Joan Hawkins
Related: art horror - body genres - film theory - nobrow - paracinema - place and genre theory
Non-fiction: Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art (1999) - Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (2000)
Profile
Joan Hawkins is an American scholar, a B.A in history and a M.A. and Ph. D in comparative literature. Her Dissertation was Horror Cinema and the Avant-garde. Her importance to the Jahsonic.com is her work on body genres (a term she borrowed from Linda Williams) and her work on the intersection of high and low culture in the paracinematic text.
In 2000 she published Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde. Her research and teaching interests include:
- Post World-War II French and American Film Culture
- Theories of High and Low Culture
- European and American Film History
- Film Theory
- Horror Cinema
- Avant-garde, Experimental and Alternative Film Cultures
- Women Directors
- Representations of Gender and Sexuality in the Media
Joan Hawkins on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Joan Hawkins maintains that Laura Mulvey's 1975 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema started feminist film theory and has gone uncontested until the early 1990s.
When Laura Mulvey published Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in 1975 she both inaugurated feminist film theory and seemed to stop it in its tracks. The essay was so good, so powerful, that for years, it seemed, scholars could only adopt its terms and apply them to other films. There were small correctives here and there, of course. Mary Ann Doane attempted to account for female spectatorship; E. Ann Kaplan began important work on women directors working within the narrative tradition. For the most part, however, feminist film scholarship done in the immediate wake of Mulvey's essay simply extended her analysis. Even the essays which attempted to address the problematic areas in Mulvey's text (the issue of female spectators, for example), did so from the standpoint of friendly critique. That is, they sought to augment the work that Mulvey had done; they did not challenge the basic premises of the essay. --http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n6hawkins
Since the 1990s however, this has changed
In recent years a number of scholars have challenged Mulvey's view that women can only be the object of a sadistic or fetishistic gaze onscreen, and that *only* women can be the object of such a gaze. For more on this see: Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992); Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (1993); Gaylyn Studlar, Masochism and the Perverse Pleasure of the Cinema, and Andrea Weiss, A Queer Feeling When I Look at You, both in Gerald Mast, Marhsall Cohen, and Leo Braudy Film Theory and Criticism (1992). --Joan Hawkins, http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n6hawkins
Georges Franju and Jess Franco
"The Anxiety of Influence: Georges Franju and the Medical Horror Shows of Jess Franco" by Joan Hawkins (1999), published in the Horror Film Reader
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