Rebecca Wanzo
Biographic Data
| ID | 389184 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca Wanzo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca |
| FAMILY NAME | Wanzo |
| SIGNATURE | WANZO R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Washington University in St. Louis |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Other Replacement Theory
With the success of M3GAN (Gerard Johnstone, 2023) and unfolding conversations about Artificial Intelligence (AI) informing the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo explores the question of labor in the AI film. Noting the limited repertoire of AI representations in television and film, Wanzo asks why so few AI stories go beyond familiar narratives to instead explore the complexities of constructing a laboring future in a world w…
Viola’s Body
FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo never expected to see Hollywood produce a film like The Woman King (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2022), an action film led by a dark-skinned Black woman in her fifties, starring other Black women, and focused on the intimacy between them. In this column, Wanzo explores The Woman King’s radical depiction of real Black women’s bodies experiencing the erotic as power—an idea borrowed from the Black feminist lesbian poet Audre Lo…
Ghosts of Cho
Nearly thirty years ago, Margaret Cho broke new ground as the star of ABC’s All-American Girl, the first network sitcom to have a predominantly Asian American cast. Cho’s series proved controversial, however, in its assimilationist politics and performance of negative ethnic stereotypes, and was canceled after only one year. In this article, FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo traces the genealogy of Asian American sitcoms from All-American Girl to more r…
Things You Can Tell by Looking
FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo jumps into the critical fray generated by Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, Passing (2021). Wanzo notes that much of the scholarly debate on Passing is illustrative of tendentious debates around authenticity, depictions of history and trauma, and cultural ownership, as well as a too common disinterest in aesthetics as a primary way to address questions of blackness in art. She suggests that it is the choice to deploy be…
What If No One Is There to Care? Dementia’s Narrative Demands
FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo considers the recent evolution of the dementia film, which has shifted over the past twenty years from a focus on the experience of caregivers to that of the person suffering from cognitive decline. Yet the relationship between the caretaker and the sufferer remains central to the genre, prompting Wanzo to ask the question: What kind of story is told about cognitive decline in old age when no one is there to care? The r…
Identity Remakes in and out of Time
Film Quarterly columnist Rebecca Wanzo reads Hagai Levi’s remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage as a case study for ongoing debates about remakes. Noting the particular scorn a remake can be subject to when racial or gender identities are changed or updated, she suggests that Levi’s Scenes is a feminist update that also illustrates how genre can get in the way of more progressive renderings of gender roles, revealing instead the intra…
Taylor Sheridan Is Sorry but His Characters Are Not
FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo examines the complex and contradictory politics of Taylor Sheridan’s Westerns, focusing on the popular Paramount+ series Yellowstone. While often described as “red-state television”—referring to both its location and the presumed audience demographics—Yellowstone has conservative diegetic logic at the same time as it depicts white supremacists as antagonists and critiques racial profiling. Yellowstone’s “messiness” sugg…
Resisting the Revolutionary Call
Many people argued that Black Panther was a revolutionary film, a claim that somewhat obscures that it was success under capitalism that made Black Panther seem more radical in content than it actually was. Placing director Ryan Coogler within the ranks of radical filmmaking ironically undercuts the challenge of sustaining a successful Black commercial vision that can still contain interesting ideas about Black life. This essay explores the diffe…
MeToo
This introduction looks at the difference between Tarana Burke's "me too" and #MeToo. The chronologically distinct origin stories for the forms of activism #MeToo has generated illustrate a distinction between Burke's "me too," grounded in her work with Black girls and created to raise awareness of the collective plight of survivors of sexual violence, and "#MeToo," an example of hashtag feminism that has come to be associated with identifying in…
Sentimental Solidarities
Film Quarterly columnist Rebecca Wanzo surveys the history of fictional treatments of labor in US television and film and examines the frequently overlooked role played by sentimentality in media representations of labor and union organizing. Noting that sentimentality has been criticized for its deployment of suffering bodies as “other” objects for voyeuristic tears as well as for sometimes collapsing difference in an effort to construct empathy…
Black Obliteration around the Corner
FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo examines the new genre of “gentrification” films and documentaries that has emerged during the first two decades of the 21st century. Gentrification documentaries, such as Laura Poitras and Linda Goode Bryant’s Flag Wars (2003), tend to highlight not only displacement but the effects arising from class disparities that have become hypervisible with the proximity of new, affluent residents. In fictional films, however, g…
How Long, Not Long
A major theme of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series is West Indian joy. West Indian immigrants’ struggles against state resistance to everyday black life. In a rather profound contrast to McQueen’s other work—in which long takes of suffering bodies draw the viewer into the inescapability of the pain experienced by his subjects—joy disrupted provides the counterpoint to bodies in pain. Striking this balance between suffering and joyous bodies is one…
National Fantasies about the Self
National Fantasies about the Self Rebecca Wanzo (bio) In my last exchange with Lauren Berlant, they asked me if I had read Patrisse Cullors's memoir written with asha bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist (2017). It was one of those out-of-the-blue messages you might get from Lauren about a book, art exhibit, film, television show, or in recent years, comedy routine, that you might find intellectually generative. And Lauren, queen of the "hated…
Moten’s magical meditations
Review of: Black and Blur , Fred Moten (2017) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 360 pp., ISBN 978-0-82237-016-1, p/bk, $28.95 Stolen Life , Fred Moten (2018) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 336 pp., ISBN 978-0-82237-058-1, p/bk, $27.95 The Universal Machine , Fred Moten (2019) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 312 pp., ISBN 978-0-82237-055-0, p/bk, $27.95
Migratory Dissemblance
Darlene Clark Hine’s “Rape and Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West” has been essential to black feminist theorizing of African American women’s history, respectability politics, and sexuality. However, it has not been understood as offering a political theory that has implications for understanding gendered migration. The global history of migration is shaped by both continuity and rupture. Slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and capital…
Keyword 2
This essay makes a case for the specificity of the different claims grouped under the category of “sexual injury to women” in order to think with more precision about the kind of solidarity projects that are required. In the case of #MeToo, one of the most important outcomes of its recent iteration has been its elucidation of sexual harassment in the workplace. While there has undoubtedly been political utility in acknowledging the pervasiveness …
The Normative Broken
Lost Girls (2006) is a return to the themes explored by Melinda Gebbie and other underground feminist cartoonists in the 1970s and 1980s. The text, a collaboration between Gebbie and Alan Moore, should be read as reminiscent of feminist cartoonists who intentionally depicted the taboo or obscene in order to address sexual and gender inequalities. These comics suggest that the obscene can push against purity narratives attached to womanhood, narra…
The Cosby Lament
This essay is an attempt to work through the nature of the cultural injury produced by the African American male celebrity—an injury that is frequently enacted as intimate violence—and to hypothesize why public accusations of such injuries so often affectively challenge black subjects. Remedies for these injuries frequently gesture toward heteronormative or otherwise regulatory racialized sexual scripts. Stories of African American male celebriti…
Precarious-Girl Comedy
Issa Rae's web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011–13), initially posted on YouTube, and Lena Dunham's Girls (HBO, 2012–) are examples of the precarious-girl comedy in the new millennium. These sitcoms depict women experiencing a prolonged girlhood produced not only by the greater economic insecurity that middle-class women have been facing post–Great Recession but also by a variety social factors that generate feelings of immobi…
The Deadly Fight Over Feelings
This essay explores the role affect plays in police use of force. On the one hand, police officers' affect, and more specifically, police officers' fear of African Americans can function as evidence in police shootings. But black fear of police violence is often cast as unreasonable and excessive. In a discussion of the public battles over affective responses to police violence, I argue that the failure that the struggle over perceptions of affec…
Homegrown
Book Review| September 01 2010 Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism; Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities Rebecca Wanzo Rebecca Wanzo Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2010) 82 (3): 659–661. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2010-037 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Rebecca Wanzo; Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism; Rhetorical Occasions: …
The Superhero
Question with boldness even the existence of God ... because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. —Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Strange Girl. Ar
Bridging Race Divides
While scholars such as Ula Taylor have looked at African American women's participation in black nationalist projects, Kate Dossett's book goes one step further by arguing that African American women were at the forefront of conversations about black nationalism and integration in the early twentieth century. This volume explores how those women “challenged the dichotomy between black nationalism and integrationism,” exploring how some black wome…
Against Proper Affective Objects
Against Proper Affective Objects Rebecca Wanzo (bio) The Female Complaint. By Lauren Berlant. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 368 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. 328 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. By Elizabeth Povinelli. Durham, …
Wearing Hero‐Face
Precarious-Girl Comedy
Issa Rae's web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011–13), initially posted on YouTube, and Lena Dunham's Girls (HBO, 2012–) are examples of the precarious-girl comedy in the new millennium. These sitcoms depict women experiencing a prolonged girlhood produced not only by the greater economic insecurity that middle-class women have been facing post–Great Recession but also by a variety social factors that generate feelings of immobi…
Wearing Hero‐Face
Keyword 2
This essay makes a case for the specificity of the different claims grouped under the category of “sexual injury to women” in order to think with more precision about the kind of solidarity projects that are required. In the case of #MeToo, one of the most important outcomes of its recent iteration has been its elucidation of sexual harassment in the workplace. While there has undoubtedly been political utility in acknowledging the pervasiveness …
The Era of Lost (White) Girls
rebecca wanzo is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. She is currently completing a book manuscript about sentimental political storytelling in the United States forthcoming from suny Press
The Superhero
Question with boldness even the existence of God ... because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. —Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Strange Girl. Ar
Beyond a 'Just' Syntax
This article examines how Oscar winning African American women have negotiated a tension between representing stereotype and constructing complex personhood. The author argues that ‘complex personhood’ has meant publicly utilizing stereotype while imaginatively reaching toward identities as individuals and representatives of communities they wish to claim. Through reviews of their performances and the stories they tell about their own struggles w…
The Deadly Fight Over Feelings
This essay explores the role affect plays in police use of force. On the one hand, police officers' affect, and more specifically, police officers' fear of African Americans can function as evidence in police shootings. But black fear of police violence is often cast as unreasonable and excessive. In a discussion of the public battles over affective responses to police violence, I argue that the failure that the struggle over perceptions of affec…
Quiet As It's Kept
Book Review| December 01 2000 Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison By J. Brooks Bouson. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press. 2000. x, 277 pp. $21.95. Rebecca Wanzo Rebecca Wanzo Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2000) 72 (4): 887–888. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-72-4-887 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site…
The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy
Book Review| September 01 2001 The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from“ Clarissa” to “Rescue 911.”; The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature By Laura Hinton. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press. 1999. xiii, 279 pp. Paper, $18.95.By Marianne Noble. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. 2000. viii, 258 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $18.95. Rebecca Wanzo Rebecca Wanzo Search for other works by this author on: This S…
The Freedom to Remember
The Particulars of Rapture
Book Review| September 01 2006 The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects; The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment Rebecca Wanzo Rebecca Wanzo Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2006) 78 (3): 650–652. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-043 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Rebecca Wa…
Beyond a 'Just' Syntax
This article examines how Oscar winning African American women have negotiated a tension between representing stereotype and constructing complex personhood. The author argues that ‘complex personhood’ has meant publicly utilizing stereotype while imaginatively reaching toward identities as individuals and representatives of communities they wish to claim. Through reviews of their performances and the stories they tell about their own struggles w…
The Era of Lost (White) Girls
rebecca wanzo is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. She is currently completing a book manuscript about sentimental political storytelling in the United States forthcoming from suny Press
The Superhero
Question with boldness even the existence of God ... because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. —Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Strange Girl. Ar
Bridging Race Divides
While scholars such as Ula Taylor have looked at African American women's participation in black nationalist projects, Kate Dossett's book goes one step further by arguing that African American women were at the forefront of conversations about black nationalism and integration in the early twentieth century. This volume explores how those women “challenged the dichotomy between black nationalism and integrationism,” exploring how some black wome…
Against Proper Affective Objects
Against Proper Affective Objects Rebecca Wanzo (bio) The Female Complaint. By Lauren Berlant. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 368 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007. 328 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. By Elizabeth Povinelli. Durham, …
Wearing Hero‐Face
Homegrown
Book Review| September 01 2010 Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism; Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities Rebecca Wanzo Rebecca Wanzo Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2010) 82 (3): 659–661. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2010-037 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Rebecca Wanzo; Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism; Rhetorical Occasions: …
The Deadly Fight Over Feelings
This essay explores the role affect plays in police use of force. On the one hand, police officers' affect, and more specifically, police officers' fear of African Americans can function as evidence in police shootings. But black fear of police violence is often cast as unreasonable and excessive. In a discussion of the public battles over affective responses to police violence, I argue that the failure that the struggle over perceptions of affec…
Precarious-Girl Comedy
Issa Rae's web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011–13), initially posted on YouTube, and Lena Dunham's Girls (HBO, 2012–) are examples of the precarious-girl comedy in the new millennium. These sitcoms depict women experiencing a prolonged girlhood produced not only by the greater economic insecurity that middle-class women have been facing post–Great Recession but also by a variety social factors that generate feelings of immobi…
The Normative Broken
Lost Girls (2006) is a return to the themes explored by Melinda Gebbie and other underground feminist cartoonists in the 1970s and 1980s. The text, a collaboration between Gebbie and Alan Moore, should be read as reminiscent of feminist cartoonists who intentionally depicted the taboo or obscene in order to address sexual and gender inequalities. These comics suggest that the obscene can push against purity narratives attached to womanhood, narra…
The Cosby Lament
This essay is an attempt to work through the nature of the cultural injury produced by the African American male celebrity—an injury that is frequently enacted as intimate violence—and to hypothesize why public accusations of such injuries so often affectively challenge black subjects. Remedies for these injuries frequently gesture toward heteronormative or otherwise regulatory racialized sexual scripts. Stories of African American male celebriti…
Keyword 2
This essay makes a case for the specificity of the different claims grouped under the category of “sexual injury to women” in order to think with more precision about the kind of solidarity projects that are required. In the case of #MeToo, one of the most important outcomes of its recent iteration has been its elucidation of sexual harassment in the workplace. While there has undoubtedly been political utility in acknowledging the pervasiveness …
Moten’s magical meditations
Review of: Black and Blur , Fred Moten (2017) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 360 pp., ISBN 978-0-82237-016-1, p/bk, $28.95 Stolen Life , Fred Moten (2018) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 336 pp., ISBN 978-0-82237-058-1, p/bk, $27.95 The Universal Machine , Fred Moten (2019) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 312 pp., ISBN 978-0-82237-055-0, p/bk, $27.95
Migratory Dissemblance
Darlene Clark Hine’s “Rape and Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West” has been essential to black feminist theorizing of African American women’s history, respectability politics, and sexuality. However, it has not been understood as offering a political theory that has implications for understanding gendered migration. The global history of migration is shaped by both continuity and rupture. Slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and capital…
Sentimental Solidarities
Film Quarterly columnist Rebecca Wanzo surveys the history of fictional treatments of labor in US television and film and examines the frequently overlooked role played by sentimentality in media representations of labor and union organizing. Noting that sentimentality has been criticized for its deployment of suffering bodies as “other” objects for voyeuristic tears as well as for sometimes collapsing difference in an effort to construct empathy…
Black Obliteration around the Corner
FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo examines the new genre of “gentrification” films and documentaries that has emerged during the first two decades of the 21st century. Gentrification documentaries, such as Laura Poitras and Linda Goode Bryant’s Flag Wars (2003), tend to highlight not only displacement but the effects arising from class disparities that have become hypervisible with the proximity of new, affluent residents. In fictional films, however, g…
How Long, Not Long
A major theme of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series is West Indian joy. West Indian immigrants’ struggles against state resistance to everyday black life. In a rather profound contrast to McQueen’s other work—in which long takes of suffering bodies draw the viewer into the inescapability of the pain experienced by his subjects—joy disrupted provides the counterpoint to bodies in pain. Striking this balance between suffering and joyous bodies is one…
National Fantasies about the Self
National Fantasies about the Self Rebecca Wanzo (bio) In my last exchange with Lauren Berlant, they asked me if I had read Patrisse Cullors's memoir written with asha bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist (2017). It was one of those out-of-the-blue messages you might get from Lauren about a book, art exhibit, film, television show, or in recent years, comedy routine, that you might find intellectually generative. And Lauren, queen of the "hated…
Things You Can Tell by Looking
FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo jumps into the critical fray generated by Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, Passing (2021). Wanzo notes that much of the scholarly debate on Passing is illustrative of tendentious debates around authenticity, depictions of history and trauma, and cultural ownership, as well as a too common disinterest in aesthetics as a primary way to address questions of blackness in art. She suggests that it is the choice to deploy be…
What If No One Is There to Care? Dementia’s Narrative Demands
FQ columnist Rebecca Wanzo considers the recent evolution of the dementia film, which has shifted over the past twenty years from a focus on the experience of caregivers to that of the person suffering from cognitive decline. Yet the relationship between the caretaker and the sufferer remains central to the genre, prompting Wanzo to ask the question: What kind of story is told about cognitive decline in old age when no one is there to care? The r…
Identity Remakes in and out of Time
Film Quarterly columnist Rebecca Wanzo reads Hagai Levi’s remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage as a case study for ongoing debates about remakes. Noting the particular scorn a remake can be subject to when racial or gender identities are changed or updated, she suggests that Levi’s Scenes is a feminist update that also illustrates how genre can get in the way of more progressive renderings of gender roles, revealing instead the intra…
Art (27 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · History (15 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Literature (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Art history (10 works)