Velvet Light Trap articles from March 1992

Velvet Light Trap archives from March 1992

Introduction.(introduces articles in issue examining parenting and reproduction in historical films and videos)
March 22, 1992... EVEN BEFORE THE 1973 SUPREME COURT DECISION Roe v. Wade, issues of parenting and reproduction have produced emotional and heated debates, both in American politics and in the media. Questions surrounding these issues--abortion, surrogate...

Performing birth: the construction of female bodies in instructional childbirth videos.
March 22, 1992... ON THE COVER OF JANE GALLOP'S NEW BOOK Thinking Through the Body is a photograph of a woman giving birth. Just the head of the baby has been delivered by a pair of gloved hands. Gallop suggests that this photograph depicts a moment when the...

In search of the mother tongue: childbirth and the cinema.
March 22, 1992... POPULAR MYTHOLOGIST JOSEPH CAMPBELL illustrates our cultural assumptions about the nature of creation in the following observation: "The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father....

Baby Boom: the comedy of surrogacy in film and television.
March 22, 1992... TANIA MODLESKI HAS ARGUED THAT THE ideological function of such recent films as Three Men and a Baby and television series such as "My Two Dads" and "Full House" is to give men "more options than they already have in patriarchy." These films...

The way we weren't: abortion 1950s style in Blue Denim and Our Time.
March 22, 1992... JOHN ELLIS WRITES IN VISIBLE FICTIONS: "Cinema and TV contribute to [the] silent process of change that is ceaselessly taking place within the realm of ideology. These media... do not reproduce ideology... [but] instead, they are involved in...

Too much guilt is never enough for working mothers: Joan Crawford, Mildred Pierce, and Mommie Dearest.
March 22, 1992... PERHAPS MORE THAN ANY OTHER WELL-KNOWN actress of the studio years, Joan Crawford provides an opportunity to examine the public image of a Hollywood star as a working mother. In 1939, as a single woman, she became an adoptive mother whose...

Suffering and suffrage: birth, the female body, and women's choices in D. W. Griffith's Way Down East.
March 22, 1992... IT HAS LONG BEEN RECOGNIZED THAT THE films of D. W. Griffith support a Victorian ideology of the sanctity of family life. At the center of this ideal is the image of the woman as "the angel in the house," an image most fully embodied for...