Skin Shows

Skin Shows PDF Author: Judith Halberstam
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822316633
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Parasites and perverts: an introduction to gothic monstrosity -- Making monsters: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- Gothic surface, gothic depth: the subject of secrecy in Stevenson and Wilde -- Technologies of monstrosity: Bram Stoker's Dracula -- Reading counterclockwise: paranoid gothic or gothic paranoia? -- Bodies that splatter: queers and chain saws -- Skinflick: posthuman genderin Jonathan Demme's The silence of the lambs -- Conclusion: serial killing.

A Finger in the Wound

A Finger in the Wound PDF Author: Diane M. Nelson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520920606
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Many Guatemalans speak of Mayan indigenous organizing as "a finger in the wound." Diane Nelson explores the implications of this painfully graphic metaphor in her far-reaching study of the civil war and its aftermath. Why use a body metaphor? What body is wounded, and how does it react to apparent further torture? If this is the condition of the body politic, how do human bodies relate to it—those literally wounded in thirty-five years of war and those locked in the equivocal embrace of sexual conquest, domestic labor, mestizaje, and social change movements? Supported by three and a half years of fieldwork since 1985, Nelson addresses these questions—along with the jokes, ambivalences, and structures of desire that surround them—in both concrete and theoretical terms. She explores the relations among Mayan cultural rights activists, ladino (nonindigenous) Guatemalans, the state as a site of struggle, and transnational forces including Nobel Peace Prizes, UN Conventions, neo-liberal economics, global TV, and gringo anthropologists. Along with indigenous claims and their effect on current attempts at reconstituting civilian authority after decades of military rule, Nelson investigates the notion of Quincentennial Guatemala, which has given focus to the overarching question of Mayan—and Guatemalan—identity. Her work draws from political economy, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, and has special relevance to ongoing discussions of power, hegemony, and the production of subject positions, as well as gender issues and histories of violence as they relate to postcolonial nation-state formation.

Postfeminist Gothic

Postfeminist Gothic PDF Author: B. Brabon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230801307
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book explores new critical ground by addressing the intersection of two contentious concepts, postfeminism and Gothic. This collection of original and exciting essays examines a number of Gothic texts, from Anne Radcliffe's romances to modern horror films, in conjunction with diverse postfeminist theories, from backlash to postmodern feminism.

Infected Empires

Infected Empires PDF Author: Patricia Saldarriaga
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978826788
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Infected Empires examines a central figure in contemporary apocalyptic film: the zombie. This creature reveals bloody truths about the human condition, the wounds of history, and methods of contending with them. Studying films from a transnational perspective, Infected Empires presents a vision of a global zombie that resists oppressive structures that racialize, marginalize, disable, and dispose of bodies.

Splatter Capital

Splatter Capital PDF Author: Mark Steven
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
ISBN: 1910924865
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Splatter Capital shows how a popular subgenre of cinematic horror has developed a uniquely sensitive perspective on the cycles of capitalism. It argues that the emphatically messy brand of horror mobilized in gore or "splatter" films is extremely responsive to the internal contradictions that threaten the future sustainability of capitalist accumulation. And, while responding to the prospect of that end, splatter promotes an extant truth: capitalist accumulation is and always has been a nightmare of systematized bloodshed. This book provides an account of that nightmare as told through a combination of economic history and filmic analysis. The story it tells will serve as a source of both theoretical and practical knowledge for surviving the horror movie we collectively inhabit.

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages PDF Author: S. Morrison
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230615023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary book intergrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, concluding that excrement is a moral and ethical category deserving scrutiny.

Body Gothic

Body Gothic PDF Author: Xavier Aldana Reyes
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1783160942
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D'Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanley Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012).

Deformed and Destructive Beings

Deformed and Destructive Beings PDF Author: George Ochoa
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786486546
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Why are audiences drawn to horror films? Previous answers to that question have included everything from a need to experience fear to a hunger for psychotherapy. This critical text proposes that the horror film's primary purpose is to present monsters, best understood as deformed and destructive beings. These monsters satisfy the audience's desire to know these beings, in particular those beings too fantastic and dangerous to know in real life. The text illuminates many aspects of the horror film genre, including epistemology, ethics, evaluation, history, monster taxonomy, and filmmaking techniques.

Fields of Vision

Fields of Vision PDF Author: Leslie Devereaux
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520914708
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Filmed images dominate our time, from the movies and TV that entertain us to the news and documentary that inform us and shape our cultural vocabulary. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Fields of Vision is a path-breaking collection that inquires into the power (and limits) of film and photography to make sense of ourselves and others. As critics, social scientists, filmmakers, and literary scholars, the contributors converge on the issues of representation and the construction of visual meaning across cultures. From the dismembered bodies of horror film to the exotic bodies of ethnographic film and the gorgeous bodies of romantic cinema, Fields of Vision moves through eras, genres, and societies. Always asking how images work to produce meaning, the essays address the way the "real" on film creates fantasy, news, as well as "science," and considers this problematic process as cultural boundaries are crossed. One essay discusses the effects of Hollywood's high-capital, world-wide commercial hegemony on local and non-Western cinemas, while another explores the response of indigenous people in central Australia to the forces of mass media and video. Other essays uncover the work of the unconscious in cinema, the shaping of "female spectatorship" by the "women's film" genre of the 1920s, and the effects of the personal and subjective in documentary films and the photographs of war reportage. In illuminating dark, elided, or wilfully neglected areas of representation, these essays uncover new fields of vision. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995. Filmed images dominate our time, from the movies and TV that entertain us to the news and documentary that inform us and shape our cultural vocabulary. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Fields of Vision is a path-breaking collection that inquires i

Contingency and the Limits of History

Contingency and the Limits of History PDF Author: Liane Carlson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231548974
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Central to the historicizing work of recent decades has been the concept of contingency, the realm of chance, change, and the unnecessary. Following Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogists have deployed contingency to show that all institutions and ideas could have been otherwise as a critique of the status quo. Yet scholars have spent very little time considering the genealogy of contingency itself—or what its history means for its role in politics. In Contingency and the Limits of History, Liane Carlson historicizes contingency by tying it to its theological and etymological roots in “touch,” contending that much of its critical, disruptive power is specific to our current historical moment. She returns to an older definition of contingency found in Christian theology that understands it as the lot of mortal creatures, who suffer, feel, bleed, and change, in contrast to a necessary, unchanging, impassible God. Far from dying out, Carlson reveals, this theological past persists in continental philosophy, where thinkers such as Novalis, Schelling, Merleau-Ponty, and Serres have imagined contingency as a type of radical destabilization brought about by the body’s collision with a changing world. Through studies of sickness, loneliness, violation, and love, she shows that different experiences of contingency can lead to dramatically dissimilar ethical and political projects. A strikingly original reconsideration of one of continental philosophy and critical theory’s most cherished concepts, this book reveals the limits of historicist accounts.