Bodies, Gestus, Becoming: Cinema as a Technology of Gender and (Post)memory

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-571
Author(s):  
Belén Ciancio
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
Political Cinema ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
The One ◽  
The Third World

The first issue this essay examines is the articulation of the cinema of the body, the feminine gestus, and the ‘political cinema’, which begins with the philosophical shout, ‘Give me a body, then!’ and ends with the ‘Third World Cinema’ as a cinema of memory. How is this Deleuzian concept in tension with the one proposed here of ‘missing body’? The second issue concerns the importance of the body for theory and practice within feminist film theory and queer theory. The question of the body is introduced in-between these two lines in the context of a series of Latin American documentaries. The final problem is then how to see and show a body that is missing, like an outside of the body image, and of a certain regime of the visible and the audible that tends to be fixed in topics by the production of technologies of (post)memory.

Queer Timing

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Potter
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Institutional Processes ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
Lesbian Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Film Texts

This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to lesbian representation, initially by reframing the emergence of lesbian figures in cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s as only the most visible and belated signs of an array of strategies of sexuality. The emergence of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema is not a linear progression and consolidation but rather arises across multiple sites in dispersed forms that are modern and backward-looking, recursive and anachronistic. In this tumultuous period, new but not always coherent sexual knowledges and categories emerge, even as older modalities of homoeroticism persist. The book articulates some of the discursive and institutional processes by which women’s same-sex desires and identities have been reorganized as impossible, marginal or—perhaps not so surprisingly—central to new forms of cinematic representation and spectatorship. Complicating the critical consensus of feminist film theory and history, the book foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to historically distinct cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality. It articulates across its chapters the emergence of lesbian sexuality—and that of its intimate “other,” heterosexuality—as the effect of diverse discursive operations of early cinema, considered as a complex assemblage of film texts, exhibition practices, modes of female spectatorship, and reception.

scholarly journals The female detective as the child who needs to know. Saga Norén as an example of potent yet dysfunctional female detectives in contemporary Nordic Noir

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Schwartz ◽  
E. Ann Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Queer Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
Recognition Theory ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Female Detective ◽  
The One ◽  
The U.S

Abstract The global popularity of Nordic Noir, such as the Danish/Swedish production Broen, The Danish production Forbrydelsen, its U.S. and U.K. remakes, the Danish/Swedish production The Millennium Trilogy seems to depend on its insistent interest in a set of maladjusted female detectives. The by now seven seasons of the U.S production Homeland have a similar focus. In this essay, we argue that the struggle these female protagonists endure between extreme potency on the one hand and shameful psychic problems on the other is linked to how these female detectives represent the female position in film in general. Turning to traditional and ongoing discussions in feminist film theory, and combining queer studies and sociological and psychoanalytic perspectives with recognition theory (Felski/Coplan), we ask how we as spectators relate to these women in terms of recognition. In line with that, we ask whether these female detectives should be considered feminist icons who challenge traditional gendered poses on film, or whether, due to their dysfunctionalities, they came to represent some kind of otherness that we sympathize with but also fail to identify with.

scholarly journals Postmodern messiahs: the changing saviours of contemporary popular culture

2009 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 196-212
Author(s):  
Sofia Sjö
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Feminist Film

The messiah myth is alive and well in the modern world. Contemporary science fiction film has taken the myth to heart and given us an endless stream of larger than life heroes. The heroes of the present are, however, not exactly the same as the heroes of the past. A changing world demands new things of its saviours. Using a textual and narrative analysis based on insights gained from feminist film theory and cultural studies, this article looks closely at the messiah theme in science fiction films and TV series from the last three decades. The study explores the changes that have occurred in relation to images of the body, the attitudes and personalities of modern heroes, gender, questions of power and ideas of the transcendent. The article then discusses what these changes both between newer and older heroes and between contemporary heroes and the traditional messiah story might say about religion and spirituality in the modern world. Finally the article explores the question of why the messiah myth still finds an audience today.

scholarly journals Surveillance and the Body in the Millennium Trilogy

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-169
Author(s):  
Jeff W. Marker
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Surveillance Studies ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Race Ethnicity

A growing discourse in surveillance studies is leading the field away from socially neutral theories and introducing methodologies that account for factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. However, scholarship on surveillance in the arts, among which voyeurism and panopticism remain dominant, has been slower to adopt models that address these sociological dimensions of surveillance. This interdisciplinary article argues for expanding the theoretical and sociological scope of scholarship on surveillance in the arts, using Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels and the Swedish films adapted from them as a case study. This series of narratives features three scopic regimes: the state’s surveillance apparatus, the protagonist’s own surveillant gaze, and the male gaze, each of which operates on and through the body of the central character, Lisbeth Salander. These representations, as so many others, demand that we break away from the panoptic model and employ a theoretically intersectional approach. The author integrates theories from surveillance studies, feminist film theory, and the social sciences to develop such an approach.

Feminist Film Theory and Cléo de 5 à 7 by Hilary Neroni

2017 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-242
Author(s):  
Mariah Devereux Herbeck
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
Feminist Film

The Body in Theory

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity J Callard
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Theoretical Investigations ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.

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