CAMERA OBSCURA最新文献

Facing Death, Choosing Life: Pose's Positive Historiography 面对死亡，选择生活：Pose 的积极历史学

IF 0.4 3区艺术学

CAMERA OBSCURA Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-11024083

Henry Washington

{"title":"Facing Death, Choosing Life: Pose's Positive Historiography","authors":"Henry Washington","doi":"10.1215/02705346-11024083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-11024083","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 From the museum heist cast members perform in its first episode to the series finale, Pose (FX, 2018–2021) endeavors to complicate the dominant historical narrative of queer and trans of color life and death at the height of the AIDS pandemic. By focalizing the vitality of the community's social life despite the disease's deathliness, the show attempts to humanize its “real” history. This article explicates the ethical dilemmas that haunt this positive historiography despite its significant value. The show's attention to the robustness of the community's social relations—particularly in its depiction of ballroom culture and the work house mothers do to make chosen families—usefully reorients viewers’ attention away from dominant historiography's pathologizing gestures. Yet simultaneously, this push for the positive threatens to obscure the structural neglect that enabled the pandemic's death toll along with the complex and often tragic reality of black and brown queer life more generally, particularly insofar as it implicitly links success to performances of homo- and transnormativity. This article tarries with rather than attempts to overcome this tension—between the structural critique and historiographic intervention modeled by the cast's theft, transport, and refashioning of the museum's historical objects and the logic of toxic positivity that takes shape in many of the show's other representations. Rather than argue for the wholesale embrace or refusal of the representational logic that inheres Pose's historiographic intervention, the article uses the show's range of historical representations as a starting point for thinking through what it means to face death and choose life amid conditions of extraordinary violence.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141041271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Revisiting Queer and Trans Representation in Junior 重新审视《少年》中的同性恋和变性人形象

IF 0.4 3区艺术学

CAMERA OBSCURA Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-11024096

Jon Heggestad

{"title":"Revisiting Queer and Trans Representation in Junior","authors":"Jon Heggestad","doi":"10.1215/02705346-11024096","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-11024096","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The 1994 film Junior (dir. Ivan Reitman), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the world's first pregnant man, has been the subject of much scholarly debate since its initial release. Specifically, feminist critiques have both called attention to the film's androcentric usurpation of reproduction and lauded its break from more traditional and gendered forms of this labor. The following analysis of Junior and its reception builds on this critical feminist foundation while reconsidering the film's potential as an early blockbuster work that explores alternative modes of queer family-making. This reading draws on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, applying her analytic framework of binaristic formations to the film. In so doing, a series of dyads emerge—feminist/misogynist, feminist/queer, trans/cis, queer/heteronormative, masculine/feminine, passive/active, hard/soft. Navigating these divisions not only offers a more reparative reading of the film, it also produces a fruitful study for addressing the ways in which queerness on-screen so frequently operates through such binary formations. Lastly, new insights regarding the way male pregnancy, as a theme, has historically been depicted in Western film and television are born out of this queer re-reading. By revisiting Junior through this approach, zaniness—as conceptualized by Sianne Ngai—illustrates yet another division where queer modes of family-making reside—the binaristic formation of horror/humor.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141044273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Watching Women: Surveillance and Spectatorship in Early Science Fiction Television 注视女性早期科幻电视中的监视与旁观者身份

IF 0.4 3区艺术学

CAMERA OBSCURA Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-11024057

Cara Dickason

{"title":"Watching Women: Surveillance and Spectatorship in Early Science Fiction Television","authors":"Cara Dickason","doi":"10.1215/02705346-11024057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-11024057","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article analyzes episodes of early science fiction anthology series to examine how fears of television's ability to turn its gaze on the home circulated around women, both as objects of surveillance and as television spectators, in the 1950s and 1960s. Media historians have called attention to the importance of women in defining the role of new technologies and have detailed the gendered popular constructions of early television. This article stems from such work, addressing the time when audiences and producers alike were grappling with the imagined potential of television's visuality and liveness to impose visibility on its viewers. Early episodes of Tales of Tomorrow, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits expose anxieties about the power of television as a surveillance mechanism to enact control over audiences. Formally and narratively, these episodes complicate the division between seeing and being seen, particularly for women viewers, while enacting strategies to contain and discipline women. They mobilize women's navigation of visual subjectivity and objectification only to eschew their ability to look and reify their status as objects to be looked at. By taking a closer look at early television surveillance narratives, this article demonstrates how women's television spectatorship has always entailed a complex negotiation of imposed looking relations that paradoxically attempt to deny the female gaze even as they depend on it. Understanding this historical context helps illuminate the gendered power dynamics of spectatorship and visibility in our present media landscape, in which the convergence of TV and surveillance technologies realizes the imagined fears of the mid-twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141049693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Castle & Crook: Necroliberalism and Cartographies of Abandonment in Maquilapolis (City of Factories) and Señorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman) Castle & Crook：工厂之城》（Maquilapolis）和《失踪少女》（Señorita Extraviada）中的亡灵自由主义和遗弃图谱

IF 0.4 3区艺术学

CAMERA OBSCURA Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-11024044

Edward Avila

引用次数: 0

The Perverted Ancestry of the Antiheroine: Bad Mothers and Unruly Daughters in Sharp Objects and Mare of Easttown 反派女主角的变态祖先：《利器》和《东镇的母马》中的坏母亲和刁蛮女儿

IF 0.4 3区艺术学

CAMERA OBSCURA Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-11024070

Eleanore Gardner, Alyson Miller

{"title":"The Perverted Ancestry of the Antiheroine: Bad Mothers and Unruly Daughters in Sharp Objects and Mare of Easttown","authors":"Eleanore Gardner, Alyson Miller","doi":"10.1215/02705346-11024070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-11024070","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 While complex women in contemporary television are, as Svenja Hohenstein and Katharina Thalmann contend, “no longer a niche phenomenon,” the antiheroine continues to be defined by her relationship to motherhood, sexuality, and violence. This essay contrasts antiheroines Camille Preaker and Mare Sheehan from HBO's Sharp Objects and Mare of Easttown and argues that the antiheroine is premised on a disturbed mother-daughter dynamic that complexly manifests in two key opposing ways: in Sharp Objects, as the destruction of both self and other via a dynamic that is monstrous and devouring; and in Mare of Easttown, as a source of reconciliation and healing through a redemptive vision of the maternal. Both series confront the idea that the antiheroine's moral failings are a result of bad mothering, a familiar patriarchal trope that is simultaneously challenged and upheld in the narratives. Importantly, while they differ in their responses to essentialist patriarchal ideologies, Sharp Objects and Mare of Easttown position patriarchy as the true monster and suggest that control over the self can be gained through resisting the notions of the maternal taint.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141023711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

No Bodies Business: Trapdoor Tactics and the Art of Transgender Disappearance in A Fantastic Woman 没有尸体的生意：奇女子》中的陷阱战术和变性人的失踪艺术

IF 0.4 3区艺术学

CAMERA OBSCURA Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-11024109

Curran Nault

{"title":"No Bodies Business: Trapdoor Tactics and the Art of Transgender Disappearance in A Fantastic Woman","authors":"Curran Nault","doi":"10.1215/02705346-11024109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-11024109","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Chilean Academy Award–winning drama, Una mujer fantástica/A Fantastic Woman (dir. Sebastián Lelio, 2017), is a film that navigates past the superficiality of surface into a transgender interiority and imagination situated below and against dominant culture's demand for transgender display. Within the media mainstream, transgender legibility has been predicated on a hypervisibility tailor-made for cisgender consumption—via celebrated magazine covers and charged cinematic spectacles. A Fantastic Woman, however, frustrates this ideology of the visible and the knowable certainties it feigns. Prying the cisgender gaze from its perch of power—disrupting its ability to detect, define, and dominate the transgender body—the film incites the “transgender gaze,” as first advanced by Jack Halberstam. A Fantastic Woman ultimately forsakes specular relations altogether, enacting a “disappearing act” that moves audiences beyond the flesh and into the heart of the matter: the internal depths of transgender fantasy and feeling. Aesthetically articulated, this transcension progresses from the private visions of the film's protagonist, Marina, to an acute emphasis on sound as well as surface. Through its “art of disappearance,” A Fantastic Woman conjures an enticing horizon in which transgender surveillance and subjugation are provisionally contravened, proffering the possibility of sidestepping the disciplining, normalizing powers of the cisgender gaze.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141141866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Feminist Refusal of I May Destroy You 女权主义拒绝《我可能会毁掉你

IF 0.4 3区艺术学

CAMERA OBSCURA Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-11024122

Madeline Ullrich

{"title":"The Feminist Refusal of I May Destroy You","authors":"Madeline Ullrich","doi":"10.1215/02705346-11024122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-11024122","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You (HBO, BBC One, 2020) chronicles a first-generation Black woman's struggles in the aftermath of her sexual assault. Set in the United Kingdom, I May Destroy You was well-received by US critics and audiences alike, who rallied around the series as a positive, cohesive, and ultimately feminist example of how a woman productively deals with sexual trauma. These discourses of positive representation used to frame I May Destroy You, however, focus on reinforcing liberal feminist ideals of assimilation, legibility, and respectability in the service of an unexamined “womanhood.” In reality, I May Destroy You uses both plot—as Arabella and her friends attempt to make sense of her rape—and narrative form to deconstruct the identity of “woman,” the term that most television series on “women's issues” and with feminist modes of address have attempted to represent and stabilize since the medium's foundations in the mid-twentieth century. In resisting stable, positive identity categories in a story of sexual violence, Coel's I May Destroy You presents an aberration and an important intervention in a televisual landscape that often relies on access to distinct binaries of male/female, Black/white, and victim/perpetrator to make claims of “accurate” representation—both for sexual assault on television and for women's experience more broadly.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141033352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Cinema, Taliban, and Being a Woman in Today's Afghanistan: An Interview with Sahraa Karimi 当今阿富汗的电影、塔利班和女性身份：Sahraa Karimi 访谈录

IF 0.4 3区艺术学

CAMERA OBSCURA Pub Date : 2023-12-01 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10772645

Pinar Fontini

{"title":"Cinema, Taliban, and Being a Woman in Today's Afghanistan: An Interview with Sahraa Karimi","authors":"Pinar Fontini","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10772645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10772645","url":null,"abstract":"On 13 August 2021, Sahraa Karimi posted a letter from her Twitter account. I write you with a broken heart and a deep hope that you can join me in protecting my beautiful people, especially filmmakers, from the Taliban. In the last few weeks, the Taliban have gained control of so many provinces. They have massacred our people, they kidnapped many children, they sold girls as child brides to their men, they murdered a woman for her attire. . . . It is a humanitarian crisis, and yet the world is silent. . . . We need your voice. The media, governments, and the world humanitarian organizations are conveniently silent as if this “Peace deal” with the Taliban was ever legitimate. It was never legitimate. Recognizing them gave them the confidence to come back to power. The Taliban have been brutalizing our people throughout the entire process of the talks. Everything that I have worked so hard to build as a filmmaker in my country is at risk of falling. . . . I do not understand this world. I do not understand this silence. I will stay and fight for my country, but I cannot do it alone. I need allies like you. Please help us get this world to care about what is happening to us. Please help us by informing your countries’ most important media what is going on here in Afghanistan. Be our voices outside of Afghanistan . . . Days after publishing this letter, Sahraa had to flee from Afghanistan as the Taliban took control of Kabul. Within several weeks, I made this interview with her.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139190579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Reading Border through Desire: Queer Indigenous Theory, Nordic Settler Colonialism, and Trans Aesthetics 通过欲望阅读边界：同性恋土著理论、北欧定居殖民主义和跨美学

IF 0.4 3区艺术学

CAMERA OBSCURA Pub Date : 2023-12-01 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10772589

Kata Kyrölä

{"title":"Reading Border through Desire: Queer Indigenous Theory, Nordic Settler Colonialism, and Trans Aesthetics","authors":"Kata Kyrölä","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10772589","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10772589","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the Swedish fantasy-horror-romance film Gräns (Border, dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018) through queer Indigenous thought and the notion of trans aesthetics, exploring how the film may sensitize its viewers to seeing and feeling with gender variance, queer desire, and the trauma of settler colonialism. Drawing on Eve Tuck's call for desire-based research, the article asks what is at stake in queer, trans, and decolonial readings of films that are not necessarily identifiable as such at the surface level. Border centers on a love story between two gender-fluid trolls who pass as human and whose kin have been subjected to genocide, dislocation, and mutilation, but the film's reception largely misses the connection to the treatment of Indigenous Sámi people and transgender people within Nordic settler states. The article argues that Border's ecstatic depiction of gender-fluid desires, bodies, and sex, alongside its examination of the psychic consequences of settler colonial violence, make it a thus far unique film in the Nordic context — even though this examination happens through the distancing effect of trolls as metaphorical Natives. The main characters embody wrongness in the settler nation-state, in heteronormative society, and ultimately in the delimiting category of the human, but the film imagines rightness in nature as a queer, gender-fluid space where all creatures can just be. Through employing notions of trans aesthetics, the (non)sovereign erotic, refusal, and haunting, the article proposes desire-based readings of cinema that envision ways of feeling and existing beyond humancentric, settler, binary notions of gender and sexuality.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139190749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Becoming User: Oracle, Barbara Gordon, and Representations of the User in Popular Culture 成为用户：甲骨文、芭芭拉-戈登和大众文化中的用户形象

IF 0.4 3区艺术学

CAMERA OBSCURA Pub Date : 2023-12-01 DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10772617

Zara Dinnen

{"title":"Becoming User: Oracle, Barbara Gordon, and Representations of the User in Popular Culture","authors":"Zara Dinnen","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10772617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10772617","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the figure of the “user” as an emergent subject of late twentieth-century US culture, in relation to the World Wide Web and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. The user is a subject position that is historical in the sense that use relations have always determined social formations within capitalism, but it has been newly energized in contemporary modes of capitalism after digital computing, and newly weighted in contemporary renderings of the nation-state as service provider. This essay turns to a cultural moment in which a privatized user subject was coming into formation, using comic books of this moment to find the user figure and its stories. The DC Comics archive might not seem the most likely place to find answers to these concerns. But superhero origin stories are always about becoming user in late capitalist imaginaries. Superheroes learn to use their histories to reproduce the world they want. The then newly inaugurated DC Comics character Oracle, aka Barbara Gordon (formerly Batgirl), is becoming a wheelchair user and a computer user. Reading Oracle's 1990s user origin stories, this essay attends to scenes of wheelchair and computer use to work out a theory of user history and user time emerging in 1990s US culture. The comics reveal that the process of becoming user is always intersecting with the processes of becoming a racialized, gendered, classed, (dis)abled subject. They also open up the possibility for other affordances: becoming user as a process which can be torqued in its unfolding.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139188613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0