Butch and femme

Double Indemnity, a film based on fraud and betrayal in regards to insurance money, carried out by Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson. This film is a perfect classic example of film noir, as the film has various aspects of depicting characters in an ambiguous manner with the addition of dark shadows, moody aesthetics, intense music and mis-en-scene to express the shots well. In particular, the opening scene of Walter entering his apartment building to his room is divided into five simultaneous…

always been scared of women”, but the fact that Cary Grant’s character associates female sexuality with male peril does not necessarily mean that the film itself follows this misogynistic view. In other words, just because Devlin considers Alicia a femme fatale, that does not mean that Notorious is directing us toward the same opinion. Julie Grossman agrees with this idea, stating that women in film noir are not portrayed just as one-dimensional “bad girls” characters, like most critics believe…

Social and technological factors have caused Film Noir to develop and change in a plethora of ways to keep up with a constantly changing audience’s takes and expectations. During the 1940-50’s Film le Noir emerged and created an artistic movement within the movie community and created a contemporary style of movies that were often described at cynical crime melodramas. These films used lighting effects, flashbacks, cynical heroes and were mostly present in post-World War II, in which the…

In the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid directed by George Roy Hill uses many different examples of symbolism that connects to the American Progressive Era and life in America. The true story is about the two leaders of Wyoming’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, looting trains and banks which is starting to get harder because of how the times are changing which ultimately in the end leads to their downfall. With that being said this movie could be considered…

identifies others merely based on their appearances. For example, Walker (1993) argues that people recognize lesbians’ identifications through their visibility. In general, comparing to femme lesbians, a butch is relatively easier to be recognized as a lesbian because she looks like what she is. That is to say, a butch lesbian makes her identity visible…

JeeYeun Lee's essay "Why Suzie Wong is Not a Lesbian: Asian and Asian American Lesbian and Bisexual Women and Femme/Butch/Gender Identities" is an insightful take on the discourses surrounding lesbian and bisexual identity for Asian women, the conflicting, multitudinous stereotypes that often go along with them, and the resulting unique experiences of erasure that they face. Lee begins by recognizing the Orientalist image of the "Lotus Blossom Baby", one of many stereotypes of Asian women. It…

wood pulp. The film features multiple segments focusing on three main characters: Vincent Vega, Butch Coolidge, and Jules Winnfield, who are all connected by a mobster named Marcellus Wallace. This film is a member of the neo-noir genre of crime fiction. The film also contains certain noir characteristics such as a pessimistic or nihilistic nature, a McGuffin, and common characters such as a femme fatale, a sap, and a hardboiled leading man. To begin,…

Breathless, directed by Jean Luc Godard, was somewhat of a French-made parody of these American films, for instance, the main character, Michel, attempting to molding himself after Humphrey Bogart, and his lover, Patricia, encompassing the role of a femme fatale. Whereas, Pulp Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino, and released in 1994, is a sort of new-age film noir, with…

place themselves in one of two categories - butch or femme. This binary view of being lesbian often had serious consequences. One of the women interviewed even described how, because the ratio of butch to femme was often 10 to 1, fights between butch women in competition for femme women was not uncommon. Because being lesbian was already taboo at that period, these women subjected themselves to yet another categorization by defining themselves as butch or femme when, in reality, they were all…

Representation of Female Masculinity In order to understand the formations and trends of masculinized female identities, it is important to analyze the presentation of female masculinity in film. Because female masculinity is a generally unexplored phenomenon, films and the media provide a societal view of female masculinity. Masculine women have often been presented on film as butches “as an emblem of social upheaval and as a marker of sexual disorder” (Halberstam 186). Although there is…