Film and Screen Media - Book Chapters

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    Victims of a vicious system: Women, violence, and human rights
    (Routledge, 2016-06-23) Imran, Rahat
    This chapter explores the Cinema of Accountability category to focus on representative documentary films, filmmakers, and organizations that address particular gender-specific issues affecting Pakistani women from their standpoint. Numerous Pakistani activist organizations and independent filmmakers have drawn attention to the widespread forms of violence and discrimination, with a particular focus on honour and revenge through extreme acts of violence such as stove-burning, acid-attacks, karo kari, honour-killing, honour-rape, and Swara. The chapter focuses on Burnt Victims: Scars on the Society. Burnt Victims: Scars on the Society, made by the AGHS Legal Aid Cell as a consciousness-raising and educational film for the purpose of training its staff to deal with cases of violence against women, also stresses the alarming situation of violence against women in the form of stove-burning and acid-attacks. Film discussions in the chapter demonstrates that Western conceptualizations and terminology of feminist' are not wholly applicable to the Pakistani situation.
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    Mukhtaran Mai's transformation from gang-rape victim to the feminist face of glamour: Transcending notions of tribal honour, gender and class in Pakistan
    (Routledge, 2019-10-29) Imran, Rahat
    This chapter focuses on the Mukhtaran Mai gang-rape case study to examine one womanâ s resolve to fight back "honor-rape", and her struggle to seek justice through the Pakistani judicial system. The discussion explores the various dimensions underlying such sexual violence against women, and their objectification as symbols of "honour" from the tribal standpoint of power structures of tribe/caste, class, and gender in contemporary Pakistani society. It also deals with the tribal parallel legal system that itself propagates and condones such acts of violence against women. The essay, thus, traces Mukhtaran Mai's journey through the courts and her emergence as a feminist and rights activist who transcended the widely held notions of tribal honor, gender, and class, and acquired worldwide acclaim as a symbol of courage, and resistance, and recognition as a feminist face of glamour when she received in 2005 Glamour Magazine's Women of the Year award.
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    James Baldwin's embodied absence: I Am Not Your Negro and filmic corporeality
    (Routledge, 2020-06-18) Rascaroli, Laura
    As an essay on North American history and on the rift between lived experience and ideological images that obfuscate it, I Am Not Your Negro relies on a key motif: the body. I argue that I Am Not Your Negroâ s engagement with Baldwinâ s ideas on the question of Black bodies and their effacement from American history, media, and society becomes the kernel of the filmâ s narrative and discursive strategy. As a documentary, I Am Not Your Negro carries out a historical/biographical work of testimony and assemblage, and is a vehicle for Baldwinâ s ideas; as an essay, it suggests a corporeal fullness to Baldwinâ s textual fragments by giving them a filmic voice. Located between reality and imaginary, present and past, substance and image, the essayistic constitutes itself through voiceover as an embodied absence that carries the weight of the argument in its filmic flesh.