scholarly journals Queering Bodies: “Becoming-unrecognisable” in Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiaying Sim
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Desire ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Narrative Time ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Film Stars ◽  
Star Bodies

Abstract This paper is interested in the cinematic apparatus’s potential to produce affect which defamiliarises the visible presence of star-bodies in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (chunguang zhaxie, 1997), thus invoking non-normative and new modes of thinking about queer identification and representation. By close reading the mise-en-scène of the two Iguazu falls sequences, the on-screen star bodies of Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung are defamiliarized when they produce Gilles Deleuze’s affect and “become-unrecognisable” as on-screen subjects. Through this, the encounters with the Iguazu Falls allow us to queer heteronormative and linear narrative time that is associated with (a movement towards) futurity. This inability to pass judgement, I argue, is the ethics of sexual desire which Happy Together proffers when we understand the body that queers and becomes unrecognisable through productive affective assemblages. Instead, we move through the transsensorial potentials for the cinematic assemblage to rethink modes of queering normativity and to redefine bodies in terms of plurality and multiplicity. To that end, this paper presents a new way of thinking about how film stars, familiar tourist spots and even a classic text like Happy Together may be defamiliarized through productions of affects, new-sensations, to provide more ways of revisiting and regarding the film anew.

Contesting Aristotle: Science, Theology and the Resurrection of the Body in Methodius of Olympus’ De Resurrectione and the Dialogue of Adamantius

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Dawn LaValle Norman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Parallel Text ◽  
Entire Text

Abstract The contest over the resurrection of the body used the scientific authority of Aristotle as ammunition on both sides. Past scholars have read Methodius of Olympus as displaying an anti-Aristotelian bias. In contrast, through close reading of the entire text with attention to characterization and development of argument, I prove that Methodius of Olympus’ dialogue the De Resurrectione utilizes Aristotelian biology as a morally neutral tool. To put this into higher relief, I compare Methodius’ dialogue with the anonymous Dialogue of Adamantius, a text directly dependent upon the Methodius’ De Resurrectione, but which rejects arguments based on scientific reasoning. Reading Methodius’ De Resurrectione with greater attention to the whole and putting it in the context of its nearest parallel text retells the traditional story of early Christian resistance to Aristotle. Methodius of Olympus’ characters, although they view scientific knowledge as subordinate to philosophy, see it as neutral in and of itself.

Homer and the Poetics of Gesture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Purves
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Muscle Memory ◽  
Way Of Thinking

This book offers five readings of the Homeric poems through five different postures, actions, or gestures: falling, running, leaping, standing, and reaching. It argues for a connection between formularity and embodiment in Homeric epic by tracing, in each chapter, the story of a particular gesture through one or both of the poems. In doing so, it presents a new understanding of what the body does and suffers in Homer alongside original readings and arguments about the structure and meaning of the poems themselves. It revises our understanding of formula and type scenes in the Iliad and Odyssey by reading repetition through the body, identifying a relationship between familiar epic movements—learned through repetition, reinforced by muscle memory, and culturally engrained—and the verbal formulas through which many of the movements are conveyed. As a result, the book suggests a different way of thinking about epic repetition, both insofar as it relates to the sequencing of action through time, and in relation to the autonomy and agency of the Homeric body and its role within the narrative.

The Justified Body: Hauerwas, Luther and the Christian Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Justin Nickel
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Stanley Hauerwas ◽  
The One ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
Ethical Significance ◽  
The Way

Stanley Hauerwas and others argue that Luther’s understanding of justification denies the theological and ethical significance of the body. Indeed, the inner, spiritual person is the one who experiences God’s grace in the gospel, while the outer, physical (read: bodily) person continues to live under law and therefore coercion and condemnation. While not denying that Luther can be so read, I argue that there is another side of Luther, one that recognizes the body’s importance for Christian life. I make this argument through a close reading of Luther’s reflections on Adam and Eve’s Fall in his Lectures on Genesis (1545) and the sacramental theology in ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’. For this Luther, disconnection from our bodies is not a sign of justification but rather the sin from which justification saves us. Accordingly, justification results in a return to embodied creatureliness as the way we receive and live our justification.

scholarly journals “Celebration of the Body”: Marshall McLuhan and the Sensory Conceptualism of N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lauder
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Artist's Book ◽  
Livre D'artiste

Through a close reading of the 1976 artist’s book and exhibition catalogue “Celebration of the Body,” the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.’s pioneering representations of the body’s “informationalization” are situated within the conceptual company’s creative reworking of Marshall McLuhan’s sensory media theories. In turn, McLuhan’s thought is located within a genealogy of physiological aesthetics that troubles conventional narratives of Conceptual art as a movement defined by its engagement with theories of cognition, language, and systems. Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of modernism as reflecting the decomposition of the body under a regime of psychophysical experimentation provides the framework for this article’s re-evaluation of the Toronto School theorist and his influence on the foundational Vancouver-based “critical company.”En utilisant une lecture attentive du livre d’artiste et catalogue d’exposition « Celebration of the Body », 1979, les représentations du corps numérisé de N.E. Thing Co. sont encadrées dans le remaniement créatif des théories médiatique de Marshall McLuhan entreprit par la compagnie.  À leurs tours, les pensées de McLuhan sont placées dans une généalogie d’esthétique physiologique qui dérange les récits conventionnels de l’art conceptuel comme étant un mouvement défini par son engagement avec les théories de la cognition et du langage. L’analyse de Friedrich Kittler de modernisme comme réflexion de la décomposition du corps effectuée par des expériences psychophysique fournit le cadre pour cette réévaluation du théoricien de l’École de Toronto et son impact sur la « compagnie critique » fondatrice de Vancouver.

‘Till the whisper…You know…When you can't hear the words’: Narrated Memory and the ‘Fragmented’ Body in Samuel Beckett's Late Drama

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Michelle Charalambous
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Works

Samuel Beckett's interest in the experience of memory and the central role the body plays in the re-experience of the past has been most evident since the time he composed Krapp's Last Tape (1958), one of his most famous memory plays where the body can actually ‘touch’ its voice of memory. In this context, the present article provides a close reading of two of Beckett's late works for the theatre, namely That Time (1976) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), where the author once again addresses the relationship between the body and memory. Unlike his earlier drama, however, in That Time and Ohio Impromptu Beckett creates a ‘distance’, as it were, between memory and the body on stage by presenting the former as a narrative and by reducing the latter to an isolated part or by restricting it to limited movements. Looking closely at this ‘distance’ in these late plays, the article underlines that the body does not lose its authority or remains passive in its re-experience of the past. Rather – the article argues – the body essentially plays a determining role in these stripped-down forms as is shown in its ability to ‘interrupt’ and somatically punctuate the fixity of the narrative form memory takes in these works.

Creation, the Fall, and the Regime of the Passions

2020 ◽  
pp. 164-188
Author(s):  
Gerard O'Daly
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Desire ◽  
The Body ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Love Of God ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Universe

The chapter discusses Augustine’s presentation in Books 11–14 of the origins of the two cities, heavenly and earthly. The focus is on the creation of the universe, the angels and the rebellion of some of them, and Adam, Eve, and the Fall. Specific themes include: Genesis exegesis; the elaboration of the history theme, with good and bad angels as ‘prologues’ to the two historical human cities; good and evil in the universe; angelic rebels and the nature of the will; death and resurrection; Platonist and Christian views on the body; Pauline flesh and spirit; emotions and passions; sexual desire in paradise and since the Fall; love of self and love of God, and the application of this contrast to the two cities.

Cinematic Spaces of ‘the Arab Street’ : Mohamed Diab’s Inverted Road Movie Clash (2016)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alena Strohmaier
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Cinematic Space

This chapter examines how cinema challenges and inverts traditional spaces of social upheavals, such as streets and squares, in their capacity to be spaces of knowledge and solidarity, in conceptualizing them as enhanced media-sensible spaces. Through a close reading of Mohamed Diab’s feature film Clash (2016), I foreground the idea of the truck as a cinematic space predicated on its ability to accommodate movement, both in a literal and a metaphorical sense. This allows for a discussion of cinematic spaces of the so-called ‘Arab street’, created by both mise en scène and cinematography that go against the more prevalent images of street fights and mass demonstrations as seen in documentaries about the popular upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa region since 2009.

Erotismo y homofobia en "El Apando" (1969) de José Revueltas

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Manzo-Robledo
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Drug Consumption ◽  
Jose Revueltas ◽  
El Sistema ◽  
The Erotic

In José Revueltas' novel El apando (1969), the possibility for transgression is greatly diminished by the system. In such circumstances, the only possibility of transgression by means of the body is through drug consumption and erotic acts. This article examines the lack of literary criticism regarding the erotic, the homoerotic and the expression of sexual desire, other than in the sense of the society's values. The notion of act-space, together with concepts from cultural and queer theory serve as a critical instrument for this analysis. This essay evaluates critically the narrative discourse, clearly tinted with homophobia and a patriarchal patronage incapable of dealing with the most intimate aspects of self-expression. Under the patriarchy, that self-expression is occluded and controlled by the same ideologies, which again, are signs of homophobia. / En la novela El apando (1969) de José Revueltas, la posibilidad de transgredir se reduce a base los parámetros impuestos por el sistema. Ante tal situación, la única posibilidad de transgredir corporalmente que permanece se presenta a través del consumo de droga y la expresión erótica. El presente ensayo examina por qué existe una carencia de crítica en relación al erotismo, al homoerotismo y a la expresión del deseo sexual si no se estudian estos tres puntos de interés exclusivamente a base de los valores sociales que imperan. Una lectura que va contracorriente, en combinación con la noción de acto-espacio, se integra a conceptos culturales y de teoría queer para forjar un instrumento de investigación. Este análisis evalúa críticamente el discurso narrativo que está teñido por sentimientos de homofobia que sustancian a un patriarcado incapaz de aceptar los aspectos más íntimos de la auto-expresión. Esta auto-expresión bajo el patriarcado se ve controlada y obstruida por las mismas ideologías que ejemplifican, una vez más, la homofobia dentro de dicho sistema.

scholarly journals Development of Sexuality in Female Children and Adolescents*

1989 ◽  
Vol 34 (9) ◽  
pp. 879-883 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Whitfield
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Childhood And Adolescence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Female Children ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Impact

Female sexuality (meaning sexual desire, excitement and orgasm) has been of considerable interest in psychiatry. Women's efforts to define and legitimize their own experience of their sexuality have increased in the past 25 years. However, the integration of these new views into the body of psychiatric (especially psychoanalytic) theory has not occurred very actively or successfully. Very little is known about the development of sexuality in childhood and adolescence. This paper looks at various behaviours, interests and events in women's lives that might reveal something about the development of their sexuality. The literature on female masturbation is reviewed and some sex differences highlighted. The literature on interest in babies, the wish to have babies, and menarche is explored for possible associations with sexuality. Rather than sexuality being a central organizer of experience, it seems quite possible that experience is an organizer of sexuality. Therefore, to better understand female sexuality we need to consider the impact of experiences during childhood and adolescence.

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