Patricia White Research Articles

Rebels, Revolutionaries, Returnees: Palestinian Women’s Cinema as World Cinema

Abstract Grounded in Patricia White’s theorization of women’s cinema as world cinema, this article discusses select feature, documentary, and short films of two contemporary Palestinian women filmmakers, Najwa Najjar and Annemarie Jacir. Identifying the transformative and emancipatory processes within Palestinian society and the new Palestinian narratives of return as key elements in their films, this article concentrates on their contribution to the aesthetics and politics of Palestinian cinema. White’s theoretical framework allows for the analysis of the feminist and postcolonial concerns of Palestinian women filmmakers, their engagement with the minor form, and the place of their films within global production and distribution contexts. Taking into account the new responsiveness of Palestinian and global audiences, it also allows for the discussion of their increasingly prominent role in Palestinian cinema and their contribution to the struggle of women filmmakers for better conditions within the film industry.

Conscience and Controversy

Conscience and Controversy

Women Auteurs, Western Promises

In this essay, Patricia White discusses the ways in which directors Kelly Reichardt, Chloé Zhao, and Jane Campion contend with the legacy of the Hollywood Western in the context of global cinema in their recent films First Cow (2019), Nomadland (2020), and The Power of the Dog (2021) respectively. Representing three different generations of women directors working within the American feature-film space, Campion, Reichardt, and Zhao all reference genre to question the masculinist Western ideology of rugged individualism, even as they use these works to distinguish themselves as individuals within the cinematic marketplace of auteurism.

Interview with Florrie Burke

Abstract In this interview, Patricia White and Sarah Keller talk with Barbara Hammer's partner for over thirty years, Florrie Burke, who in multiple ways has helped keep Hammer's work present in the art world after her death in 2019. In the interview, Burke discusses life with Hammer and her drive to complete projects during the last years of her life. Outlining the variety of outlets for Hammer's work after her death, Burke describes her own role in ensuring the continuation of Hammer's legacy.

Rebecca by Patricia White

Rebecca by Patricia White

"Civic Virtues and Public Schooling" (Patricia White)

"Civic Virtues and Public Schooling" (Patricia White)

Les vélos libérateurs dans Whale Rider de Niki Caro et dans Wadjda de Haifaa Al Mansour

Susan B. Anthony declared in 1896 that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” The comparative study of Whale Rider (2002) and Wadjda (2012) demonstrates that this liberating effect of the basic tool of transportation is being reinforced in the new millennium. The analysis further situates two contemporary women filmmakers, Niki Caro from New Zealand and Haifaa Al Mansour from Saudi Arabia, within the growing global network Patricia White identifies, in Women’s Cinema, World Cinema (2015), as crucial for the improvement of female directors’ conditions in a global film industry.

Patricia White (2015) Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms

Patricia White (2015) <i>Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms</i>

Women’s transnational cinema: displacement, projection, and identification. A review of Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms

Women’s transnational cinema: displacement, projection, and identification. A review of Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms

Should Children Have Best Friends?

An important theme in the philosophy of education community in recent years has been the way in which philosophy can be brought to illuminate and evaluate research findings from the landscape of policy and practice. Undoubtedly, some of these practices can be based on spurious evidence, yet have mostly been left unchallenged in both philosophical and educational circles. One of the newer practices creeping into schools is that of ‘No best friend’ policies. In some schools, this is interpreted as suggesting that children should not have just one best friend but a group of good friends. In others, it is interpreted as suggesting that children should forgo having best friends altogether and be friends with everyone. What is common to both is that friendship is seen as somehow ‘dangerous’. This article offers a preliminary examination of what has been referred to as this ‘dark side’ of friendship. Whilst philosophers such as Patricia White have previously alluded to its existence, there has been little philosophical scrutiny in any broad terms elsewhere. I examine three common arguments commonly used to justify ‘No best friends’ practices: that children can be friends with everyone; that young children are developmentally incapable of ‘real’ friendship hence best friendship should be avoided until later age; that only good people can be good friends. I indicate why this unreflective adoption of practices matters so much and why we should be prepared to challenge these cases. I identify practices that we have good evidence to support as making a positive difference in this area.

Review: Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms by Patricia White

Review: Women's Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms by Patricia White

Women's cinema, world cinema: projecting contemporary feminisms

In Women’s Cinema, World Cinema , Patricia White explores the dynamic intersection of feminism and film in the twenty-first century by highlighting the work of a new generation of women directors from around the world: Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf, Nadine Labaki, Zero Chou, Jasmila Zbanic, and Claudia Llosa, among others. The emergence of a globalized network of film festivals has enabled these young directors to make and circulate films that are changing the aesthetics and politics of art house cinema and challenging feminist genealogies. Extending formal analysis to the production and reception contexts of a variety of feature films, White explores how women filmmakers are both implicated in and critique gendered concepts of authorship, taste, genre, national identity, and human rights. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema revitalizes feminist film studies as it argues for an alternative vision of global media culture.

Drying and Preserving Plant Materials for Decorative Uses

Dried and preserved plant materials are popular for home decor. Dried arrangements can preserve the graceful lines, textures, and colors of flowers and foliage with a subtle and gently aged appearance. This 14-page fact sheet was written by Sydney Park Brown, Patricia White, Benny Tjia, Marion R. Sheehan, and published by the UF Department of Environmental Horticulture, November 2013. http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/ep004

Age Appropriate? Sundance’s Women Filmmakers Come Next

Research Article| December 01 2013 Age Appropriate? Sundance’s Women Filmmakers Come Next Patricia White Patricia White Patricia White is the author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana University Press, 1999), and co-author with Timothy Corrigan of the textbook The Film Experience (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2012). With Meta Mezaj, she and Corrigan are the editors of Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2011). Her work has appeared in Screen, Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, Out in Culture, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, and Teaching Film. Her book Women’s Cinema/World Cinema: Projecting 21st Century Feminisms is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2013) 67 (2): 80–84. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.80 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Patricia White; Age Appropriate? Sundance’s Women Filmmakers Come Next. Film Quarterly 1 December 2013; 67 (2): 80–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.80 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of California2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review: New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut

Book Review| September 01 2013 Book Review: New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut B. Ruby Rich, New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut. : Duke University Press, 2013. $25.95 paperback. 360 pages. Patricia White Patricia White Patricia White is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College and author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability and of the forthcoming Women's Cinema/World Cinema: Projecting 21st Century Feminisms. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2013) 67 (1): 89–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2013.67.1.89 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Patricia White; Book Review: New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut. Film Quarterly 1 September 2013; 67 (1): 89–91. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2013.67.1.89 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of California2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Mobilizing lesbian desire: the sexual kinaesthetics of Dorothy Arzner's The Wild Party

Dorothy Arzner's The Wild Party (1929) has been reclaimed for a lesbian cinematic canon, but it is only relatively recently that scholars have engaged more directly with the homoerotics of Arzner's films, and the question of the representability of female homosexuality in late 1920s Hollywood classical cinema. This essay frames its engagement with these concerns in terms of The Wild Party's generic history. Often claimed as instituting a new lesbian genre, the all-female college film, The Wild Party's innovations can be more persuasively traced to its subtle transformation of an older, nearly exhausted genre: the flapper film. Expanding the film's generic antecedents to consider the flapper as a discursive figure of 1920s American culture, I situate The Wild Party within developing modern female kinaesthetics and spectatorships, during a period in which Hollywood was also systematizing its commodification of femininity and the production of heterosexual romance narratives. If, as Patricia White has convincingly claimed, the representation of female homosexuality in Hollywood film is more often veiled by ‘the public sexualization of the female body’, then in the case of The Wild Party it is the excessively feminine and kinetic bodies of the flapper that screen – that is, both project and hide from view – lesbian desire as a new form of cinematic knowledge and pleasure. Rather than isolating certain scenes for their lesbian subtext or their resistance to a contemporary pathologized lesbian reading, I argue that the sexual intelligibility of such scenes is inseparable from the kinetic aesthetics of the flapper that Arzner harnesses to organisze the film's visual schema.

Gratitude, Ressentiment, and Citizenship Education

Patricia White (Stud Philos Educ 18:43–52, 1999) argues that the virtue gratitude is essential to a flourishing democracy because it helps foster universal and reciprocal amity between citizens. Citizens who participate in this reciprocal relationship ought to be encouraged to recognize that “much that people do does in fact help to make communal civic life less brutish, pleasanter and more flourishing.” This is the case even when the majority of citizens do not intentionally seek to make civic life better for others. Were citizens to recognize the appropriateness of gratitude in these situations, the bonds of our democratic communities would be strengthened. In this paper, I examine White’s argument more carefully, arguing that it fails to address adequately the difficulties that arise when we attempt to encourage the virtue of gratitude in our students. To address these difficulties, I turn to an unlikely source for democratic inspiration: Friedrich Nietzsche. In spite of his well-known anti-democratic sentiments, Nietzsche offers democratic citizens insights into the social value of gratitude. I argue that Nietzsche’s ideas resolve the educational difficulties in White’s argument and viably establish gratitude as an important democratic virtue that ought to be cultivated.

Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory Montré Aza Missouri Figures Of Resistance: Essays In Feminist Theory Teresa de Lauretis. Ed. Patricia White. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007, 310 pp. Figures of Resistance is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on feminist film theory and lesbian representations by pioneering feminist scholar Teresa de Lauretis. The book is introduced and edited by Swarthmore College professor Patricia White, who contextualizes both de Lauretis’s essays and her theoretical frameworks within the larger body of feminist thought. The essays are organized in such a fashion as to highlight the breadth both in time and in theoretical understandings of Teresa de Lauretis’s arguments. By examining not only the scholarly work of de Lauretis but also her life as a proponent of feminist thought, providing a biographical glimpse of de Lauretis’s experiences, White achieves the longstanding aspiration of the American feminist movement as the personal is political. For researchers in the areas of cinema and semiotics, approaching these disciplines from a feminist and/or queer theoretical framework, much of this book will be familiar territory as many of de Lauretis’s most noted arguments on these subjects are presented in this text. Chapters such as “Rethinking Women’s Cinema” (based on an article originally published in 1985 in the New German Critique), in which de Lauretis highlights the challenges in identifying a distinctive feminist film aesthetic and feminist film theory, are testimony to the relevancy of this work, as it continues to question the progress of women’s cinema in forging a distinguishing practice and theory outside of the conventional parameters of the dominant cinematic paradigms. In “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation,” de Lauretis engages in a close reading of homo-sexual and hommosexual lexicon and of lesbian literary text in reckoning with the paradoxes of female homosexuality. And in “Public and Private Fantasies in David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly,” de Lauretis deconstructs the cinematic representations of Orientalism and its fantasy of the submissive Asian woman, postcolonialism, and male homosexuality in Cronenberg’s innovative twist on the Giacomo Puccini opera Madame Butterfly. Figures of Resistance is highly charged with de Lauretis’s most compelling discourses on representations of gender and sexuality. This collection of essays by Teresa de Lauretis is essential to discussions on gender and sexual representations in film, media, and culture as these works critically examine the dichotomies of feminist and queer theories. Although there is no lack of complexity in the arguments presented in this book, this work remains accessible to individuals for whom feminist thought and queer theory are new terrain. For readers of film studies, feminist theory, queer theory, and gay and lesbian studies, Figures of Resistance is a key text not only because it presents critical arguments in these fields but also because it chronicles the work of a prolific feminist theorist and, in so doing, historically locates the course of feminist thought. [End Page 55] Montré Aza Missouri Howard University Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Assessment of genetic diversity in a highly valuable medicinal plant Catharanthus roseus using molecular markers

Genetic diversity was evaluated among 14 cultivars of Catharanthus roseus using RAPD and ISSR markers. The RAPD primers resulted in the amplification of 56 bands, among which 46 (82%) bands were polymorphic Four ISSR primers amplified 31 loci out of which 17 were polymorphic and 14 are monomorphic. The Jaccard's similarity derived from the combined marker system showed that the varieties First Kiss Coral and Cooler Orchid were the most closely related cultivars, with 98% similarity. In the dendrogram constructed on the basis of both RAPD and ISSR data two clear clusters were obtained. The smaller cluster included C. roseus Cv Blue Pearl and C. roseus Cv. Patricia White and the larger cluster was subdivided into two sub clusters with C. roseus Cv. First Kiss Polka Dot isolated from the rest of the cultivars. This may be useful for breeding for improved quality.

Cinema Solidarity: The Documentary Practice of Kim Longinotto

Cinema Solidarity: The Documentary Practice of Kim Longinotto Patricia White U.K. filmmaker Kim Longinotto has long been a practitioner of transnational feminism, though the term would probably sound too academic to her. Working primarily in cinema verité format, with funding from Britain's Channel 4, she has documented the stories of women ordinary and extraordinary—often both—in Egypt (Hidden Faces [1990]), Iran (Runaway [1991], Divorce Iranian Style [1998]), Japan (Dream Girls [1993], Shinjuku Boys [1995], among others),1 and sub-Saharan Africa (The Day I Will Never Forget [2002], Sisters in Law [2005]) for exhibition largely (but not exclusively) in the West. She has also made numerous films back home in England, including her first, Pride of Place (1976), an indictment of her boarding school that helped close the place down. The reception of Longinotto's latest film, Sisters in Law (a prizewinner at Cannes that was showcased in North America at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals [End Page 120] and released in April 2006 at New York's Film Forum to strong reviews), helps frame questions about feminism's claims to the public sphere in a reputedly "postfeminist" era and about how documentary film can facilitate this "publicity." While Longinotto's work has been available in the United States for many years through the nonprofit distributor Women Make Movies, Sisters in Law demonstrates the risks and promises of theatrical exhibition for her work and for the feminist media culture Women Make Movies' collection represents.2 The visibility of Longinotto's work is enhanced by its frequent engagement with Third World subjects. One of the clichés of postfeminism holds that while Western (white) women "have it all" (except guarantees of reproductive freedom, sexual choice, equal wages, etc.), women elsewhere still have "issues."3 The very title of Divorce Iranian Style implies national and cultural differences in women's access to basic rights. And Sisters in Law frames questions about feminism's claims to the public sphere in a reputedly "postfeminist" era. In her influential essay "Under Western Eyes" Chandra Mohanty critiques Western feminist social science practice and development work in which "third world women" are portrayed as victims, not agents of change—a strategy evident in a wide swath of well-meaning global social-issue documentaries.4 Does the fact that Longinotto works in so many different cultural contexts similarly convey the sense that "what binds women together is a sociological notion of the 'sameness' of their oppression"?5 Longinotto's work scrupulously avoids this structure; her subjects, methods, and emphases are transnational rather than global(izing). That is to say, the films compare and connect gendered spaces and practices across cultures and borders without disavowing the power of the gaze (and of language, capital, state, religion, history, etc.), shaping these relations and rendering them intelligible. As Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan write in "Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Feminist Practices," "transnational feminism . . . is not to be celebrated as free of asymmetrical power relations. Rather, transnational feminist practices, as we call them, involve forms of alliance, subversion, and complicity within which asymmetries and inequalities can be critiqued."6 Longinotto's reliance on cinema verité practices in most of her work seeks to avoid imposing an interpretive perspective on the films, yet the forms of alliance and complicity that may be invisible in observational cinema are often foregrounded. Divorce Iranian Style, for example, avoids silencing the chador-wearing plaintiffs it follows, emphasizing their efforts to understand and use language that might help them navigate the legal system. The contradictions of Japanese gender and social codes are conveyed in the at-once nonconformist and rigidly regulated and hierarchal practices of the cross-dressing performers in Dream Girls and the female wrestlers in Gaea's Girls. It is the filmmaker's access to gender-segregated spaces and institutions in both cultures that allows her to tell these stories. Moreover, Longinotto works with collaborators grounded in each place and culture where she films. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an expert on Islamic...