Transcoding Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The enterprise of this paper is to understand how paracinema’s representation of femme fatale contests the power/pleasure schema. Divided into three ‘talks,’ the paper draws chiefly from Gender Studies, Psychoanalysis, Semiotics, and Cultural Studies. The first talk, entitled “Gun, or dynamite?: the poetics of power/pleasure,” inquires the pleasures offered by B-films dealing with violence to and enacted by women. In order to conceptualize how the pleasure of gendering spectacle and gendered spectating becomes a means of renegotiation with power, the phrase ‘power/pleasure’ is coined. Quipping at Foucault’s power/knowledge, the phrase connotes that power and pleasure are imbricated in visual discourse: pleasure is a form of power/discourse that in turn renders the production and consumption of pleasure gendered cultural capital, further privileging the male and marginalizing the female. The second talk, “Spitting on their graves: the femme fatale in B-films,” offers discourse and content analyses of select B-films, e.g. _Baise-Moi_, _The Great Texas Dynamite Chase_, and _I Spit on Your Grave_ that feature ‘violent’ women as protagonists. The third talk, “‘Girls just want to end oppression’: contesting the power/pleasure schema,” explores how these B-films have advanced emancipatory, sometimes revolutionary, representation of women, sexuality, and violence. Acknowledging and critiquing the ‘violent women’ stereotypes (from Damsel in Distress graphically assaulted to Avenging Angels mercilessly butchering), the paper contends that these B-films exemplify four strategies – de-sexing, de-eroticizng, de-sympathizing, and de-gendering violence – to question, destabilize, and reverse gendered visual pleasure/discourse. Appropriating the title of _Baise-Moi_ (and alluding to the Oscar-winning _Monster_), the title of this paper, "Baise-toi, monstre: Violent Women in B-films and the Politics of Power/Pleasure" attends to the dialogic relation between violence and gender, projecting an aggressive response to heteropatriarchal pleasure and envisioning a more inclusive humane world.