To browse Academia. Virgina shows a culturally conservative society in which the expectation that the virgina will live as a man comes into conflict with her desire to live as she wants. In the west we usually think of transvestites and transgender people as going against societal norms to perform their desired identities.
In the case of sworn virgins, it is the patriarchal society that forces the women to live as men. Marble Ass, on the other hand, features a male-to-female transvestite prostitute who works the streets of Beograd during the war in Bosnia. The film exploits the nationalist expectations of conformity to traditional norms of gender and sexuality. Virgina and Marble Ass provide an index of cultural expectations about the performance of gender and sexuality in Yugoslavia.
The paper uses Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber's work on the construction of gender to analyze these films and place them in their cultural context.
Both films call into question essential gender--and, by extension, nationality-- as a stable identity. Kenneth Pinion. The concept of social gender is an interdisciplinary matter of debate and is still questioned today. Making sense of this concept is understood by the ongoing codes in the social order. The thoughts of feminist film theorists also bring the strategies of representation of female characters up for discussion.
Butler's thoughts and the discourses of feminist film theorists will enable both making sense of social gender and a more concrete understanding of the concept of the subject.
