The Hip Ephebe: Hollywood and Ethnicity

By Georgia Tres.

Published by The International Journal of the Humanities

The presumed ethical drive that justifies the film industry’s infatuation of recent years with the representation of extreme instances of ethnic marginalization is nevertheless undercut by the overwhelming focus of the respective products on the male segment of the respective populations. The documentary genre is no exception, as is the case with prodigiously marketed items like The Lost Boys of Sudan (2003) and God Grew Tired of Us (2006). The even more brutal and annihilatory fate of the corresponding female population throughout the Second Sudanese Civil War (1984-2005) has not quite found expression. However, elsewhere, in the cases where marginalized female ethnicity was represented, this was done with a focus of predictable gender-role wariness, as is the case with Born into Brothels (2004) and The Beauty Academy of Kabul (2004). Needless to say, when it comes to cinematic male-centeredness, the big-budget Hollywood feature is the consecrated norm. The aspect dealt with in this paper is the uncanny parallelism of its current predilection for an always lucky, chance-taking, scheming, boyish, ephebe-like ethnic subject.

The International Journal of the Humanities, Volume 5, Issue 4, pp.65-70. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 503.444KB).

Dr Georgia Tres

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, UNITED STATES