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Transnational Women Protagonists in Contemporary Cinema: Migration, Servitude, Motherhood

Kim, Natalia N.
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7728-7968
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1429100119

Abstract Details

2015, Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, Film (Fine Arts).
This thesis studies the cinematic representation of transnational women workers in contemporary American and European fiction films including Bread and Roses (2000), Dirt (2003), Spanglish (2004), and Amreeka (2009). The research considers this representation as it articulates issues in the current state of global migration, immigration laws, and women’s reproductive labor. Since the early 2000s, the growing numbers of women from the so-called `developing’ countries have been immigrating, alone or with their children, to `developed’ countries. Most often they are destined for employment in low-wage service jobs. This process, termed as the “feminization of migration” in the United Nations study (2006), has been addressed by filmmakers such as Ken Loach, Gregory Nava, Nancy Savoca and many others who have made films centered on the immigrant women protagonists. I argue that the cinematic impulse to portray the lives of underrepresented women and to appropriate their marginalized point-of-view signals a necessary turn to a transnational subjectivity determined by contemporary global economic and power relations.
Ofer Eliaz (Committee Chair)
Katarzyna Marciniak (Committee Member)
Louis-Georges Schwartz (Committee Member)
103 p.
Film Studies; Fine Arts; Gender; Womens Studies
Transnational feminism; transnational film studies; American cinema; European cinema; women protagonists, reproductive labor; feminization of migration; transnational motherhood; female migration; female mobility; globalism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Kim, N. N. (2015). Transnational Women Protagonists in Contemporary Cinema: Migration, Servitude, Motherhood [Master's thesis, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1429100119

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Kim, Natalia. Transnational Women Protagonists in Contemporary Cinema: Migration, Servitude, Motherhood. 2015. Ohio University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1429100119.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Kim, Natalia. "Transnational Women Protagonists in Contemporary Cinema: Migration, Servitude, Motherhood." Master's thesis, Ohio University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1429100119

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1429100119
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This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.