This article modifies philosopher Tamar Szabó Gendler's theory of imaginative resistance in order to make it applicable to film and analyze a distinctively adverse kind of resistant response to James Cameron's Avatar (2009). Gendler's theory, as she states it, seeks to explain resistance to literary stories in a straightforwardly cognitivist, but narrowly rationalistic fashion. This article introduces elements from recent work at the intersection of philosophy of film and the emotions to augment Gendler's theory so that it can be used to explain why some viewers hesitate or even refuse to imagine some cinematic fictional worlds. The method used is analytic philosophy of film. The analysis reveals that some viewers are cognitively impoverished with regard to imagining race in general: they will likely have extreme difficulty in centrally imagining racially "other" characters, which also bodes ill for their real-world prospects for moral engagements concerning race.
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Dan Flory
“All our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015) One of the more notorious sequences in D. W
Jacob Breslow, Jonathan A. Allan, Gregory Wolfman, and Clifton Evers
Miriam J. Abelson. Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 264 pp. ISBN: 9781517903510. Paperback, $25. Beginning with the deceptively simple premise that trans
In Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2020
- Article Type:
- Book Review
- Pages:
- 84–97
Erin Ash
Media are important sites for examining issues of power and privilege, particularly with regard to race. Beyond instances of specific representations, however, the narrative tropes—or common stories that are told across all types of media
Stephen Prince
In this issue of Projections , Dan Flory examines issues of race in film from a singular angle. He is interested in understanding how disgust reactions, manifested by viewers in relation to characters and situations, are inflected by racial
Minority Report
Perceptions and Realities of Black Men in Heterosexual Porn
Darryl L. Jones II
sold for up to ten times as much as intact black boys. Closer to home, Thomas Jefferson firmly believed that black people in general “were more sensual than reflective … [and] that males of the race possessed greater sexual drive” than their white
In Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 60–79
“The Dragon Can't Roar”
Analysis of British Expatriate Masculinity in Yusuf Dawood's One Life Too Many
Antony Mukasa Mate
their race. British women were objectified; men used them to affirm their virility. Their denigration of women contradicted Franz Fanon's postulation that the bodies of white women symbolize “white civilization and dignity” ( 1967: 63 ). The public
In Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 33–46
Janet Staiger
internationally, as a conflict based on race; another is the critiques of US militarism/imperialism in the 1960s. Is the classical phase really just one version of the genre available at every historical point? And parody as well? Do actual historical audiences
Margrethe Bruun Vaage and Gabriella Blasi
and critical race theory to analyze how some of the 2011 Native American Film and Video Festival (NAFVF) films “work to orient indigenous agency and activism” (228). In this context, Monani’s chapter focuses on the figure of the “ecological Indian” as
Carl Plantinga
Spartans and the bad Persians. Figure 3. A hideous Persian giant roars like a beast before attacking the Spartans ( 300 , Warner Bros., 2007) Both race and sexuality work into this stark differentiation as well, as purity is designated to the