Taymor's tempests: sea change, or seeing little change in responses to gender and leadership?

Abstract

Veteran film and stage director Julie Taymor suffered succeeding disappointments when her cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest was poorly reviewed and failed at the box office in 2010, and she was subsequently fired as writer-director of the stage musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark in 2011. Contextualizing the rejections of Taymor and her creations requires analysis that delves deeply into history and broadly across multiple dimensions, including the cultural and political dynamics shaping the complex interplay between gender and leadership. Among the topics explored are transactional and transformational leadership styles exhibited by female leaders; attitudes toward female leadership; current masculinist leadership assumptions in the shadow of America's ‘war on terror’; the hegemonic masculinity inherent in today's blockbuster superhero cinema inspired by Joseph Campbell's ‘hero's journey’; and the entertainment industry's gender regimes. In her artistic depictions of two leaders – the magical Prospero and the mythical Spider-Man – Taymor challenged masculinist assumptions, creating aesthetic products at odds with the hegemonic masculinity dominating the cultural marketplace. Simultaneously, Taymor's artistic leadership was undermined by multiple gender regimes, of Hollywood, Broadway, and the music industry. Ironically, Taymor's The Tempest forecast the writer-director's own situation in the loss of leadership by her character Prospera.

Keywords::

• witchcraft
• performance art
• Shakespeare
• leadership
• gender
• film

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ralph Turner

Ralph Turner is an assistant professor at Eastern Kentucky University, Department of Curriculum and Instruction. He is also the coordinator of the graduate program in the area of Library Science, having previously held the position of Assistant Professor and Director of Library Media Degree Programming at Southern Utah University. Having completed degree work in such diverse fields as philosophy and religion, exercise physiology, educational leadership and policy analysis, cultural studies, English literature and librarianship, Ralph Turner has presented at regional, national, and international conferences on such varied topics as cross-cultural education, leadership studies, film studies, women's studies, sports studies, technology and the twenty-first-century learner, and popular culture. A former Fulbright Senior Scholar to Technische Universitüt, München, Germany and Fulbright Visiting Scholar to Istanbul University, Turkey, Ralph Turner has authored articles in journals as diverse as the Journal of Kinesiology and International Journal on Sport and Society to the Reference Librarian. His books include The Cowboy Way: The Western Leader in Film, 1945–1995 (Greenwood Press), Football as a War Game: The Notebooks of General R. R. Neyland (Falcon Press), and a chapter on ‘Sports’ in the Handbook of American Popular Culture (Greenwood Press). His research interests include librarianship, cultural and film studies, cross-cultural and cross-curricular educational studies, National Socialism and leadership studies. He has worked on advisory boards addressing issues pertaining to both K–12 and higher educational issues.