Dr Antonio da Silva from the Department of Hispanic Studies will launch his new book The ‘Femme’ Fatale in Brazilian Cinema: Challenging Hollywood Norms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), at the Birkbeck Cinema, Birkbeck, University of London on Thursday 26 June from 7-9pm.
The femme fatale has long been constructed and understood in popular culture and cinema as a beautiful heterosexual Caucasian woman that belongs to film noir and neo-noir. Antonio’s book shows the need to incorporate diverse ethnic groups and gay men into the range of femmes fatales. He examines how the Brazilian representations cross genre, gender, race, and class and offer alternative instances to the dominant Hollywood Caucasian model. As with gender performativity, the danger the femme fatale represents to society is constructed rather than being an innate feature. The figure represents areas of cultural anxiety, particularly around issues of sexuality and gender, but Antonio seeks to reframe these issues in the context of Brazilian film.
The event, hosted by the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, will include an introduction by Antonio followed by a question and answer session, and a raffle of a free copy of the book. Further details of the event are available at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cilavs/events#femme
Antonio will also give a presentation on the use of technology in language teaching at a workshop on ‘Blended Learning in Language Teaching: Synchronous and Asynchronous Possibilities’ at Birkbeck. There has been much discussion around the incorporation of blended learning not only in language teaching but also in education in general. This practical presentation will explore the advantages of embedding blended learning in the language teaching curriculum and how this offers possibilities for synchronous and asynchronous activities. In order to illustrate such possibilities, some examples of activities developed by students will be shown and it will offer some suggestions of resources and activities that can be explored as part of the teaching/learning process. The workshop will be held on Friday 27 June