Hitchcock Annual (1993) - Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies
Details
- book review: Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies
- author(s): Patricia Terry
- journal: Hitchcock Annual (01/Jul/1993)
- issue: page 126
- journal ISSN: 1062-5518
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Abstract
Review of "Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies" by Elizabeth G. Traube (ISBN 0813313139)
Article
Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies. Elizabeth G. Traube. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. 207 pages. $49.95 cloth. $15.95 paper.
Reviewed by PATRICIA TERRY
In Dreaming Identities, Elizabeth Traube convincingly decodes ideological patterns in popular Hollywood films that appeared during the 1980s and identifies correspondences between the films' messages and the social and political trends during the Reagan era. She explains her approach to interpreting the films as cultural products:
the producers of cultural commodities must draw upon ongoing social experience for raw materials, selectively borrowing elements of meaning from lived cultures, reworking them, and incorporating them into commercial cultural products. Such products, however, are raw materials for their receivers, "who make their own re-appropriations of the elements first borrowed from their lived culture and forms of subjectivity." (4)
Further, Traube locates tensions within the films that reflect "contradictory tendencies in the larger society" and identifies the "contending vision struggl[ing] for expression" in the films (3). She is particularly interested in the "fictional threat of female power" (167) in the films but goes beyond merely noting the existence of patriarchal messages in them by emphasizing their reception by specific audiences "differentiated by class, race, gender, and generation" (5). Traube argues that "men and women are under continual pressure to reinvent gender identities appropriate to their class situation," and her concern arises from the power of the Hollywood films which "provide imaginative resources for...
Patricia Terry teaches at Gonzaga University and is working on contemporary westerns.
