Hannah Hamad - Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood

This book makes a key contribution to contemporary film and media studies, as well as contemporary gender studies, by turning our attention to a particularly prominent trope in filmic representations of masculinityfatherhood. Because Hamad places these representations within the crucial context of postfeminist culture, recognizing its complex fashioning of gender roles in our historical moment, the book helps us to better understand the appeal and the danger of these powerful discourses.

Elana Levine, University of WisconsinMilwaukee

This is an important study bringing together a pair of too often neglected subjects, popular contemporary movies outside the critical canon and the representation of masculinity in those movies.

Mike Chopra-Gant, London Metropolitan University

This book interrogates representations of fatherhood across the spectrum of popular U.S. film of the early twenty-first century. It situates them in relation to postfeminist discourse, identifying and discussing dominant paradigms and tropes that emerge from the tendency of popular cinema to configure ideal masculinity in paternal terms. It analyses postfeminist fatherhood across a range of genres, including historical epics, war films, westerns, bromantic comedies, male melodramas, action films, family comedies and others. It also explores recurring themes and intersections, such as the rejuvenation of aging masculinities through fatherhood, the paternalized recuperation of immature adult masculinities, the relationship between fatherhood in film and 9/11 culture, postracial discourse in representations of fatherhood and historically located formations of fatherhood. It is the first book-length study to explore the relationship between fatherhood and postfeminism in popular cinema.

Hannah Hamad is Lecturer in Film Studies at Kings College London, United Kingdom.

1 Nation and Identity in the New German Cinema

Homeless at Home

Inga Scharf

2 Lesbianism, Cinema, Space

The Sexual Life of Apartments

Lee Wallace

3 Post-War Italian Cinema

American Intervention, Vatican Interests

Daniela Treveri Gennari

4 Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America

Edited by Victoria Rutalo and Dolores Tierney

5 Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers

The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear

Julian Hanich

6 Cinema, Memory, Modernity

The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema

Russell J. A. Kilbourn

7 Distributing Silent Film Serials

Local Practices, Changing Forms, Cultural Transformation

Rudmer Canjels

8 The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema

Raz Yosef

9 Neoliberalism and Global Cinema

Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique

Edited by Jyotsna Kapur and Keith B. Wagner

10 Koreas Occupied Cinemas, 18931948

The Untold History of the Film Industry

Brian Yecies with Ae-Gyung Shim

11 Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas

The Reel Asian Exchange

Edited by Philippa Gates and Lisa Funnell

12 Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas

Alka Kurian

13 Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal

Public Daydreams

Anna Siomopoulos

14 Theorizing Film Acting

Edited by Aaron Taylor

15 Stardom and the Aesthetics of Neorealism

Ingrid Bergman in Rossellinis Italy

Ora Gelley

16 Postwar Renoir

Film and the Memory of Violence

Colin Davis

17 Cinema and Inter-American Relations

Tracking Transnational Affect

Adrin Prez Melgosa

18 European Civil War Films

Memory, Conflict, and Nostalgia

Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou

19 The Aesthetics of Antifascism

Radical Projection

Jennifer Lynde Barker

20 The Politics of Age and Disability in Contemporary Spanish Film

Plus Ultra Pluralism

Matthew J. Marr

21 Cinema and Language Loss

Displacement, Visuality and the Filmic Image

Tijana Mamula

22 Cinema as Weather

Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change

Kristi McKim

23 Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film

Cinema Year Zero

Giuliana Minghelli

24 Masculinity in the Contemporary Romantic Comedy

Gender as Genre

John Alberti

25 Crossover Cinema

Cross-Cultural Film from Production to Reception

Edited by Sukhmani Khorana

26 Spanish Cinema in the Global Context

Film on Film

Samuel Amago

27 Japanese Horror Films and Their American Remakes

Translating Fear, Adapting Culture

Valerie Wee

28 Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary U.S. Film

Framing Fatherhood

Hannah Hamad

Framing Fatherhood

By Hannah Hamad

First published 2014

by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hamad, Hannah.
Postfeminism and paternity in contemporary US film: framing fatherhood / Hannah Hamad.
pages cm. (Routledge advances in film studies; 28)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Fatherhood in motion pictures. 2. Motion picturesUnited StatesHistory21st century. 3. Feminism and motion pictures United States. I. Title.
PN1995.9.F42H36 2013
791.43'653dc23
2013017022

ISBN: 978-0-415-89992-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-79871-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Thanks above all to Diane Negra, whose support for this work has been generous and unwavering at every stage. Special thanks also to Deborah Jermyn, Alice Leppert and Julie Wilson for reading chapters and for welcome advice, as well as to Shelley Cobb, Lindsay Steenberg and Sarah Godfrey. Many people have provided different forms of moral, intellectual and general support or have steered me in the direction of examples and sources that have informed this work directly or indirectly, so thanks also to Nathalie Morris, Lorcan McGrane, Neil Ewen, Sam Crowie, Jonathan Stubbs, James Caterer, Stuart Mogridge, Lawrence Napper and anyone else I have neglected to name. It all helped. Thanks also to my friends and former colleagues Sarah Ross and Ian Huffer for personal and professional support. Thanks to Erica Wetter and Felisa Salvago-Keyes at Routledge, New York, and to the anonymous readers who provided valuable feedback and constructive criticism. Yvonne Tasker, Peter Krmer, Su Holmes and Estella Tincknell supported my ideas for this work at its germinal stage, for which I remain grateful. An award from Massey Universitys College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the flexibility and understanding of the Department of Film Studies at Kings College London enabled the timely submission of this manuscript. I am indebted to both. Aspects of the work in this book are informed by material that also appears in Hannah Hamad Hollywood Fatherhood: Paternal Postfeminism in Contemporary Popular Cinema in Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood , eds. Joel Gwynne and Nadine Muller (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. The full published version of this publication is available from: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=657640.