Author: Ruth McPhee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 552
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Book Description
Since the mid 1990s, several films have emerged in European and North American cinema that portray female subjectivity in terms of masochistic sexuality. This thesis will examine several films that represent in varied ways female sexuality centred upon the desire for pain, submission, or humiliation. The primary films under discussion in successive chapters are Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996), The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 200 l ), Secretary (Steven Shainberg, 2003), Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999), and In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2003). These films will be discussed within the context of existing theoretical explorations of masochism in psychoanalytic and film theory. I shall argue that within these theories, there is a blind spot in the conceptualization of a specifically female heterosexual masochism. Much existing discourse (particularly within psychoanalysis) focuses primarily upon masochism within the male subject. In theorizing female masochism, this thesis will move away from the negative connotations of perversity, passivity, and subjection that have permeated discourse around this form of sexuality, and instead argue that masochism may be associated with an active agency of the subject. The representations of female masochistic subjectivity in these films are characterized by this activity, although it is an activity that is sometimes portrayed as ambiguous in its implications for the female subject and the choices they make. Each of these films is notable for its engagement with ethical concerns: because of the power dynamics inherent in the masochistic relationship, the question of ethics will be central to this thesis, in terms of the films' depictions of intersubjective relationships, and of how the spectator is positioned and challenged by their imagery and themes.
Author: Ruth McPhee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317136004
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Theoretically and representationally, responses to heterosexual female masochism have ranged from neglect in theories that focus predominantly or only upon masochistic sexuality within male subjects, to condemnation from feminists who regard it as an inverted expression of patriarchal control rather than a legitimate form of female desire. It has commonly been understood as a passive form of sexuality, thus ignoring the potential for activity and agency that the masochistic position may involve, which underpins the crucial argument that female masochism can be conceived as enquiring ethical activity. Taking as its subject the works of Jane Campion, Catherine Breillat, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier as well as the films Secretary (Steven Shainberg), Dans Ma Peau (Marina de Van), Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006) Amer (Hélène Cattat and Bruno Forzani), and Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh), Female Masochism in Film avoids these reductive and simplistic approaches by focusing on the ambivalences and intricacies of this type of sexuality and subjectivity. Using the philosophical writings of Kristeva, Irigaray, Lacan, Scarry, and Bataille, McPhee argues that masochism cannot and should not be considered aside from its ethical and intersubjective implications, and furthermore, that the aesthetic tendencies emerging across these films - obscenity, extremity, confrontation and a transgressive, ambiguous form of beauty - are strongly related to these implications. Ultimately, this complex and novel work calls upon the spectator and the theorist to reconsider normative ideas about desire, corporeality, fantasy and suffering.
Author: Carol Siegel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Siegel explores the literary tradition of representing male love as service and ordeal and looks at how modernist and postmodernist writers and filmmakers have responded to this tradition and how psychoanalytic theorists have depicted the behaviors they labeled masochistic. Among the novels and films she discusses are Mary Webb's Gone to Earth, James Joyce's Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head, Kathy Acker's Great Expectations, Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons, and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter.
Author: Janice G. L. Williams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Masochism
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Author: Kate Ince
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623562929
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Since the 1980s the number of women regularly directing films has increased significantly in most Western countries; in France, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have joined Agnès Varda in gaining international renown, while British directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold have forged award-winning careers in feature film. This new volume in the “Thinking Cinema” series draws on feminist philosophers and theorists from Simone de Beauvoir on to offer readings of a range of the most important and memorable of these films from the 1990s and 2000s, focusing as it does so on how the films convey women's lives and identities. Mainstream entertainment cinema traditionally distorts the representation of women, objectifying their bodies, minimizing their agency, and avoiding the most important questions about how cinema can "do justice" to female subjectivity. Kate Ince suggests that the films of independent women directors are progressively redressing the balance, reinvigorating both the narratives and the formal ambitions of European cinema. Ince uses feminist philosophers to interpret such films as Sex Is Comedy, Morvern Callar, White Material, and Fish Tank anew, suggesting that a philosophical understanding of female subjectivity as embodied and ethical should underpin future feminist film study.
Author: Paul Nathanson
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773577890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 816
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Book Description
Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young believe that this reveals a shift in the United States and Canada to a worldview based on ideological feminism, which presents all issues from the point of view of women and, in the process, explicitly or implicitly attacks men as a class. They argue that ideological feminism is silently reshaping law, public policy, education, and journalism.
Author: Rosi Braidotti
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023151526X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
For more than fifteen years, Nomadic Subjects has guided discourse in continental philosophy and feminist theory, exploring the constitution of contemporary subjectivity, especially the concept of difference within European philosophy and political theory. Rosi Braidotti's creative style vividly renders a productive crisis of modernity. From a feminist perspective, she recasts embodiment, sexual difference, and complex concepts through relations to technology, historical events, and popular culture. This thoroughly revised and expanded edition retains all but two of Braidotti's original essays, including her investigations into epistemology's relation to the "woman question;" feminism and biomedical ethics; European feminism; and the possible relations between American feminism and European politics and philosophy. A new piece integrates Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "becoming-minoritarian" more deeply into modern democratic thought, and a chapter on methodology explains Braidotti's methods while engaging with her critics. A new introduction muses on Braidotti's provocative legacy.
Author: Teresa de Lauretis
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253017920
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166
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Book Description
"Technologies of Gender builds a bridge between the fashionable orthodoxies of academic theory (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, et al.) and the frequently-marginalized contributions of feminist theory. . . . In sum, de Lauretis has written a book that should be required reading for every feminist in need of theoretical ammunition—and for every theorist in need of feminist enlightenment." —B. Ruby Rich " . . . sets philosophical ideas humming. . . . she has much to say." —Cineaste "I can think of no other work that pushes the debate on the female subject forward with such passion and intellectual rigor." —SubStance This book addresses the question of gender in poststructuralist theoretical discourse, postmodern fiction, and women's cinema. It examines the construction of gender both as representation and as self-representation in relation to several kinds of texts and argues that feminism is producing a radical rewriting, as well as a rereading, of the dominant forms of Western culture.
Author: A. Smelik
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0333994701
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
And The Mirror Cracked explores the politics and pleasures of contemporary feminist cinema. Tracing the highly productive ways in which feminist directors create alternative film forms, Anneke Smelik highlights cinematic issues which are central to feminist films: authorship, point of view, metaphor, montage and the excessive image. In a continuous mirror game between theory and cinema, this study explains how these cinematic techniques are used to represent female subjectivity positively and affirmatively. Among the films considered are A Question of Silence , Bagdad Cafe , Sweetie and The Virgin Machine .
Author: Shohini Chaudhuri
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134346670
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Focusing on the ground-breaking work of Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis and Barbara Creed, this book explores how, since it began in the 1970s, feminist film theory has revolutionized the way that films and their spectators can be understood. Examining the new and distinctive approaches of each of these thinkers, this book provides the most detailed account so far of their ideas. It illuminates the six key concepts and demonstrates their value as tools for film analysis: the male gaze the female voice technologies of gender queering desire the monstrous-feminine masculinity in crisis. Testing their ideas with a number of other examples from contemporary cinema and TV, Shohini Chaudhuri shows how these four thinkers construct their theories through their reading of films. An excellent study companion for all students of film theory and women’s studies.
