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Electronic Media and the Feminine in the National Security Regime: The Manchurian Candidate before and after 9/11

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 35; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3200/jpft.35.3.119-126

1930-6458

Mark E. Wildermuth,

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

The 1962 and 2004 versions of The Manchurian Candidate, although critical of the oppressive national security states of their times, fail to interrogate the sexist epistemic informing those states. They thereby unwittingly support the ideology informing regimes that, as Iris Marion Young indicates, typify "a logic of masculinist protection" that reduces citizens to the roles of helpless women and children. Both films revive a sexist trope that as Jeffrey Sconce says, equates "femininity, electronic presence, and the televisual" with "oblivion," and a "loathsome passivity" associated with brainwashing and control of the (feminized) masses. By embedding itself in countercultural rhetorics that express concern for the impact of electronic media on the masses, this trope disguises the militant antifeminist thrust of its logic and finds renewed life in visual representations that are not as subversive as they seem.