Votre recherche

Much has been written about Nina Simone’s song “Mississippi Goddam” because it lyrically achieves the political consciousness of the embattled community whose experiences and energy it intends to speak to, through, and for. With its curse words, impatient tone, and energetic rhythm, it could never be mistaken for the traditional, Christian-inflected civil rights dirge. “Alabama’s got me so upset,” the chorus complains. “Tennessee made me lose my rest, and,” as if its atrocities need not be spelled out, “every body knows about Mississippi, goddam!” The song was banned from radio airplay but still became part of the civil rights sound

Galt and Schoonover conceived and developed this book through a queer critical lens that invites questions and does not pretend to know—or desire to know—every possible outcome. Queer is neither adjective nor noun for Galt and Schoonover. Queer is a verb, and a transitive one at that. Queering the world and queering cinema studies are active processes in which Schoonover and Galt delight as theorists, historians, and consumers of media. To extend the travel metaphor a step further: they are intrepid, genial travel guides, and so much more.

"Debates on the future of the African continent and the role of gender identities in these visions are increasingly present in literary criticism forums as African writers become bolder in exploring the challenges they face and celebrating gender diversity in the writing of short stories, novels, poetry, plays and films. Controversies over the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer (LGBTIQ) communities in Africa, as elsewhere, continue in the context of criminalization and/or intimidation of these groups. Residual colonial moralizing and contemporary western identity norms and politics vie with longstanding polyvalent indigenous sexual expression. In addition to traditional media, the new social media have gained importance, both as sources of information exchange and as sites of virtual construction of gender identities. As with many such contentious issues, the variety of responses to the "state of the question" is strikingly visible across the continent. In this issue of ALT, guest editor John Hawley has sampled the ongoing conversations, in both African writing and in the analysis of contemporary African cinema, to show how queer studies can break with old concepts and theories and point the way to new gender perspectives on literary and cinematic output. This volume also includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles and a Literary Supplement."--Publisher's description

The writer frames his analysis of Kan Lume and Loo Zihan's feature length film Solos (2007) with a historical overview of the representation of queer sexualities in new Singaporean cinema. This approach also takes in the Penal Code Section 377A, arguing that not only do these repressive laws force queer sexualities to the margins of culture and society, but also that the State's censorship laws are a means by which it can reify ‘the Asian value system's supposed rejection of queerness’.

The writer examines Singapore's Media Development Authority's censorship of representations of lesbianism in film, music video, television and theatre. She highlights the government surveillance and repression of portrayals of LGBT cultures and communities in Singapore by unpacking the ambiguities and contradictions underlying the censorship of these popular media forms. This reflects an institutional ‘inability to read lesbians’.

The unprecedented increase in lesbian representation over the past two decades has, paradoxically, coincided with queer theory’s radical transformation of the study of sexuality. In Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, Clara Bradbury-Rance argues that this contradictory context has yielded new kinds of cinematic language through which to give desire visual form. By offering close readings of key contemporary films such as Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Water Lilies and Carol alongside a broader filmography encompassing over 300 other films released between 1927 and 2018, the book provokes new ways of understanding a changing field of representation. Bradbury-Rance resists charting a narrative of representational progress or shoring up the lesbian’s categorisation in the newly available terms of the visible. Instead, she argues for a feminist framework that can understand lesbianism’s queerness. Drawing on a provocative theoretical and visual corpus, Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory reveals the conditions of lesbian legibility in the twenty-first century.

A non-foundationalist construct for the Feiticeiro/a character that assumes neither an essentialist nature nor a determinist set of activities is possible. This does not prescribe a ‘type’ of ‘pervert’ character, but instead delineates an epistemic framing for a Feiticeiro/a character. This chapter explores an etymologically based semiotic approach to character construction that accounts for a Derridean view that language is constituted by binary reciprocal delimitations and for a view of sex as a dereified expression of materialised instances of engagement by sexual subjects, in terms of which sexuality is rendered as an opened-outward and connected function. The chapter further deals with an approach based in an empathic engagement between audiences and Feiticeiro/a characters, which is apposite for audiences identifying with but not necessarily liking characters. The chapter closes the volume’s argument around how transgressive, sexually focused Feiticeiro/a characters might productively be constructed in terms other than of essences and determinist actions, but in terms of ‘meaning’ found in the points of connection between heterogeneous bodily surfaces.

A post-humanist lens is useful as a starting-point to remedy the absenting and invisibilising effects of sexological epistemologies for the purposes of conceiving a constitution of ‘pervert’ filmic characters, since certain strains of existential thinking have a meta-theoretical pliancy that is useful for reflecting the non-binary character of complex people beyond simple identity categories, across a range of types and styles of filmic products. If matched with a semiological approach such as that espoused by Barthes, it thereby becomes possible to manipulate signs in the form of character constructions to represent people as more than the sum of their parts and to contain deeper significations that are built into the fabric of their construction. This requires a deeper understanding of the semiotic notion of ‘semes’ as the foundation for character construction. To this end, this chapter explores how sexual ‘perversion’ as reflected in notion of the ‘feitiço’ might serve as a foundation for a new episteme for ‘perverse’ characters, as the Feiticeiro/a as ‘sorcerer/sorceress’.

The notion of ‘perversity’ suggests inherent transgressiveness. However, a focus on practices does not help identify who filmic characters are in ways that might inform a paradigm for character identity suitable for translation into a visual medium. Failing to achieve this clarity, ‘perverts’ often end up as ‘ambulatory objects’ at once imagined and defined by what is not present. This chapter engages how this manifests in the nineteenth-century sexological discourses that reflected perverse prurience in terms of assumptions that all entities might be empirically identifiable in the same way that material phenomena can be perceived by means of the senses, which is especially visible in the various incarnations of Freudian constructs of ‘fetishism’ that refuse personal agency through reliance on a range of psychodynamic constructs.

In seeking to find a solid paradigm for the Feiticeiro/a character, it is tempting to approach the established psychiatric categories. Unfortunately, many of these suggest that people are ineffably different from others and that people will behave according to type in a predictable, even inevitable way. This chapter explores the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which merely re-inscribes essentialist and determinist tendencies by means of processes akin to the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence and linguistic fixity. The chapter explores further how this is embedded in the category of ‘fetishism’, ‘fetishistic transvestism’ and ‘transvestic fetishism’, which contain certain problematic vestigial tails of Freudian categories that make the psychiatric definitions of ‘fetishism’ unsuitable as a foundation for the Feiticeiro/a character.

The categories for ‘perversion’ in the World Health Organization’s ICD fail to describe people and their practices, thereby obscuring the remarkable singularity of individuals and diversity of groups. Instead, they prescribe heteronormative sexual behaviour, which is unhelpful as a foundation for the Feiticeiro/a character. This chapter explores an alternative epistemic construct, as becomes available in the notion of a focalising character, which reflects a ‘semic’ construct that negates the notion of a ‘pervert’ character as a substance, but instead embraces the notion of a Feiticeiro/a character as a structure. The chapter further explores the philosophical nature of this structure as it relates to the thematic elements of a narrative whilst engaging in believable activities in a material world. The chapter then suggests an approach to structure based in a phenomenological notion of the replacement of ‘substance’ with ‘form’/‘structure’ as the foundation of meaning.

An episteme for the Feiticeiro/a as a filmic character who is ‘perverse’ needs a form if it is to be useful to writers wanting to construct complex transgressive sexual characters. The beginnings of this framing are productively associated with the semiotic notion of ‘connotation’. This chapter explores what is meant by complexity in character construction and suggests a framing focused on character as an embodied being as a helpful starting-point for an episteme for characterological ‘perversion’. The chapter explores this as a non-foundationalist framing that transcends problematic Cartesian distinctions, concrete object materiality and woolly broad-stroke statements of a disembodied discursive constitution of social and personal experience.

If the Feiticeiro/a as a psychologically defined and complex character is to be seen as an embodied form/structure (not substance) that exists in dialectical relationships between self, other and discursive constructions of society, a clearer indication should be made about what kinds of behaviours or actions he/she should engage in. This chapter explores how psychiatric diagnostic criteria fail to provide assistance, despite professing to authoritatively mark stable, reliable and accurate epistemic boundaries to sexual activity. The chapter thereby addresses questions of the description of actions versus the demarcation of thoughts, objects, feelings and time as invisible and abstracted notions that are virtually the opposite of what is useful for an episteme for the Feiticeiro/a. It also approaches how the diagnostic criteria codify ‘perverse’ activity in determinist terms, thereby insidiously refusing an epistemic construct of action into which is built an acknowledgement of the behaviours of the Feiticeiro/a as a complex subjectivity.

Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt attempt a formidable feat in Queer Cinema in the World: to take three charged yet indispensable concepts and theorize their interconnections. A tour-de-force analysis of the triangulation between “queer,” “cinema,” and “world”, this coauthored monograph largely succeeds in drawing out threads between crucial issues in cinema studies, queer theory, and global studies.

"African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness uses critical race theory to discuss American films that embrace contemporary issues of race, sexuality, class, and gender. Its linear history chronicles black-oriented narrative film from post-World War II through the presidential administration of Barack Obama. Editor Mark A. Reid has assembled a stellar list of contributors who approach their film analyses as an intersectional practice that combines queer theory, feminism/womanism, and class analytical strategies alongside conventional film history and theory. Taken together, the essays invigorate a "Black Lives Consciousness," which speaks to the value of black bodies that might be traumatized and those bodies that are coming into being-ness through intersectional theoretical analysis and everyday activism. The volume includes essays such as Gerald R. Butters's, "Blaxploitation Film," which charts the genre and its uses of violence, sex, and misogyny to provoke a realization of other philosophical and sociopolitical themes that concern intersectional praxis. Dan Flory's "African-American Film Noir" explains the intertextual-fictional and socio-ecological-dynamics of black action films. Melba J. Boyd's essay, "'Who's that Nigga on that Nag?': Django Unchained and the Return of the Blaxploitation Hero," argues that the film provides cultural and historical insight, "signifies" on blackface stereotypes, and chastises Hollywood cinema's misrepresentation of slavery. African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness embraces varied social experiences within a cinematic Black Lives Consciousness intersectionality. The interdisciplinary quality of the anthology makes it approachable to students and scholars of fields ranging from film to culture to African American studies alike."

This essay performs a critical comparison of two documentary films about queer and trans people of color, Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning (1991) and Wu Tsang's Wildness (2012) and examines how the two films negotiate of the politics of representing reality and “realness.” The comparison illuminates two entwined problematics: the ways in which the challenges faced by each film are emblematic of the larger historical context in which they were made, specifically notions of queer community and its subjects; and the ways in which the negotiation of these challenges occurs in relation to a broader field of ethical and formal questions relating to documentary itself.

This paper looks at five documentaries on activism around ending the practice of female genital cutting (FGC) in Africa. All were made by or in partnership with UK and US producers and are distributed by the New York-based non-profit media arts organization Women Make Movies. By tracing changing political and representational strategies in feminist documentaries on the issue and the varying terms on which the films engage their subjects and address their viewers, the chapter aims to put the specificity of independent documentary formats, practices, and institutions in dialogue with feminist theoretical critiques of the wider discourse on women's human rights. The chapter looks at Kaplan and Grewal's critique of the neo-colonialism of Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar's Warrior Marks, the observational strategies of Kim Longinotto's The Day I Will Never Forget, the diasporic dimensions of Mrs. Goundo's Daughter and Sarabah, and the visual rhetoric of human rights models in Equality Now's Africa Rising. The cultural field of documentary constitutes a public sphere in which activist and theoretical debate, contested reception, and continually renewed cultural production articulate the productively shifting terms of transnational feminism.

What does it mean to be white? This remains the question at large in the continued effort to examine how white racial identity is constructed and how systems of white privilege operate in everyday life. White Out brings together the original work of leading scholars across the disciplines of sociology, philosophy, history, and anthropology to give readers an important and cutting-edge study of ""whiteness""

Artists and cultural practitioners from Indigenous communities around the world are increasingly in the international spotlight. As museums and curators race to consider the planetary reach of their art collections and exhibitions, this publication draws upon the challenges faced today by cultural workers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to engage meaningfully and ethically with the histories, presents and futures of Indigenous cultural practices and world-views. Sixteen Indigenous voices convene to consider some of the most burning questions surrounding this field. How will novel methodologies of word/voice-crafting be constituted to empower the Indigenous discourses of the future? Is it sufficient to expand the Modernist art-historical canon through the politics of inclusion? Is this expansion a new form of colonisation, or does it foster the cosmopolitan thought that Indigenous communities have always inhabited? To whom does the much talked-of 'Indigenous Turn' belong? Does it represent a hegemonic project of introspection and revision in the face of today's ecocidal, genocidal and existential crises?"--Page 4 de la couverture. Autres auteurs/titres:edited by Katya García-Antón ; contributors, Daniel Browning, Kabita Chakma, Megan Cope, Santosh Kumar Das, Hannah Donnelly, Léuli Māzyār Luna'i Eshrāghi, David Garneau, Biung Ismahasan, Kimberley Moulton, Máret Ánne Sara, Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, Irene Snarby, Ánde Somby, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Prashanta Tripura, Sontosh Bikash Tripura.

his thesis documents and explores community-based and socially engaged art by Indigenous women artists. Their artwork is impacting and strengthening communities in Manitoba. The Thesis explores the use of dialogical aesthetics in performance and socially-engaged art by Indigenous women artists in rural and remote areas of Manitoba, and relates these aesthetics to the concept of activism through their art and relationship to their community. The aim of this research and this paper is to document, support and expose the work of a small pocket of Indigenous women artists in Manitoba who are acting as activists or social change agents based on their artwork. I have arrived at this conclusion first by their personal testimonies, second, by their art being socially conscious and lastly, by their art practices entrenched in the framework of dialogical aesthetics, community-based and site-specific ideologies.