Joanne Leal (London) and Klaus-Dieter Rossade (Milton Keynes) p.59-87
2008 Issue 3
Abstract
This essay explores the relationship between the representation of gender, sexuality and ethnicity and the negotiation of urban space in the post-migrant city films of two of the most prominent Turkish-German filmmakers working today, Thomas Arslan and Fatih Akin. It aims to identify whether stereotypical representations of ethnically specific gender relations of the sort to be found in the so-called cinema of duty of the 1970s and 1980s have been abandoned in contemporary filmmaking in favour of more complex and diverse versions of the interaction between male/female identities and ethnicity, or whether, in fact, more recent films produce a new set of stereotypes in this regard. It investigates representations of Turkish-German masculinities and examines the ways in which female identities have been imagined on screen, before turning briefly to representations of gender/sexual dynamics which fall outside the binary logic underpinning all of the films discussed here, exploring the consequences of these for their construction of Turkish-German identities.