This dissertation uses the 1979 movie Norma Rae as an entry into the global textile and garment industry and as an example of contested cultural production. It argues that U.S. colonial experimentation with the labor of Puerto Rican needleworkers helped to propel a disaggregation of manufacturing, but an American fascination with poor white southerners led media to focus on Crystal Lee Sutton in the 1970s. In recycling the narrative of white workingclass individuals in isolated circumstances, Norma Rae elided a history of collective southern activism and contributed to the erasure of Puerto Rican women. The dissertation does not simply recover Sutton but reevaluates the context in which she labored, expanding it to the Atlantic U.S. as a whole, including Puerto Rico. The dissertation makes a vital contribution in its use of archives fragmented by colonialism and racialized labor practices. The women were interconnected, if not interchangeable, labor markets critical to how the diverse working class coalesced. The argument contradicts the dominant historical narrative of industry relocating in a direct line from the Northeast to the South to a final stage in the Global South. A detailed study of Norma Rae then shows how popular culture works to rearticulate familiar meanings and obscure such disconcerting complexities due to its own reliance on Aimee Loiselle – University of Connecticut, 2019 gendered, racialized, and colonial narratives. The dissertation argues Hollywood professionals used legal and financial contrivances to remove Sutton from the production when her insistence on the collective efforts of workers did not suit their commercial ambitions. It reveals the importance of status and capitalist mechanisms in the arena of cultural politics, especially regarding questions of who contests and shapes the visibility and meanings for “working class,” “worker,” and “American.” These contests in the business and politics of culture generated the Norma Rae icon, a representation of a white woman standing alone, with its individualist narrative and affect of inspirational defiance. Creating Norma Rae: The Erasure of Puerto Rican Needleworkers and Southern Labor Activists in a Neoliberal Icon by Aimee Loiselle B.A., Dartmouth College, 1992 M.A., University of Vermont, 1998 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History at the University of Connecticut

Creating Norma Rae: The Erasure of Puerto Rican Needleworkers and Southern Labor Activists in a Neoliberal Icon

Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film

Fairy-Tale Films

https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3984&context=gradschool_dissertations

Viewing novels, reading films: Stanley Kubrick and the art of adaptation as interpretation

Fairy Tale Films: Visions of Ambiguity

Woman is... the Enigma. Octavio Paz' The recent success of some foreign films in the American art-house exhibition circuit could be interpreted as a sign of the crisis of national specificity in commercial World cinemas. The apparent neutralization of culturally specific topics, the globalization of cinematic language, and the hybridization of genre configurations may have aided the popular acceptance in the U.S. of such films as Life is Beautiful (Roberta Benigni, Italy 1998), All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar, Spain 1999), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, Hong Kong, Taiwan 2000), Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France 2001) and "Talk to Her" (Almodovar, Spain 2002).2 The Mexican films Amores perms (Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu, 2000) and Y tu marna tambien (AIfonso Cuaron, 2002) seem to have followed this trend by becoming not only available through commercial if limited US exhibition venues, but also accessible to the U.S. public as products of a new kind of global film language that is non-nationally specific. In these two films the language of violence and sexuality, and a postmodern generic malleability overtake the details and nuances of national topics as treated regularly in Mexican films, so they become "universal," while being allowed to keep their original Spanish titles. A closer look, however, reveals the inherent Mexicanness/Mexicanidad of these films present in the treatment of women and violence and the development of historical Mexican cinema topics in the narrative. Amores perms and Y tu mama tambien (both Oscar nominees) capitalize on their emphasis on violence and sexuality respectively (the lingua franca of contemporary cinema) to "pass" internationally, but in the context of contemporary Mexico and Mexican cinema in general both films continue the historical trajectory of Mexican cinema when it comes to the presence and meaning of female characters and the treatment of national politics, class relations, and the economy. Gender, Class, and the Nation in Mexican Cinema Mexican cinema has evolved greatly in its one hundredyear history. It has developed from the constitution of a "national" cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, to the mythmaking "foundational fictions" of Carlos Navarro, Emilio Fernandez, and Fernando de Fuentes in the 1940s, to the myth-shattering realism of Luis Bunuel's Los olvidados? and the exploitation "cabaretems" and nightclub films of the 1950s and 1970s. Its most enduring iteration is the "Golden Age" of Mexican Cinema (from the 1930s through the 1950s), in which the mythification of national history, characters, and imagery was cemented in the widely seen films of Emilio Fernandez, Fernando de Fuentes, and a few other directors. In this "Golden Age" the idea of a national fiction was well articulated, and with the economic support of the State, Mexican cinema created a vision of the nation that became consistently multiplied in films of various genres. This image of Mexico emphasized the celebration of a status quo of gentle patriarchs governing their estates and families with a stern hand, macho charms singing their way into the hearts of fair maidens and through honor matters, and in the case of Fernandez's films, the creation of an idealized, romantic view of the Indians who were in reality, largely marginalized.4 These constant topics were present in the underlying celebration and affirmation of machismo and the values of the (mostly Creole) Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. Joanne Hershfield deftly summarizes these ideas under the concept of the madre patria or "Motherland" as: [ A]n attempt to forge a national solidarity among the diverse elements of the Mexican population despite differences of language, ethnic and cultural traditions, class, race, gender, and regional affiliation... By privileging a common (if invented) history, the Spanish language, a national system of education, and the mestizo as the quintessential Mexican, Ia madre patria (sic) came to signify a united Mexican nation. …

Sex, Class, and Mexico in Alfonso Cuaron's Y tu mama tambien

Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema

(2003). The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother. Quarterly Review of Film and Video: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 25-38.

The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother

(2002). Don't look now: Kubrick, schnitzler, and 'The unbearable agony of desire' Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 117-137.

Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz

Papers

Sex, Class, and Mexico in Alfonso Cuaron's Y tu mama tambien

Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema

The Body and Spain: Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother

Don't look now: Kubrick, schnitzler, and "The unbearable agony of desire"

West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece