Between Zero Dark Thirty and Camp X-Ray: Changing Gender Dynamics of Contemporary American War Film

Authors

  • Ali Yasar Tuzcu John F. Kennedy Institute (Free University of Berlin)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.311

Keywords:

2nd Wave Feminism, Identity Politics, Militarism, Neoliberalism, Politics, Spectatorship, War Film

Abstract

War films play a substantial role in American society by cultivating an understanding of military politics. I argue that the use of different narrative strategies encouraging spectator identification within the US American war films establishes the political backbone of the genre. This paper concentrates on the transformation of the genre’s conventional gender representation in connection with American military politics. After providing a brief history of female integration into the US military, it offers a comparative analysis of Zero Dark Thirty“ (2012) and Camp X-Ray“ (2014).

Author Biography

Ali Yasar Tuzcu, John F. Kennedy Institute (Free University of Berlin)

Ali Yasar Tuzcu is a PhD candidate at the Culture department of the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin. His academic interests revolve around the topics of neoliberalism, feminism, and media studies. As a DAAD-Turkish Education Foundation scholarship holder, he finished his M.A. degree in the field of British and North American Cultural Studies at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. In his PhD project, he concentrates on the historical integration of women into American military institutions in parallelism with the rise of neoliberalism. He closely analyzes Zero Dark Thirty “(2012) by Kathryn Bigelow, Camp X-Ray“ (2014) by Peter Sattler, Sicario “(2015) by Denis Villeneuve and Eye in the Sky“ (2015) by Gavin Hood as the visual examples of this historical process.

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Published

2019-06-12

How to Cite

Tuzcu, Ali Yasar. “Between Zero Dark Thirty and Camp X-Ray: Changing Gender Dynamics of Contemporary American War Film”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, June 2019, doi:10.5283/copas.311.

Issue

Vol. 20 No. 1 (2019)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.