Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks Recent documents in Taunya Lovell Banks en-us Sat, 12 Dec 2009 03:40:38 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/124 http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/124 Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:41:45 PST Film . . . has been used effectively to shape public perceptions about the criminal justice system. . . . [and] the documentary form has power to convict or release a defendant, as well as to disclose the positive and negative aspects of the criminal justice system. . . . Three articles on this subject appear in this issue of the UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND LAW JOURNAL OF RACE, RELIGION, GENDER AND CLASS and add to this body of scholarship. . . .Our goal was to foster a series of dialogues among and between a number of individuals: filmmakers.... Taunya Lovell Banks Law & Popular Culture Race and Racial Formation http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/123 http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/123 Wed, 02 Dec 2009 07:08:48 PST Taunya Lovell Banks Race and Racial Formation Civil Rights http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/122 http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/122 Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:49:00 PST In this Article Professor Banks argues that what makes many of filmmaker John Waters early films so subversive is his use of the "white-trash" body--people marginalized by and excluded from conventional white America--as countercultural heroes. He uses the white trash body as a surrogate for talk about race and sexuality in the early 1960s. I argue that in many ways Waters' critiques of mid-twentieth century American society reflect the societal changes that occurred in the last forty years of that century. These societal changes resulted from the civil rights, gay pride, student, anti-war and women's movements, all of which used social protest and the legal process as vehicles for social change. Waters used his films not only as counter-narratives of mid-twentieth century mores but also as critiques of the increasingly disruptive effect of media forces in glamorizing criminality. Although the films Professor Banks discusses in this Article are set largely in the 1960s, many of the themes they raise - acceptance of difference, a rejection of exclusionary mores and the media's disruptive role in the quest for justice - continue to have currency. Taunya Lovell Banks Law & Popular Culture Civil Rights http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/121 http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/121 Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:33:45 PDT Taunya Lovell Banks Law & Popular Culture http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/120 http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/120 Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:57:08 PDT Taunya Lovell Banks Race and Racial Formation http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/118 http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/118 Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:23:29 PDT Taunya Lovell Banks Race and Racial Formation Civil Rights http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/117 http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/117 Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:43:58 PDT Taunya Lovell Banks Race and Racial Formation Civil Rights http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/114 http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/114 Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:13:55 PDT Socio-economic rights, first articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) sixty years ago, are regaining currency. Legal practitioners around the world, emboldened by emerging constitutional democracies in Eastern Europe and South Africa that constitutionalized socio-economic rights, are actively seeking to enforce these rights. The UDHR "reaffirim[ed] faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person," and served as the basis for the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Among those rights included in the Covenant are housing, food, and healthcare. Taunya Lovell Banks Civil Rights Constitutional Law http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/113 http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/113 Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:20:52 PDT This article examines the conflicting film narratives about the internment from 1942 through 2007. It argues that while later film narratives, especially documentaries, counter early government film narratives justifying the internment, these counter-narratives have their own damaging hegemony. Whereas earlier commercial films tell the internment story through the eyes of sympathetic whites, using a conventional civil rights template Japanese and other Asian American documentary filmmakers construct their Japanese characters as model minorities -- hyper-citizens, super patriots. Further, the internment experience remains largely a male story. With the exception of Emiko Omori's documentary film memoir, Rabbit in the Moon (2004), the stories and voices of Japanese American women, who with their children comprised the bulk of internees, are marginalized. Thus I argue that the shadow of the internment experience affects Asian American documentarians' telling of the internment story. These filmmakers engage in a degree of self-censorship, crafting their stories to show Japanese Americans as a model minority to counter persistent perceptions of Asian American as foreigners--marginal citizens' whose loyalty is forever suspect. Taunya Lovell Banks Law & Popular Culture Civil Rights http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/112 http://works.bepress.com/taunya_banks/112 Wed, 22 Apr 2009 07:22:01 PDT Most people think of Thurgood Marshall as a champion of racial equality. Few legal scholars hail him as a great friend to women when he was on the United States Supreme Court. Yet between 1971, when the Court in Reed v. Reed invalidated a state law preferring men over women as administrators for estates on equal protection grounds, and 1991 when Marshall announced his retirement from the bench, he cast "pro-feminist" votes 92% of the time in gender employment discrimination cases, one percent more than Justice Brennan. .This overwhelmingly pro-woman voting record might even cause some to call Marshall a feminist a closer examination of the man, and his record, particularly three decisions, two of which he authored (Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, Florida Star v. B.J.F and Alexander v. Louisiana) where he votes against women's interests, discloses a more mixed picture. Without question Thurgood Marshall was a race man, but this article asks whether a good race man can also be a good feminist.I conclude that Marshall, while a friend to women, was no feminist in the contemporary meaning of the word, and at best could be classified as a practical as opposed to an idealistic feminist. Taunya Lovell Banks Civil Rights