Signifier

On the morning of my ninth birthday, I took my father aside and asked, "Dad is my father a milkman?" An insulting fable concocted from my siblings that, when living in Hawaii while my father was shipped to go fight in Desert Storm, my mother had an affair with the neighborhood milkman. The story was fashioned due to my dark complexion, which was not inherited by any of my siblings or parents. "No you’re my son." My father replied. "Then why do I look so different than everybody?” I rebutted. My…

Henri Matisse painted Bonheur de Vivre (c. 1905-1906) within the introductory period of radically charged, color-based fauvist work. The color in Bonheur de Vivre easily conveys a sense of joy present in a free-natured romp through nature the painting attempts to emulate. The painting contains sixteen feminine-coded human figures sitting in a hyper-colored field. Instead of a contemporary scene, trees enclose a mythic clearing. This deifies these figures as they lounge nude in multicolored grass…

“[What happens in the film] can happen in every single suburb of Europe, it is a reality of immigration, which is the slavery of the 21st century, that is happening all over the world” (McCracken 2011). These are the words of, Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of Biutiful, when asked about the shooting of the film. The severity of the words can come at the reader as shocking but in reality they accurately represent the current reality of the globalized world. The ongoing globalization is…

In 2004, the ban on locally produced horror and supernatural films was lifted, marking an era when the number of supernatural film screenings skyrocketed in local cinemas. Much of this was due to the efforts of Shuhaimi Baba, as she managed to convince the censorship board to reconsider the ban so that local films could be financially competitive with the influx of foreign horror films (Hassan, 2013, p 228). It is useful to note that before the censorship was being lifted – for few decades,…

Kabena Mercer has described, “all Black hairstyles [are] political [because] they each articulate [a] response to the panoply of historical forces which have invested this element of the ethnic signifier with both symbolic meaning and significance” (Mercer 104). The attention to hair is a by-product of racism and the slave system in America, as well as all the negative ideas that surround Black people because of these systems. The devastating effects…

Fur has always been the ultimate “fabric of desire”. People around the world have been purchased and favored fur clothes in many centuries ago, but not until recently, the demand for fur clothes are extending higher than ever. According to Robert Burke, founder of the luxury consultancy in New York, “Fur has always been a hot-button issue in fashion, and now more than ever because the consumer has the ability to research and decide for themselves where they want to stand”, he also added up to…

In discussing the legacy and impact of Le Ly Hayslip and the overall responsibility of Asian American authors in depicting Asian Americans in literature, specific ideas about gender and sexuality frame such discussions. On one side specifically among Asian American women, there is great criticism against the backlash and condemnation that was levelled against Le Ly Haislip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging due to such attacks being sexist and…

Abstract The paper makes a postcolonial feminist reading of Jean Rhys’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea which is a subversion of Charlotte Bronte’s celebrated novel,Jane Eyre.It tries to show how in the novel, Rhys lends voice to Antoinette Cosway, the most silenced character in Jane Eyre and how she foregrounds the importance of creolized gendered subject within the hierarchy of European patriarchy. The paper unravels the way in which the sense of unbelongingness and gendered discrimination…

Now, how did non-Sunni Kurds approach and feel about Kurdish nationalism during its nascent stages of development? For many non-Sunni Kurds, Kurdish nationalism was just another attempt at reinforcing religious dominance over other religious communities in the area, not much different from its ethnically diverse neighbors. These minorities mostly rejected Kurdish nationalism during this period. By the 1800s many sectarian differences had come to a head after subsequent battles between the…

There seems to be a miscommunication in medical language and the general public. Certain signifiers exist in scientific language because it is impossible to say anything with one hundred percent certainty (Mooney). When a study says “based on what we now know; to the best of our scientific knowledge and research there is not a link between autism…