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How is desire expressed in films with English as a second language (ESL)? How do ESL students and teachers identify with cinematic ESL characters? Do popular films uphold or redefine racial and gender ESL stereotypes? Drawing on a wide range of examples from well-known reel ESL teachers such as Miss Anna in The King and I to real classroom experience, the book provides a comprehensive review of literature on popular films in education, a much needed analysis of popular films with ESL, and an exploration of how teachers and students take up popular identities of ESL. Mackie contextualizes her findings within recent thinking in feminist pedagogy and postcolonial, cultural, and feminist studies. She argues that cinematic ESL subjects are sites of various raced and gendered desires, and that real readers of films by-pass their race, gender, age, and occupation to access the cinematic body as politically engaged and disrupting the status quo. This important book will be welcomed by students and researchers in education, sociolinguistics, and cultural and gender studies.
