formation of strong and independent nation-states.

The greater body of Spanish American letters stands in somewhat of an ancillary relationship to the traditions that arose in Europe. Only at the end of the 19th century, with the emergence of modernismo, which was linked to European aesthetic movements such as French Parnassianism and Symbolism, there emerged a wave of literary innovations and experimentation that ushered in the modern era. This volume covers writers whose positions and reputations were established and consolidated prior to the crucial decade of the l960s.

For Latin American literature of the second half of the 20th century, critics have proposed such labels as new novel and new new novel, boom and post-boom, women's literature, testimonial, postmodern literature, and the like. Given the fact that none of these designations is entirely satisfactory for fully charting the complex map of literary phenomena, this volume features an arrangement based on the birthdate of the writers represented, with an emphasis on individuals who have transcended the boundaries of national literatures and achieved a certain international recognition.

Latin American Documentary Filmmaking is the first volume written in English to explore Latin American documentary filmmaking with extensive and intelligent analysis. David William Foster, the leading authority on Latin American urban cultural production, provides rich, new interpretations on the production of gender, political persecution, historical conflicts, and exclusion from the mainstream in many of Latin America’s most important documentary films.Foster provides a series of detailed examinations of major texts of Latin American filmmaking, discussing their textual production and processes of meaning. His analysis delves deeply into the world of Latin American film and brings forth a discourse of structure that has previously been absent from the fields of filmmaking and Latin American studies. This volume provides perspective on diverse and methodological approaches, pulling from a wide scope of cinematic traditions. Using his own critical readings and research, Foster presents his findings in terms that are accessible to non-Spanish speakers and Latin American film enthusiasts.A much-needed contribution to the field of Latin American documentary film, Foster’s research and perspective will be a valuable source for those interested in film studies, gender studies, and culture.

The City as Photographic Text offers the first comprehensive presentation of photography on São Paulo. But more than just a study of one city’s photographic legacy, this book is a manual for how to understand and talk about Latin American photography in general. Focusing on major figures and referencing widely available books of their work, David William Foster offers a unique analysis of how photographers have contributed to our understanding of the megalopolis São Paulo has become. Eschewing a conventional historical approach, Foster explores how best to interpret visual urban life. In turn, by focusing interest on the photographic text and the ways in which it creates an interpretive meaning for the city, rather than rehearsing the circumstances under which the photographs were taken, this study provides a model for productive comment on urban photography as a project of visual meaning with important artistic attributes. As a unique entry in the inventory of scholarly writing on São Paulo, The City as Photographic Text adds to our understanding of the enormous cultural significance this city holds as a world-class urban center.

Mexican-American life, like that of nearly every contemporary community, has been extensively photographed. Yet there is surprisingly little scholarship on Chicano photography. Picturing the Barrio presents the first book-length examination on the topic. David William Foster analyzes the imagery of ten distinctive artists who offer a range of approaches to portraying Chicano life. The production of each artist is examined as an ideological interpretation of how Chicano experience is constructed and interpreted through the medium of photography, in sites ranging from the traditional barrio to large metropolitan societies. These photographers present artistic as well as documentary images of the socially invisible. They and their subjects grapple with definitions of identity, as well as ethnicity and gender. As such, this study deepens our understanding of the many interpretations of the "Chicano experience."