This collection of essays examines intersectional identities of race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, class, and nationality in Hollywood cinema. Intersectionality, traditionally associated with social activism, is used here more liberally as a critical and analytic tool to explore films, expressing multiple points of views and multiple ways of looking at films.
Introduction
Hollywood Formulas: Codes, Masks, Genre, and Minstrelsy
Daydreams of Society: Class and Gender Performances in the Cinema of the Late 1910s
Ruth Mayer
The Death of Lon Chaney: Masculinity, Race, and the Authenticity of Disguise
Alice Maurice
MGM’s Sleeping Lion: Hollywood Regulation of the Washingtonian Slave in The Gorgeous Hussy (1936)
Ellen C. Scott
Yellowface, Minstrelsy, and Hollywood Happy Endings: The Black Camel (1931), Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), and Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937)
Delia Malia Konzett
Genre and Race in Classical Hollywood
“A Queer, Strangled Look”: Race, Gender, and Morality in The Ox-Bow Incident
Jonna Eagle
By Herself: Intersectionality, African American Specialty Performers, and Eleanor Powell
Ryan Jay Friedman
Disruptive Mother-Daughter Relationships: Peola’s Racial Masquerade in Imitation of Life (1934) and Stella’s Class Masquerade in Stella Dallas (1937)
Charlene Regester
The Egotistical Sublime: Film Noir and Whiteness
Matthias Konzett
Race and Ethnicity in Post-World War II Hollywood
Women and Class Mobility in Classical Hollywood’s Immigrant Dramas
Chris Cagle
Orientalism, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Go for Broke! (1951)
Dean Itsuji Saranillio
Savage Whiteness: The dialectic of racial desire in The Young Savages (1961)
Graham Cassano
Rita Moreno’s Hair
Priscilla Peña Ovalle
Intersectionality, Hollywood, and Contemporary Popular Culture
“Everything Glee in ‘America’”: Context, Race, and Identity Politics in the Glee Appropriation of West Side Story
Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz
Hip Hop “Hearts” Ballet: Utopic Multiculturalism and the Step Up Dance Films
Mary Beltrán
Fakin da Funk (1997) and Gook (2017): Exploring Black/Asian Relations in the Asian American Hood Film
Jun Okada
“Let Us Roam the Night Together”: On Articulation and Representation in Moonlight (2016) and Tongues Untied (1989)
Louise Wallenberg
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index