Performing Essentialism: Reassessing Barbara Hammer's Films of the 1970s (original) (raw)
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Cher's music videos. Gender as a performative construction
This paper aims at presenting the way Cherilyn Sarkisian's-" Cher " 's music videos are a powerful source in helping her question and deconstruct classical representations of gender, carrying a message of empowerment to women and other minorities and proving that Cher's performance has strong social and political connotations. Of particular interest are Cher's video clips of the songs Believe, Strong Enough, Walking in Memphis, and her performance of the song Perfection in Extravaganza: Live at the Mirage (the first live music video title by her). I will examine how these videos depict narratives in support of hybrid identities by studying her choices of wardrobes, the presence of Cher's impersonators by her side on stage, and the association of her image to that of a cyborg through the use of the auto-tune in a powerful carnivalistic transgression. Cher is able to deconstruct what Mikahil Bakhtin called the " classic body " and prove that gender is performative.
Women's Fragmented Consciousness in Feminist Experimental Video
Toward the beginning of Margaret Stratton's videotape Kiss the Boys and Make Them Die, she describes in voice-off narration that she wears her grandmother's "simple...sweet" wedding ring. As she says this, we see a very tight close-up of barbed wire glinting in the sun. A few sentences later, when she describes the hard physical labor which the ring on her grandmother's hand saw, the camera pans down a tight close-up of many strings of rosary beads hanging together, pauses at the crucifixes at the ends of the strands, and the tracks back up the beads. Barbed wire and beads and a sweet ring passed down to a grandchild --I didn't articulate the connection between these images conceptually on first viewing, but I felt it resonate for days afterward in my gut. Since I, too, am a video maker, I conjured up a wonderful fantasy about a video-maker narrator who wears a sweet, inherited ring which leads her, in the course of making an autobiographical video, to shoot a graphically beautiful, extreme close-up of barbed wire and edit it into the narration at this place. But however I personally receive this image as a videomaker, media critic and heterosexual feminist, I am also teased by the fact that Stratton presents herself as a lesbian videomaker, and I wonder what these images have to do with her story of herself as a lesbian or how the same set of images is received by or has explanatory power for lesbian viewers. Of particular importance to me is the fact that the connotative links are not all traced out nor tied to the narration in any one-to-one symbolic way, but rather that the images can convey their full symbolic power --rosary, barbed wire -without my knowing exactly what they "mean."
Students of MISA, the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute, produced in the early 2000s several adult movies, some of them featuring female urination, which offered ammunition to critics calling for police action against what they considered a "pornographic cult." Carmen Enache, under the pseudonym Bella Maestrina, directed most of these movies. After the 2004 police raid against MISA in Romania, the production of these movies ceased, although Enache still organized erotic theatrical shows and in the following decade started directing a new kind of movies under the pseudonym Aghora Vidya. The movies and shows do not appear to have generated significant income, nor did MISA use them as a recruitment tool. Based on interviews with Enache and others involved in the movies, the article concludes that presenting a Tantric approach to sexuality to consumers of pornography was not a purely utilitarian enterprise, and those MISA students who participated in it also...
Transgressive Eroticism in the Music Videos of Madonna, Rihanna and Lady Gaga
4th Annual Conference, Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand, 2013
Since the inception of film the thrilling potential of horror has featured prominently, almost always treading a fine line between the erotic and the macabre. Whilst these powerfully entwined forces have been explored on many levels within the realm of moving image, it is perhaps within the genre of music video that we see this conjoined aesthetic so actively envisaged. Lady Gaga's Bad Romance and Paparazzi, and Rihanna's Disturbia follow Madonna's Justify My Love and What it Feels Like for A Girl in their disturbing/captivating expression of aggressive sexuality and brutality through a series of fabricated personas. Drawing the ire of some for what is perceived as vacuous and dangerous exhibitionism, these concerns echo in unfavorable critique. Conversely, reading into these videos primarily by means of objective analysis disregards the pointed layering of themes and stylistic devices that operate as both forceful rupturing and heightened of codes of allurement, power and female sexuality, and active re-configuration of normative states of being. Framing discussions around the videos detailed above, this paper considers if the appeal of spectacle could be argued as significant for the powerful responses it engenders (attraction and repulsion – including moral disapproval) and the cultural anxieties and prejudices relating to gender and sexuality this response consequently brings to the fore.
Stranger Than Fiction: Gothic Intertextuality in Shakespears Sister’s Music Videos
2020
The following article is going to focus on a selection of music videos by Shakespears Sister, a British indie pop band consisting of Siobhan Fahey and Marcella Detroit, which rose to prominence in the late 1980s. This article scrutinizes five of the band’s music videos: “Goodbye Cruel World” (1991), “I Don’t Care” (1992), “Stay” (1992), “All the Queen’s Horses” (2019) and “When She Finds You” (2019; the last two filmed 26 years after the duo’s turbulent split), all of them displaying a strong affinity with Gothicism. Fahey and Detroit, together with director Sophie Muller, a long-time collaborator of the band, have created a fascinating world that skillfully merges references to their tempestuous personal background, Gothic imagery, Hollywood glamour and borrowings from Grande Dame Guignol, a popular 1960s subgenre of the horror film. Grande Dame Guignol is of major importance here as a genre dissecting female rivalry and, thus, reinterpreting a binary opposition of the damsel in di...
Sound Kinks: Sadomasochistic Erotica in Audiovisual Music Performances
2016
In this dissertation I study musical, sonic and multimodal representations of sadomasochistic erotica in films, music videos, stage performances, and popular music. The study consists of an introductory chapter (1), a theoretical chapter on sadomasochism (2), three chapters discussing six case studies (3–5), as well as discussion and conclusion chapters (6 and 7). The examples investigated are the films Secretary (2003) and Duke of Burgundy (2014), Leonard Cohen’s song ‘I’m Your Man’ (1988), Elvis Costello’s song ‘When I Was Cruel No. 2’ (2002), Rihanna’s song and music video S&M (2011), and a filmed operatic production of W. A. Mozart’s Don Giovanni focusing on the character Zerlina (1787; dir. Claus Guth, 2008). In the conclusion, I briefly discuss the film Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) as an example of post-feminist, neoliberal sadomasochism occurring at the time of writing. This study introduces a new conceptual tool for interpreting music with specific regard to eroticism: kink reading, or kink listening. My research is informed by three main areas of inquiry and methodologies: cultural musicology, queer musicology, and close reading. I theorise sadomasochism in a resolutely multifaceted and critical way using theory on performative materialism, which emphasizes both the lived experience of sadomasochism and the social power structures informing practices. My findings indicate that there are certain strategies through which SM erotica has been depicted in music, which often include a mixture of humorous musical language and semiotic signifiers of the Uncanny, or the unsettling. This combination is distinctive of depictions of SM sex scenes. The music is often encoded as multisensory, and transforms perceptions of time and place. While sadomasochist representations can reflect cultural imbalances, SM can also be utilized as a queer, critical tool for empowering non-normative bodies, genders, and sexualities by making practitioners sexual agents rather than victims. SM can also broaden the concept of sex from a genital-oriented, procreation-directed activity to a state of mind combining suspended time and space and a mixture of sexual pleasure and sexualised pain.
Gendered Bodies in Electronic Dance Music Videos
Discuss ways in which a focus on the body can help in understanding the gendering of employment. Having endured as an 'absent presence' in geographical analysis for some time (Valentine, 1999), the body is now being given more emphasis as a site for the negotiation of multiple aspects of social identity, including sexuality, gender and race. Moreover, increasing attention is being paid to the ways in which the body is socially-constructed, flexible and the subject of individual responsibility for its success or failure (Orbach, 2009). This essay focuses on the bodies of actors and actresses in electronic-dance music (EDM) videos as a site for understanding the complexities involved in this branch of the service sector. It draws on Leidner's (1999) conceptualisation of service work as being performed, in that EDM videos involve a performance both literally (through actions like dancing) and figuratively (through the assumptions that such actions inspire). The essay begins with a consideration of how EDM videos and the people acting in them fit into the world of employment, and explores the importance of the body, and gendered relations within service work. It then considers three particular EDM videos found on the popular YouTube channel Spinnin Records: 'The Blues' by Niklas Iback (featuring Dan Reeder);
Heaven is a Place: The politics and poetics of LGBT location in a community dance film
Community Filmmaking: Diversity, Practices and Places, 2017
This chapter draws upon a range of scholarly disciplines (including performance studies, film studies, somatics, queer studies, urban studies and human geography) from the perspective of artist-researchers in order to reflect upon the implications and potentials of a community filmmaking practice that is simultaneously aesthetic, political, spatial and social. By focusing on a movement-based performance for and through digital video, it considers how the process-driven triangulation of thinking bodies, sexual subjectivities and emplacement within such a practice might enable us to acknowledge, consolidate and reimagine a community that had been either erased or marginalized in dominant accounts of its city. Heaven is a Place is a short dance film, made in 2014 by the authors of this chapter in collaboration with members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) community in Plymouth in South West England. Filmed in some of Plymouth’s most visually spectacular and evocative liminal waterside locations – its docksides, marinas, look-out points, cruising spots, clubs and bathing areas – it explores becoming, melancholy and the erotics of place through the human geography of an “ocean city”. In addition to choreography arising from site-responsive physical vocabularies, the film features scenarios and movement scores that reflect personal memories and queer histories of the city, developed in the first instance through a series of movement workshops that were co-organized with the LGBT advocacy organisation, Pride in Plymouth. The project integrated a cast of seven emergent professional performers, working in a range of movement-based disciplines (including dance, physical theatre and aerial performance), and sixteen members of Plymouth’s LGBT community to produce a film that was intended for moving image art and dance film audiences. Although this dynamic produced a range of challenges (not least to terminology and categorisation), which will be discussed below, we consider Heaven is a Place to be community filmmaking because it was made with and for a community of non-professional performers who participated in its creative process and established their own roles and representation therein. However, it is probably more accurately described as a hybrid form of screendance, socially-engaged practice and documentary film: that is, as a moving image work in which motion and aesthetic movement are the primary expressive elements of that particular community. The film attempts to capture the development and moment of dance performance within a filmic portrait of an actual place recorded at a particular time. Although its loose storyline can certainly be read metaphorically, the work is primarily non-representational, aligning to Stella Bruzzi’s central tenet of documentaries that they ‘are performative acts, inherently fluid and unstable […] whose truth comes into being only at the moment of filming’ (Bruzzi 2006, 1 and 10).