Talk with Debarchana Baruah, University of Tübingen. Representations of women in film and television often spark debates because of the industry’s reliance on stereotypes, acquiescence to male gaze, or whitewashing and total erasure of women of minority communities. When the representations are from temporally separated pasts, the portrayals become even more problematic as they raise into question women’s emotional maturity, sexuality, and intelligence. Their very human needs and emotions are doubted or denied altogether. In her talk, Debarchana Baruah will interrogate why contemporary productions set in the past often portray women in a problematic way as well as discuss possibilities of a different mode of imagining and relating to women from the past.
Dr. Debarchana Baruah is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Tübingen. Her Ph.D. dissertation “21st Century Retro: Mad Men and 1960s America” offers a unique interdisciplinary theoretical framework to understand the increasingly popular trend in contemporary films and television to revisit recent pasts in ironic and ambivalent ways, distinct in their style and treatment of the past from the traditional historical productions.
Watch for free: online via Zoom at www.dai-tuebingen.de/gender and live on YouTube at www.dai-tuebingen.de/tv.