#spectatorship

[asteriskless]

Mudita World Peace by Hannah Ensor, in 'Bodies Built for Game'

[vanpeltfoto]

Fragments d’un discours sans destinataire

"Christmas Spent in a Foreign Land," could be the name of this. The sea performs regardless. The warning signs stand politely. People pass through one another without collision, without consequence.

This is not loneliness. It is anonymity without injury — the rare condition of being present without being required to mean anything.

For a moment, the world does not ask who I am, only whether I intend to swim.

(Photo: d.)

[dontbestingybaby]

“If, as Catharine MacKinnon states in the essay cited earlier on, ‘sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away’ (p. 515), that which is most personal and at the same time most socially determined, most defining of the self and most exploited or controlled, then to ask the question of what constitutes female sexuality, for women and for feminism (the emphasis is important), is to come to know things in a different way, and to come to know them as political. Since one ‘becomes a woman’ through the experience of sexuality, issues such as lesbianism, contraception, abortion, incest, sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, and pornography are not merely social (a problem for society as a whole) or merely sexual (a private affair between ‘consenting adults’ or within the privacy of the family); for women, they are political and epistemological. ‘To feminism, the personal is epistemologically the political, and its epistemology is its politics’ (p. 535). This is the sense in which it is possible to argue as MacKinnon does, that consciousness raising is a ‘critical method,’ a specific mode of apprehension or ‘appropriation’ of reality. The fact that today the expression ‘consciousness raising’ has become dated and more than slightly unpleasant, as any word will that has been appropriated, diluted, digested and spewed out by the media, does not diminish the social and subjective impact of a practice—the collective articulation of one's experience of sexuality and gender—which has produced, and continues to elaborate, a radically new mode of understanding the subject’s relation to social-historical reality. Consciousness raising is the original critical instrument that women have developed toward such understanding, the analysis of social reality, and its critical revision. The Italian feminists call it ‘autocoscienza,’ selfconsciousness, and better still, self consciousness. For example, Manuela Fraire: ‘the practice of self consciousness is the way in which women reflect politically on their own condition.’”[33]

from Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema by Teresa de Lauretis

Additional citations: Catherine A. MacKinnon’s “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory”; Manuela Fraire’s “La politica del femminismo”

[endlessandrea]

"Even the sun, formerly a conduit of mystical knowledge in Reines’s A Sand Book, does not offer deliverance: “The sun falls on my head like a priestly hand—the gentleness of its blessing is almost enraging—why won’t it slap me, why won’t it push me, why won’t it force me to become better than I am.” In another poem titled “New York,” she writes, searchingly, “Why doesn’t this kind of killing afflict the weather here? / Why doesn’t the Earth say something? / But it does. In your body.” Reines frequently insists on the somatic as a method of accessing a more cosmic discernment, which I fear turns inquiry further and further inward, into the winding gut and arcane bone, rather than outward, toward the articulations and solidities of other people. But her questions read, movingly, like the ragged half of an incomplete catechism. I am touched by the sun’s failure to provide longed-for punishment and rehabilitation. The existence of a bright, warm day, and the whirring of the colonial death machine: our reality holds both. There are times when that can only seem like a terrible affront. Reines quotes Milton, where he describes Satan “shit-talking the sun”: “O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams / That bring to my remembrance from what state / I fell. . . .” She explicates, “Milton’s Satan hates nature, and he hates what is, he’s against what is, he’s against what is real.” It’s hard not to relate."

[sxpxrmxrgxr]

[certainwoman]

"The special appeal and significance of cinema for many gay men is evident in the way film has developed as a particularly privileged source of and for gay subcultural production. In his pioneering study of subcultural logic, Dick Hebdige contends that subcultures turn on a constitutive process of stylistic bricolage in which they appropriate various objects, texts, and signs from the ‘‘dominant’’ culture and refigure them so as to produce alternative, ‘‘subcultural’’ meanings. As Hebdige sees it, this constitutive process of social articulation allows subcultures to produce and reproduce themselves as ‘‘different’’ from the dominant or ‘‘parent’’ culture through their aberrant modes of cultural consumption.The varied practices of bricolage in subcultures become both the site and the currency of subcultural definition, the space for and tools with which a subculture produces and displays its cultural difference(s). Developing this reading further, Sarah Thornton coins the term‘ ‘subcultural capital’’ to refer to the extensive and often highly developed systems of tastes, knowledges, and competences developed and used by subcultures as marks of distinction and group affiliation. By possessing and exhibiting the requisite forms of subcultural capital, a given subject expresses and ratifies his or her membership in a subcultural group.

(...)

With the massive expansion and increased legitimization of gay subcultural formations in the post-Stonewall period, cinema has continued to play a crucial role in the production and circulation of gay subcultural capital. In line with broader sociohistorical shifts in contemporary culture such as the diversification of leisure markets and the emergence of new entertainment forms, cinema has inevitably lost the position of unrivaled predominance it enjoyed in gay subcultures in earlier decades; today it competes with other media such as popular music and television as privileged sources of gay subcultural capital. Nevertheless, film remains a vital forum of and for collective gay investment and definition The ‘‘older’’ traditions of gay cinematic capital are regularly maintained and passed on through repertory screenings, television broadcasts, gay video stores, and endless references/discussions in gay publications; while more recent screen-based practices such as independent gay/queer cinema and gay/lesbian film festivals have expanded and enlivened gay cinematic capital with a wealth of new texts and pleasures.

(...)

Spectatorship assumes a similarly performative function within gay contexts. For many gay men, spectatorship offers a privileged forum in which to define and express their identifications with discourses of gayness. Daniel Harris claims that, for gay men, film has ‘‘served a deeply psychological and political function’’ because it has provided ‘‘a vehicle for expressing alienation from our surroundings and linking up with the utopic homosexual community of our dreams.’’ Gay spectatorship, he asserts, has developed historically as ‘‘an emphatic political assertion of ethnic camaraderie,’’ ‘‘a way of achieving a collective subcultural identity.’’ This is most obvious in those subcultural contexts of reception referred to above in which individual spectators literally become part of a self-identified gay and/or queer audience. Gay subcultural cinematic practices such as film festivals and the like openly engage and bind spectators together in an ‘‘imagined community.’’ Audiences at these events are, as Samantha Searle notes, ‘‘actualised in what could be described as queer public spheres, taking part in events of off-screen visibility, of subsocial cultural affirmation and pride.’’ Much of the efficacy and appeal of these ‘‘community’’ events lie precisely in the scope they offer for the performative production of gay/lesbian/queer collective identifications, and, as anyone who has ever attended these events can attest, the experience of queer affirmation they provide can be empowering and immensely pleasurable."

Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships

[blackyouthproject]

On being a Black cynic when the laughter is so loud

On being a Black cynic when the laughter is so loud

by Donnie Moreland

There is an old adage, from Black folk, which goes as follows, “We laugh to keep ourselves from crying.” It is strange that such a crudely simple sentiment could provide such a weighted testament to the trepidations, and fears, of an entire people. And yet I can think of very few words which describe the troubling ethos of the Middle Passages’ North American descendants. There…

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[dontbestingybaby]

“Illusions, Daughters of the Dust, and A Passion of Remembrance employ a deconstructive filmic practice to undermine existing grand cinematic narratives even as they retheorize subjectivity in the realm of the visual. Without providing ‘realistic’ positive representations that emerge only as a response to the totalizing nature of existing narratives, they offer points of radical departure. Opening up a space for the assertion of a critical black female spectatorship, they do not simply offer diverse representations, they imagine new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity.”

from “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” by bell hooks