Tiina Rosenberg's article on Fucking Åmål

Discuss Lukas Moodysson's first feature film Fucking Åmål (Show me Love).

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Tiina Rosenberg's article on Fucking Åmål

Postby kant1781 » Mon May 26, 2008 12:15 am

In a different thread in this forum, eric drew our attention to a scientific study that is mentioned in the English wikipedia entry on Fucking Åmål, but is unavailable online. It is a paper by Tiina Rosenberg, a former professor of theatre studies at the university of Stockholm, and now professor of gender studies at Lund University.

Find more on her here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiina_Rosenberg (wikipedia entry)
http://www.genus.lu.se/research (her university page)

The paper was originally published in 2002 in a rather obscure journal ("Journal of Theatre and Drama", published at the university of Haifa, Israel), but reprinted in 2006 in a book on feminist and queer issues published in the US and edited by Ellen Mortensen. If have gotten hold of a copy of this book and did a scan of the paper.

Since the resulting file is 16 MB large, I cannot host it on my own page. I have instead uploaded it to rapidshare.de, a file sharing service that is 100% safe, 100% free, and 100% pop-up-free. Just follow this link to download the paper:
http://rapidshare.de/files/39521340/Tiina_Rosenberg_on_Show_Me_Love.pdf.html
(Scroll down and click on "free" download, then wait for the counter to reach zero and enter the code that appears, just to prove that you are not an automated bot. No entering of any kind of personal data is required.)

The paper itself, entitled "Coming out of the National Closet: Show Me Love" is not so much on the film itself, but rather on its reception in Sweden. It starts with a theoretical part, and then features an extensive analysis of the reviews and comments Fucking Åmål received in Swedish media when it grew so amazingly popular in 1998 and the following year. The paper, I should warn you, is written from a decidedly lesbian perspective. Rosenberg is quite critical of the general reception of the film which she says is an example of "heteronormativity". By this she means that many reviewers and commentators on the film seemed to neglect, downplay or even deny the importance of the lesbian theme to the film, by saying that it is a "universal love story", not specifically concerned with two girls. (You know what she is talking about - we've had this discussion on this board, too.) This, Rosenberg argues, is - whether these people are aware of it or not - once more an attempt to deny public recognition to lesbian and gay people. Fucking Åmål is a film about them, and denying a lesbian identity to the central characters means taking the film away from them, acting against its central message.

Rosenberg is not critical of the film itself but rather seems to love it like most people, she is just politically opposed to the way it has been discussed in public. However one judges her thesis, this is surely an interesting article that should be read. I have come across no other study of this kind yet.
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Postby Ian » Mon May 26, 2008 2:30 am

Meh...it seems, in truth, to be a rather silly kind of an argument, to me. I mean, of COURSE it's a lesbian movie, it's about two girls falling in love! No-brainer. The problem is that a lot of lesbian movies appeal to precisely no one outside of that audience (often because they're not actually very good movies in the first place), whereas FA does. That's the success - and indeed, one could say, the whole frickin' POINT of the movie. It's about two people falling in love, the movie's success is that it reaches beyond stereotypes and prejudices and essentially says "How could ANYONE have a problem with these two girls wanting to be together?"

To then object because the audience recognises the universal themes (and YES, falling in love is a universal theme. Surely that's what the gay and lesbian community have been arguing all these years - that they're no different to anyone else?) seems to be rather biting off your nose to spite your face.

Silly woman. :roll:


Of course, there is also the issue that if you're trying to get someone to watch this movie, selling it to them as "a love story that speaks to everyone" (which it does) is going to appeal rather more than trying to tell them it's some sort of lesbian polemic. :wink: :lol:
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Postby mpox » Mon May 26, 2008 3:40 pm

codyw1 wrote:To then object because the audience recognises the universal themes (and YES, falling in love is a universal theme. Surely that's what the gay and lesbian community have been arguing all these years - that they're no different to anyone else?) seems to be rather biting off your nose to spite your face.

Silly woman. :roll:

OK, I read it (well, skimmed at first but then got interested and read to the end) and I think you'd need to read the paper to understand her point. She's talking almost exclusively about the reviews and other articles that dealt with the film. I never saw any of the original press since I only found out about the movie this year but I can see her point if the articles did play out like she said.

Of course like many academic papers this one had an agenda and you'd need to read the actual articles she's referencing to say how much merit there is in any of it. She messes up the story a bit in condensing it for the reader of her article but I don't know that it really affects her central premise, it just makes her look a bit sloppy.

Anyway thanks for getting this and scanning it in kant, it was interesting in spite of the angle of the article.
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Postby MSandt » Sun Nov 02, 2008 10:02 pm

I hate Rosenberg and other militant feminists like her. They just have to see everything through their gender glasses and I hate how she tries to turn a beautiful thing like FÅ into some imagined gender war.

Gender studies are a joke anyway. It's about ruining science with politics.
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Re: Tiina Rosenberg's article on Fucking Åmål

Postby thilof » Wed Feb 16, 2011 3:14 pm

Hi,
I'm writing a paper on Fucking Amal.
I'd like to use your scan of Tina Rosenbergs article, since I can't find it anywhere else, would it be possible for you to send me a copy?

Thanks, thilo
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Re: Tiina Rosenberg's article on Fucking Åmål

Postby snaps » Mon Aug 22, 2011 7:36 pm

I couldn't find the pdf but if you try this site http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Sl8_wW0d2uAC&pg=PA111&lpg=PA111&dq=Tiina+Rosenberg+show+me+love&source=bl&ots=OOH3UTqiVI&sig=WQHl3xh02hKjp9G2zoyp_n6rWuU&hl=en#v=onepage&q=Tiina%20Rosenberg%20show%20me%20love&f=false you will find (albeit with annoyingly missing pages) her contribution to: Sex, breath, and force: sexual difference in a post-feminist era By Ellen Mortensen Scroll down to page 111 - 128 :Y it is worth reading and I don't accept the knee-jerk response to her writing a paper. She's not critical of FA, just some of the press and popular media response to it.

I fang u:

Professor Snapsie, University of Nottingham, c/o Student Union Bar, Portland Building.
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Re: Tiina Rosenberg's article on Fucking Åmål

Postby fish » Tue Aug 23, 2011 9:26 am

Lots of big words. :shock:

Brain aching. :|

Needs re-boot. :T

Save me a seat at the bar professor. 8) :lol:
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Re: Tiina Rosenberg's article on Fucking Åmål

Postby bruno » Thu Aug 25, 2011 12:45 am

I don't understand Rosenberg's point. Obviously the film is about two lesbians, and at the same time its more wide appeal sits in what it can tell to the broad public. So it's perfectly normal if some critics, or a casual observer like me, don't consider the lesbian theme as the main theme, because it's not necessarily at the centre of the film's meaning.

A different movie with some similar issues is Secretary, where the troubled girl (played by Maggie Gyllenghaal) escapes from her stifling family and frients to find happiness as the SM slave to her employer. As the producers themselves said, "it has not necessarily to do with SM," the story has a more general significance, which is more important than the metaphor used.
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