Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re-Constructions in the Cinema (Suny Series in Postmodern Culture)

Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Explores how whiteness is culturally constructed in American films.

Performing Whiteness crosses the boundaries of film study to explore images of the white body in relation to recent theoretical perspectives on whiteness.

Drawing on such diverse critical methodologies as postcolonial studies, feminist film criticism, anthropology, and phenomenology, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster examines a wide variety of films from early cinema to the present day in order to explore the ways in which American cinema imposes whiteness as a cultural norm, even as it exposes its inherent instability.

In discussions that range from The Philadelphia Story to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Foster shows that, though American cinema is an all-white construct, there exists the possibility of a healthy resistance to cultural norms of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Table of Contents

1. Performing Whiteness
2. Inventing Whiteness
3. White Face, White Space
4. The Bad-White Body
5. Performing the "Good" White
6. Performing the "Bad" White
7. Performing White Otherness