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Technosex pp 25–39Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Visible Technosexualities

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Abstract

The work of feminist filmmakers and artists has laid the groundwork for understanding the image–body–subject–text relationship. By interpreting the vision and political aims of cineastes and artists, I explicate the deployment of the female body as a socially coded “projection screen” and instrument of critique via mediated representation. Through the lens of feminist production and creative work, the body articulates a complex politics of visibility and vulnerability, where representations of embodiment can transform consciousness. This work emphasizes the idea that sexualities are realized at the juncture of the physical and the symbolic, and this conjoining is only exacerbated in the contemporary era, where it is crucial to recognize that our sexual subjectivities are at once produced and enabled in conjunction with representational technics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ed Gonzales, “Fat Girl,” Slant Magazine, September 26, 2001, http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/fat-girl/115

  2. 2.

    Catherine Breillat, interviewed by Libby Brooks in “The Joy of Sex,” The Guardian, November 22, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/nov/23/filmcensorship.artsfeatures

  3. 3.

    Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. xii.

  4. 4.

    Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 149.

  5. 5.

    Agnès Varda, interviewed in the documentary De filmer le désir: Voyage à travers le cinema du femmes, ARTE France (Paris, 2010).

  6. 6.

    Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 137.

  7. 7.

    Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. xi.

  8. 8.

    Elspeth Probyn, Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 106.

  9. 9.

    Marks, The Skin of the Film, op cit.

  10. 10.

    Vikki Bell, “New Scenes of Vulnerability, Agency and Plurality An Interview with Judith Butler,” Theory, Culture & Society 27: 1 (2010), 130–152.

  11. 11.

    Carrie Rickey, “A Director Strikes an Intimate Chord,” in Jane Campion: Interviews, ed. Virginia Wright Wexman (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999), p. 50.

  12. 12.

    Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. xii.

  13. 13.

    Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 18.

  14. 14.

    Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 190.

  15. 15.

    Joanna Frueh, “The Body through Women’s Eyes,” in The Power of Feminist Art, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p. 190.

  16. 16.

    Freuh, op cit, p. 190.

  17. 17.

    Freuh, op cit, p. 194.

  18. 18.

    Butler, op cit, p. 49.

  19. 19.

    Carolee Schneemann, More than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings, ed. Bruce McPherson (New York: Documentext, 1979), p. 52.

  20. 20.

    Schneemann, op cit, p. 194.

  21. 21.

    Maura Reilly, “The Paintings of Carolee Schneemann,” Feminist Studies 37:3 (2011), 641.

  22. 22.

    Robert C. Morgan, “Carolee Schneemann: The Politics of Eroticism,” Art Journal 56:4 (1997), 97–100.

  23. 23.

    Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women Artists and the Body (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 92.

  24. 24.

    Betterton, op cit, p. 100.

  25. 25.

    Arthur C. Danto, Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 75.

  26. 26.

    Kobena Mercer, “Looking for Trouble,” Transitions 51 (1991), 193.

  27. 27.

    Richard H. Axsom, “Contemporary Art,” in GLBTQ Encyclopedia (2002), retrieved from http://www.glbtq.com/arts/contemp_art,7.html

  28. 28.

    Yvonne Yarbro-Bejerano, “Laying It Bare: The Queer/Colored Body in Photography by Laura Aguilar,” in Living Chicana, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1997), p. 300.

  29. 29.

    Amelia Jones, “Bodies and Subjects in the Technologized Self-Portrait: The Work of Laura Aguilar,” Aztlán 23:2 (1998), 211, 206.

  30. 30.

    Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 31.

  31. 31.

    Kellie Jones, “To/From Los Angeles with Betye Saar,” in EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

  32. 32.

    Kellie Jones, “Crown Jewels,” in EyeMinded, op cit, p. 183.

  33. 33.

    Betterton, op cit, p. 162.

  34. 34.

    Geeti Sen, Feminine Fables: Imaging the Indian Woman in Painting, Photography and Cinema (Ahmedabad, India: Mapin Publications, 2002), p. 90.

  35. 35.

    Sen, op cit, p. 91.

  36. 36.

    Seema Bawa, “Image, Presences, and Silences: A Dialogue,” retrieved from Kanchan Chander’s web page, http://www.kanchansartworks.net/article_seemabawa.asp, August 15, 2012.

  37. 37.

    Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992).

  38. 38.

    Jones, 1998, p. 203.

  39. 39.

    Anne Gillain, “Profile of a Filmmaker: Catherine Breillat,” in Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Culture, and Politics in France, 19812001,” eds. Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin, and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 204.

  40. 40.

    Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 23.

  41. 41.

    Jones, 1998, p. 204.

  42. 42.

    Corinne Columpar and Sophie Mayer, “Introduction,” in There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), pp. 4–5.

  43. 43.

    Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 55.

  44. 44.

    Sobchak, op cit, p. 60.

  45. 45.

    Sobchak, op cit, p. 84.

  46. 46.

    Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge), p. 169.

  47. 47.

    Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 1.

  48. 48.

    Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 26.

  49. 49.

    Hansen, Bodies in Code, p. 84.

  50. 50.

    Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, ed. D. Séglard, trans. R. Vallier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), p. 279.

  51. 51.

    Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. xvii.

  52. 52.

    Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe, and Rachel Thomson, “Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality,” Feminist Review 46 (1994), 21–38.

  53. 53.

    Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 49.

  54. 54.

    Stephen Heath, The Sexual Fix (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 3.

  55. 55.

    Williams, Screening Sex, p. 6.

  56. 56.

    Williams, ibid., p. 16.

  57. 57.

    Catherine MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 17.

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Durham, M.G. (2016). Visible Technosexualities. In: Technosex. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28142-1_2

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