Examines gender roles in contemporary foreign and Hollywood films amid changing social, political, cultural, and economic conditions.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls examines the bizarre and fascinating range of gender portrayals in film at the end of the twentieth century. In order to view the screened face of gender in bold new ways, the contributors cover a wide variety of cinematic forms and styles-from the boy-girls of Hong Kong cinema to the on-screen modesty of post-revolutionary Iran to the New Hollywood's treatment of homosexuality, female power, and male intellectuality. Throughout, the works of important filmmakers are analyzed, including Ridley Scott, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Woody Allen, Rakhshan Banietemad, Kathryn Bigelow, Bertrand Tavernier, Roman Polanski, and many others.

Murray Pomerance's profile page

Murray Pomerance is Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson Polytechnic University, and the author of Magia D'Amore and coeditor of Bang Bang, Shoot Shoot! Essays on Guns and Popular Culture.

"This book addresses a significant aspect of film studies and cultural studies today, namely, how gender is both represented and reconfigured in the artifacts of mass culture. In a myriad of ways, it builds on the important feminist criticism of the seventies and eighties, while at the same time reflecting the overall broadening of focus that occurred in the nineties?away from strictly psychoanalytic approaches and toward a more wide-ranging variety of both formal and sociological concerns." — Steven Shaviro, author of The Cinematic Body

"From the first words of Pomerance's introduction to his clinching essay on the fortunes of Psycho, this book reads with foe and wit. It speaks not only to issues of gender or sexuality, but more directly?and compellingly?to the present state of cinema in a phase of globalization." — Tom Conley, Harvard University