Stephanie Trinidad

Opposites Attract: Gender Roles in Early Cinema Abstract Nothing shocks an audience as much as a character who intended to be one sexual orientation is played by the opposite sex. For them most part in Hollywood the reason why a studio would hire a male actor to play a female role or a female actress for a male role would have various meanings. An actress might be paid less, or the role is physically impossible for a male or female actor to play. This is something that is easily noticed in the earliest of cinema when Charlie Chaplin played the wife in the silent film A Busy Day , or when Betty Bronson played Peter Pan for the first time. Both characters are easily distinguishable for who they’re supposed to be, male or female, but their roles were played by the opposite gender. This paper is meant to study how Hollywood used male and female actors to play roles for the opposite sex in order to understand sexuality in film. Where these characters meant to be portrayed...

The Modern Girls: Japan’s Generation of Change The modernization of the world that began during the industrial revolution slowly made its way across the word throughout the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. The Modern Girl or the Modern Woman was spreading throughout the world in the early twentieth century. When Western culture made its way to Japan the young girls no longer saw a need in their parents traditional ideals, they saw a freedom in clothing and self-expression that had once been frowned upon. Women wanted the right to vote, they wanted to work, and they wanted the ability to choose what they were able to do with their lives. Yet in Japan the Modern Girl, also known as modan gaaru or moga, became a subject of concern from those who valued traditional roles. Japan as a country wanted to preserve their national identity from industrialization while they adapted to the change that was sweeping the world. When the Modern Girl began to r...

Book Review: Battle Royale Slam Book             Book to movie adaptations aren’t a new genre of film, many books have been adapted into film during the short history of cinema. Although many have caused controversy over the years none have caused such a stir as the adaptation of the cult novel Battle Royale . The story of Battle Royale is simple but also devastating, a group of 30 students are trapped on an island with collars on their necks, they must kill one another until one is left standing as the ultimate victor. In The Battle Royale Slam Book: Essays on the Cult Classic by Houshun Takami edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington [Haika Soru; 2014; San Francisco; 185 pgs; $14.99; ISBN” 978-1421565996] is collection of essays analyzing the impact of not just the novel but the movie and Japanese manga as well. Mamatas and Washington brought together writers from every spectrum to show that the cult phenomenon th...

Girls Will Change the World: The Evolution of the Modern Girl throughout Japanese Literature             The cultural evolution of young women in Japan is something that can be traced throughout its literature. Starting from the modern girl of the 1920’s to the hyper sexualized feminist roles of the late 1960’s all the way to the 21 st century girl who embodies a different world from their parents. The early 20 th century brought about a change in the young women of Japan with the influx of Western cultures and the rise of fashion that no longer restricted them to the same fashions as their mothers. The evolution of the role of women throughout the 20 th century has evolved from homemaker in a patriarchal society, where men dominate, to a working class educated young women. In Japan this change is seen through the evolution of the” Modern Girl,” which was coined in the early 20 th century to establish the cultural ...

Between Fiction and Reality The Lost Voices of the children of Easter 1916 Introduction It was April 24 th of 1916 when Dublin, Ireland became a warzone between two countries. One side was a small rebel group that wanted to gain control of Ireland, the other British troops who had control of the island nation. Britain for the most part of history has had control of a good part of the world and it has been said that “The sun never set on the British Empire because the sun sets in the West and the British Empire was in the East.” [1] The Easter Rebellion sparked a national outcry from the people of Ireland to free themselves from the rule of the British government and allow them to govern themselves. The Rising wasn’t conceived overnight; it was meticulously planned by members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, so that it would take place throughout Ireland. A few setbacks had caused the Rising to be centered around two areas instead of a full scale rebellion....

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Breakout Stars Korean Artist, K-Pop, and the American Music Industry          The emergence of Korean culture in the United States isn’t something that is new. For years artist from South Korea have slowly become a part of American culture, such as Rain a K-Pop and R&B artist who starred in the movie Ninja Assassin and was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People Who Shape Our World.” Bryan Walsh wrote in the 2006 article on Rain that, “ Rain is the face — and well-muscled torso — of pop globalism” (time.com). Although Rain didn’t debut with an English language album he was able to establish himself in the United States and bring over the Hallyu Wave to the Western World. In Choe Sang-Hun and Mark Russell’s article “Bringing K-Pop to the West” they describe what K-Pop means “ K-pop is part of a broader trend known as the Korean Wave and called ''hallyu'' in Korean. The Taiwanese were among the first to notic...

PSY: The Rise of a Korean Superstar             When the music video for Gangnam Style debuted on YouTube, PSY the artist behind the song wasn’t known to anyone outside of South Korea and its neighboring countries. Since its debut Gangnam Style has garnered over 2 billion views making it one of the most played songs in YouTube history. PSY’s global breakout success is still a mystery to people in his home country. Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Yang’s article “Gangnam Style’s U.S. Popularity has Koreans Puzzled, Gratified” Yang writes that “ the unlikely emergence of Park Jae-Song, the chubby, 34-year-old rapper known as PSY , as the face of K-pop, after the explosive success of his rollicking video for “ Gangnam Style ,” has been greeted by Koreans with a blinking neon “WTF” (blogs.wsj.com). Yet PSY has done something that was still a not yet achievable dream for Korean artist and that was to break out in a marke...

            Kitty Fane, a young wife of bacteriologist Walter Fane finds herself in a world where her former life as a debutante in upper-middle class England isn’t sufficient. In a land where the cholera epidemic runs rampant and children are orphaned by the disease. W Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil , follows her story, as a young wife who is caught in an affair with another man, betrayed by her lover, and is suddenly thrusted into a world filled with disease and death. What make’s Maugham’s novel interesting is that it isn’t about the affair but about the growth of the character who suddenly realizes that her life isn’t a closed world filled with parties and becoming the wife of a respectable man. Kitty’s growth within the novel is about how the world around her shapes who she becomes once she’s away from the life that she had known. The Church and the disease within the town made her realize that life wasn’t only ab...

            The role of women in novels is one that always changes as the world itself changes, histories are altered, women are liberated, and the past comes to light as a time that had once oppressed women. Chinua Achebe’s novels Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease both center on male characters and women are in the background pushing the story along and changing the lives of the male protagonist. As an answer to Achebe’s novels Chimamanda Adichie wrote the short story “The Headstrong Historian”, unlike the male protagonist of Achebe’s Africa Adichie’s story is centered on a female character from the same Ibo village from Things Fall Apart . All of the female characters in these three stories live in a patriarchal society that is created from traditions and religious influences. Though they influence the male characters and have strong personalities they’re still tied down to the male heirs, husbands, and sons.