Session 9: Deconstructing Villainy
3rd Global Conference
Saturday 10th September – Monday 12th September 2011
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
Crossing Legs, Genres, and Gender: Catherine Tramell:Portrait of a Writer as Postmodern Femme Fatale
Juan Senis Fernandez
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
Catherine Tramell – the iconic heroine of “Basic Instinct” and its sequel, “Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction” – is the last great femme fatale of the 20th century. Rich, blonde, elegant, smart, attractive and cultivated, she has almost all the aspects of this archetype: she seduces and manipulates men (and eventually kills them) and she is bisexual. Nevertheless, she is a postmodern femme fatale, so she is not punished at the end of the film and she can keep manipulating people, having sex with men and (eventually) killing them.
However, Catherine Tramell is also a successful writer of crime fiction. The skills she gained from her double degree in Literature and Psychology help her to write, mostly because she uses her femme fatale experiences for her books. But she does not wait for the ideas to fall onto her desk: she manipulates reality and does not hesitate to willingly kill people in order to inspire herself. She searches for crimes, since she cannot live (or write) without them. That’s what makes her a fascinating character: the combination of the writer and the femme fatale in the same woman.
The result of this unique mixture affects not only the level of the character, but also the plot of the movie. And all these consequences will be explained in this paper, focusing on two aspects. First of all, the way in which Catherine Tramell can be considered a postmodern version of the classical archetype of the villain femme fatale; and, secondly, how this combination of spider woman and crime fiction writer creates an original and brilliant thriller such as Basic Instinct.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Is There a Perfect Environment to Allow a Villain or Villainess to Thrive
Kim D. Weinert
Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia
Any form of a non-profit organisation possesses universal characteristics that differentiates them from being a household, a corporate and a government firm. The fundamental characteristic of a non-profit organisation, which delineates them from others, is the undercurrent of trust and altruism from the individuals in control, who achieve the organisation’s charitable aims and for those individuals not to gain any personal benefits along the way. However, in many instances the notion of charity takes a back-seat to obtaining a personal benefit. The practice of opportunistic management and abusing a position of trust by individual/s within a non-profit organisation is generally inconceivable and labelled abhorrent when discovered. This paper will first look at the general reasons why individuals become involved with and are dedicated to voluntary non-profit organisations. From here this paper will provide examples of cases ranging from serious sexual crime, fraudulent conduct and general misconduct that occurs within the bounds of a non-profit organisation.
In an effort to explain why an individual may digress from a pure charitable position to becoming a ‘creep’ within a non-profit, this paper will look at how a non-profit organisation’s structure creates an ‘inner sanctum’ or private sphere for misconduct to occur unchecked. Inevitably misconduct within a not-for-profit maybe discovered, at which point the law will attempt to deal with these misgivings by punishment. This paper will examine how well Australian law deals with non-profit misconduct compared to the United Kingdom’s regulatory model. This comparison will focus on the downfalls of how the respective legal systems deal with non-profit organisational misconduct. Lastly, this paper will consider what our laws could hope to do in providing stronger protection against misconduct within non-profits through legal duties.
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