Jill Fitzpatrick is a 28-year-old lesbian struggling to find both a relationship and work as a private investigator. When she accepts a job investigating the disappearance of a young female university student named Mickey, she soon meets the girl's poetry lecturer, the seductive Diana. The discovery of Mickey's strangled body sees the case taken over by the police, but the girl's grief-stricken parents implore Jill to help find the murderer. As the inquiry leads Jill towards a passionate liaison with Diana, she finds herself also entering the seamy underworld of Mickey's intimate life. The search soon begins to raise more questions than answers. For whom did Mickey write her sexually charged poems and what is the connection between Mickey and her two favourite poets? As Jill digs deeper, threatening messages in verse are left on her answering machine. Blinded by her passion, Jill is compromised in her search for the truth--until her own life is in danger.
'A concept of visibility frames much scholarship and public writing on LGBTQ+ representation in film and television, and underpins diversity reporting and inclusivity measurement. Although visibility is often depicted as a social good, there is a growing critical interest in asking if there are different kinds of visibility, and how these might be differentially valued. This paper reports insights gained from interviews with Australian stakeholders involved in the production of screen entertainment with LGBTQ+ content. The study found that stakeholders are motivated by to create texts that make LGBTQ+ stories and characters visible. The range of approaches to visibility was, however, nuanced and diverse: some understood any LGBTQ+ representation as valuable, while others discussed visibility in contexts of character depth, anti-stereotyping, and visibility tempered by concepts of human dignity. Although visibility is perceived diversely, it remains a significant lens by which creative artists involved in LGBTQ+ texts understand their work.' (Publication abstract)
'Despite an often‐repeated cliché that gender and sexually diverse characters are relatively absent from film and television, Australian screen production has a very rich history of representing sexual and gender diversity: greater than nineteen wide‐release films since 1993, including internationally recognized films such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), The Sum of Us (1994), Head On (1998), and The Monkey’s Mask (2000), portray gender and sexual diversity. Nine Australian films with LGBTQ, gender, and sexually diverse themes were released between 2013 and 2018, indicating an entrenchment of LGBTQ representation on Australian screens. Characters in major Australian television dramas and soap operas, such as Home and Away and Neighbours, have increased in regularity and complexity over the past two decades. Sexual stories, including narratives of minority sexual lives, have never, of course, been repressed or invisible, but according to Ken Plummer, they have long been central to contemporary Western culture (4). Stories representing gender and sexually diverse subjects depicting identity struggles and articulating minority health outcomes are a major and ongoing part of Australian creative production. What is significant in cultural analysis is not questions of visibility or invisibility but how the continuities and disruptions of depictions of gender and sexual minorities play a significant, pedagogical role in social participation, social harmony, acceptance, individual health and wellbeing, and community belonging (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide; Emergent Identities).' (Introduction)
'The Monkey's Mask' : Film, Poetry and the Female Voice
St Kilda
:
Atom
,
2012
Z1927382
2012
single work
criticism
'A study of the ways in which the female voice is articulated in the novel and film adaptation of The Monkey's Mask. Through an analysis of the female voices within the film and novel, this book draws on Kaja Silverman's and Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Luce Irigaray's 'feminine language' to explore the ways in which the female body is voiced. It looks at the female voices within Samantha Lang's 2001 film. This book explores the ways in which image and voice work to express women's subjectivity.
Echoes from Beneath : Voicing the Female Body in The Monkey's Mask
Victoria
:
2008
Z1705778
2008
single work
thesis
'This thesis provides a study of the ways in which the female voice is articulated in the novel and film adaptation of The Monkey's Mask. Through an analysis of the female voices within the film and novel, this thesis draws on Kaja Silverman's and Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Luce Irigaray's 'feminine language' to explore the ways in which the female body is voiced. The first two chapters look at the female voices within Samantha Lang's 2001 film. They explore the ways in which image and voice work to express women's subjectivity. The final two chapters discuss Dorothy Porter's 1994 verse novel The Monkey's Mask and the ways in which the female voice is articulated within Porter's text. Drawing on Silverman's argument that the embodied female voice in film works to contain the woman in the symbolic, I argue that, although the female characters' voices are embodied, their poetic language breaks down the subject-object dichotomy of the symbolic order. However, in its attempt to fulfil detective narrative conventions, the film adaptation privileges the unity and closure of the phallocentric language critiqued by Irigaray. Compared with the novel, the film adaptation privileges masculine unity and truth over Porter's complex multiplicity. Porter uses the hysteric strategy through her parody of the detective genre and thereby brings to the foreground the complexity of female sexuality. In Porter's novel the relationship between female detective Jill and murder-victim Mickey reveals a continuous link between the living and the dead, bringing to light Irigaray's model of the maternal genealogy in which the mother is freed from the burial given to her by a phallocentric culture at the onset of motherhood. Porter's use of elegy rejects Silverman's suggested severance of the mother-daughter connection which Silverman argues is necessary for identity.' Source: Libraries Australia (Sighted 06/07/2010).
Echoes from Beneath : Voicing the Female Body in The Monkey's Mask
Victoria
:
2008
Z1705778
2008
single work
thesis
'This thesis provides a study of the ways in which the female voice is articulated in the novel and film adaptation of The Monkey's Mask. Through an analysis of the female voices within the film and novel, this thesis draws on Kaja Silverman's and Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Luce Irigaray's 'feminine language' to explore the ways in which the female body is voiced. The first two chapters look at the female voices within Samantha Lang's 2001 film. They explore the ways in which image and voice work to express women's subjectivity. The final two chapters discuss Dorothy Porter's 1994 verse novel The Monkey's Mask and the ways in which the female voice is articulated within Porter's text. Drawing on Silverman's argument that the embodied female voice in film works to contain the woman in the symbolic, I argue that, although the female characters' voices are embodied, their poetic language breaks down the subject-object dichotomy of the symbolic order. However, in its attempt to fulfil detective narrative conventions, the film adaptation privileges the unity and closure of the phallocentric language critiqued by Irigaray. Compared with the novel, the film adaptation privileges masculine unity and truth over Porter's complex multiplicity. Porter uses the hysteric strategy through her parody of the detective genre and thereby brings to the foreground the complexity of female sexuality. In Porter's novel the relationship between female detective Jill and murder-victim Mickey reveals a continuous link between the living and the dead, bringing to light Irigaray's model of the maternal genealogy in which the mother is freed from the burial given to her by a phallocentric culture at the onset of motherhood. Porter's use of elegy rejects Silverman's suggested severance of the mother-daughter connection which Silverman argues is necessary for identity.' Source: Libraries Australia (Sighted 06/07/2010).
'The Monkey's Mask' : Film, Poetry and the Female Voice
St Kilda
:
Atom
,
2012
Z1927382
2012
single work
criticism
'A study of the ways in which the female voice is articulated in the novel and film adaptation of The Monkey's Mask. Through an analysis of the female voices within the film and novel, this book draws on Kaja Silverman's and Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Luce Irigaray's 'feminine language' to explore the ways in which the female body is voiced. It looks at the female voices within Samantha Lang's 2001 film. This book explores the ways in which image and voice work to express women's subjectivity. 
