Lisa Gotto – författare

From 1950s Malay superstar Maria Menado to 2023 Golden Globe winner Michelle Yeoh, Starring Asian Feminities brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars to explore the variations and evolutions of Asian femaleness on-screen. Exploring a range of genres and forms including Chinese “chick flicks” (“Xiaoniu Dianying”), K-Cinema, Bollywood and Asian American stardom in Hollywood, the book examines the confluence of gender and sexual identities of a range of Asian female stars and analyses what media conditions underlie the production of images of Asian femininities. Through a range of case studies of these Asian female stars, Starring Asian Femininities confronts such questions as: how do Asian female stars transcend Western notions of fame, popularity and celebrity? What positions do they take on issues such as selfhood and identity? And how do they mediate conflicting ideological claims?

This book describes the main characteristics that define the emotion of fear, its dimensions, functions, types, and social and individual meanings. It also shows that fear represents a desire to eliminate the Other and that horror films have their origin precisely in crisis and fear, which gives it a fundamentally xenophobic nature. This is demonstrated in the book through the analysis of the four most important versions of the King Kong myth: 1933, 1976, 2005 and 2017. These versions are the result of the fear of the Other that was generated by particular crises in US society: the stock market crash of 1929, the 1970s energy crisis, 9/11 and the military intervention in Iraq in 2003 and its consequences. These conflicts also led to psychological and sociological effects that created a desire for escape that King Kong's films manifest.

Since its inception, U.S. American cinema has grappled with the articulation of racial boundaries. This applies, in the first instance, to featuring mixed-race characters crossing the color line. In a broader sense, however, this also concerns viewing conditions and knowledge configurations. The fact that American film engages itself so extensively with the unbalanced relation between black and white is neither coincidental nor trivial to state — it has much more to do with disputing boundaries that pertain to the medium itself. Lisa Gotto examines this constellation along the early history of American film, the cinematic modernism of the late 1950s, and the post-classical cinema of the turn of the millennium.