Heroism and Gender in War Films

Filmic constructions of war heroism have a profound impact on public perceptions of conflicts. Here, contributors examine the ways motifs of gender and heroism in war films are used to justify ideological positions, shape the understanding of the military conflicts, support political agendas and institutions, and influence collective memory.

"A timely collection of essays, bringing together a cluster of historical and contemporary chartings of unmapped territory in the interface between cinema and representations of war." - Elisabeth Bronfen, author of Specters of War: Hollywood's Engagment with Military Conflict

"The best scholarship in the humanities is not that which answers questions but that which teaches us to ask ones we never thought of before. Heroism and Gender in War Films accomplishes this task of opening the mind by being not just another book about a well-studied genre of popular culture. The topics and authors are eclectic - from 'Mary Pickford's WWI Patriotism' to 'A People's Humor as an Aesthetic Stratagem in Golpe de Estadio (1998)' to 'Myth and Spectacle in The Hunger Games' - and what they have in common is originality, liveliness, and the choice of fascinating case studies. It's the kind of book that I think undergraduates in a gender studies class, film scholars and yes, the educated layperson wanting to learn new ways to look at movies will enjoy equally. Read Heroism and Gender in War Films and you will discover lost classics of film you may have never heard of and greatly expand your toolkit to study them as well as the latest Hollywood blockbuster." - David D. Perlmutter, Texas Tech University, USA and author of Visions of War and Photojournalism and Foreign Policy

"Assumptions concerning gender roles, behaviors and expectations are so deeply imbued in representations of war that one can view the entire genre of war films as an obstinately gendered form of expression. Yet the gender portrayals and cinematic perspectives of war-related films have shifted in significant ways, across different cultures of filmmaking and within Hollywood dominated popular culture. In fact, looking through the lens of gender calls into question the very parameters of the war film as a genre. This collection of critical essays opens up a wide-ranging discussion of the role of gender in representations of war and heroism, reorienting our consideration of these issues from a variety of cultural and historical perspectives." - Michael Griffin, Department of Media and Cultural Studies, Macalester College, USA and author of "Media Images of War", Media, War, and Conflict

Brian E. Crim, Lynchburg College, USA Janis L. Goldie, Huntington University, Canada Tara Karajica, University of Barcelona, Spain Jinhua Li, University of North Carolina Ashville, USA Tiel Lundy, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA Rochelle Sara Miller, New York University, USA Lesley C. Pleasant, University of Evansville, USA Janet S. Robinson, Philipps University in Marburg, Germany Clémentine Tholas-Disset, Paris Est Créteil University, France Jessica Wells, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA Debra White-Stanley, Keene State College, USA Hye Seung Chung, Colorado State University, USA Charles-Antoine Courcoux, University of Lausanne, Switzerland Anna Froula, East Carolina University, USA