FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
Welcome to FORUM, a peer-reviewed journal for postgraduate students working in culture and the arts. Our objective is to create and foster a network for the exchange and circulation of ideas – we hope that you will find plenty of interest and inspiration in the articles we have published to date.
School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh
The Concept of Family Across Cultures: Examining Differences Between the UK and China Through Museum Translations
This study explores the concept of family across cultures within the context of translation studies. It focuses on how the Chinese translation of the British Museum website presents the family by using the Cultural-Conceptual translation (CCT) model and Chinese perspectives on the family. This paper finds that the English version of the British Museum website primarily promotes a nuclear family model, whereas the Chinese version emphasises a broader family structure, which highlights intergenerational bonds and a collective orientation. Comparisons with the National Museum of China reveal how family-oriented activities differ: the English website of the British Museum encourages interactive engagement among family members, while the National Museum of China focuses on educational experiences where parents are more observers than active participants. Notably, the Chinese website of the British Museum removes family activities altogether, further highlighting the educational function of museums. The study follows a top-down approach, first analysing cultural aspects before moving to translation analysis.
Copyright (c) 2025 Yayuan Liu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Lashing out Against the Backlash: Constructing a Queer-Timed Narrative in the Affective Space of the Kitchen in Kim Ji-young, Born 1982
Recognized as a key text in contemporary South Korean feminist activism, the novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 has been invoked in other feminist narratives as a means of “delivering both the revelation of collective trauma and the criteria for reinterpreting what had been experienced through new temporal alternatives to what had been the ‘official’ story’” (Lee 218). However, the novel’s potential “to magnetize a mass awakening” seems to be limited to an endemic context (Lee 218). Though stimulating debate in East Asian countries (Yang 1558), neither the novel nor the film has received enough critical attention internationally. I aim to bridge the gap in current scholarship by analyzing the feminist narrative of Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 in a broader theoretical context. Drawing upon Susan Faludi’s theory on anti-feminist backlash, I explore how the new temporal alternatives opened up by the novel further emerge through the spatial dynamics of the kitchen in the cinematic medium, thereby enabling Ji-young to lash out at the backlash against the film. I first examine, in the context of anti-feminist backlash, the mobilization of negative affect in feminist theory as a means of speaking out against patriarchal oppression. Then, engaging with queer feminist theory, I analyze how a means of openly expressing these negative affects is offered through Ji-young’s mental breakdown, which constructs a queer-timed narrative that transforms the kitchen into a space of female creativity. While exploring the liberating potential of this transformation, at the same time, I reflect upon whether the queer narrative of Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 is effective by questioning the validity of applying a Euro-centric theoretical framework to a film set in an East Asian country.
Copyright (c) 2025 Xiangshu Li https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Silenced Bodies, Profitable Flesh: A Feminist Response to Child Sexual Exploitation Through Oryx’s Reimagined Voice
This paper examines child sexual exploitation through a feminist lens, interweaving an analysis of Japan's JK (joshi kosei) business with a reimagined monologue based on Margaret Atwood's character Oryx. Through creative exposition, the author explores how family structures simultaneously perpetuate and protect against exploitation. The work identifies critical gaps in Japanese legislation that enable child exploitation despite surface-level reforms, revealing how patriarchal structures commodify bodies typically protected within family units. The author argues that pornography and prostitution function as forms of "sexual cannibalism" that dehumanize bodies into consumable parts. By examining Oryx's fictional journey alongside real-world exploitation in Japan, the article advocates for educational initiatives, strengthened family support systems, and ethical consumer choices to restore the protective function of family and combat sexual exploitation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lay Sion Ng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Trans Embodiment, Aging, and the Heterotopia of Domestic Space: Reimagining Kinship and Futurity in For Nonna Anna and Wild Side
This article engages with the domestic space in two contemporary transgender narratives, For Nonna Anna (2017) and Wild Side (2004). Building on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, it argues that these films highlight the domestic sphere as a site of both cultural tradition and queer potential. Contrasting the frequent focus in queer cinema on gay male cruising and public encounters, this essay pivots to the home environment, demonstrating how religious iconography, inherited furnishings, and daily rituals become charged with intergenerational memory and transformative possibilities. Through an analysis of mirror scenes, informed by Foucault’s claim that mirrors act as both utopias and heterotopias, this paper reveals how trans protagonists simultaneously reflect and disrupt normative temporalities. Christina’s relationship with her aging Nonna, for instance, foregrounds reciprocal vulnerability, while Stéphanie in Wild Side fuses past and present by navigating chosen kinship with her mother and lovers. Bringing the work of Sarah Ahmed, Jack Halberstam, Cynthia Port, and Alison Kafer into conversation with Foucault, this essay contends that trans bodies and elderly figures share a marginal relationship to linear futurity, suggesting alternative modes of care and intimacy. By centering aging and trans bodies, the films challenge Lee Edelman’s “no future” paradigm, proposing instead a queer futurity aligned with José Muñoz’s utopian hermeneutics. Far from being mere backdrops, homes in these films operate as heterotopic refuges that accommodate non-normative practices of embodiment, kinship, and care, reimagining the family dwelling as a horizon of queer futurity. In doing so, they offer insight into how domestic environments can reshape cinematic explorations of transness, aging, care, and kinship.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kexin Zhang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Friends on Purpose: The Queer in Friendship
Friendship, when approached as an inherently queer relational form, challenges normative assumptions that hierarchise intimacy through the naturalisation and institutionalisation of the heteronormative family. Drawing on a personal narrative of a long-standing friendship, this article examines how such bonds can question and dismantle dominant intimacy hierarchies. It contributes to ongoing critiques of family as a normative institution by positioning friendship as a chosen, intentional and radical practice of intimacy: friends on purpose. To this end, autotheory is employed in order to represent the search for an adequate language for the intimate, non-institutionalised nature of relationships as well as to highlight its modes of radical subjectivity. The analysis further engages with historical concepts of intimate closeness such as the Boston Marriage, romantic friendship, the split-attraction model, and queerplatonic relationships, alongside the works of Michel Foucault, Didier Eribon, Angela Chen, and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie. Instead of integrating friendship into the institutional logic of family, it is conceptualised as a practice that disrupts conventional notions of kinship. At the same time, it is shown that non-institutionalised forms of relationships can still remain intertwined with amatonormativity and normative life scripts. By resisting the temporalities and prescribed values of romance, marriage, and reproduction, and by questioning their naturalisation, friendship opens up a powerful mode of relating beyond institutional recognition.
Copyright (c) 2025 Madeleine Häusler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Japanese Postmodernism, Infantile Capitalism and the Family Unit in Yoshimitsu Morita’s The Family Game (1983)
Study of Yoshimitsu Morita’s 1983 film The Family Game (家族ゲーム) has long focused on the film’s criticism of the middle-class nuclear family of 1980s Japan through searing satire. Marking the end of postwar politics and new economic heights, the 1980s brought with it the need to redefine and reify central concepts such as the family, and educational excellence became one of the lines of reference. Caught up in the educational rat race, the film’s Numata family make efforts to project the illusion of family without meaningful connection to one another. Building upon previous analyses of satire and the family in the film, this article applies postmodern theorist Akira Asada’s concept of infantile capitalism to analyse the intersection of the film’s economic context with the family structures it criticises. Asada’s theory of infantile capitalism outlines the economic mode of 1980s Japan as mimicking familial social structures in its attitude towards both work and social hierarchies. Through a close reading of The Family Game, this article argues that the criticisms levied by the film at the Japanese middle class family’s obsession with education is part of a larger conversation with the postmodern paradigm and the very definition of the family. The trends criticized by the film and theorists of the 1980s did not stop with the end of the decade but instead continued, highlighting this moment in time as pivotal to understanding the continued intersection between family and education in Japan.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kyoko Hashimoto Telfer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
4-H and the Family Farm as Historical Materialist Connection Between Trans and Animal Struggles: A Response to Trans* New Materialism
Trans* new materialism (TNM) is a relatively recent trend in trans studies which attempts to conjoin analyses of transness with insights from posthumanism and animal studies. As of yet, it represents the most substantial corpus of literature engaged with fostering connections between trans people and animals. TNM has, however, come under criticism from within trans studies. Andrea Long Chu provocatively called it “the worst possible direction for trans studies to go in” and authors like Kadji Amin and Josch Hoenes warn that TNM runs the risk of decentring actual lived experiences of trans people and neglecting the specific historical situatedness of power structures. Rather than dismissing TNM’s project of fostering trans-animal connections, I am interested in addressing the concerns of TNM’s critics by linking the struggles of trans people and animals in a historical materialist way. In this paper, I create such an analysis by drawing on Gabriel Rosenberg’s work on the US agricultural youth organisation 4-H and the heteronormative family farm. Extending the purview of Rosenberg’s account to include cisnormativity, this case study reveals that: firstly, the elimination of transness from the bodies of rural youth via 4-H and the family farm was inextricably tied to the capital-intensification of agriculture in the early twentieth century, which aggravated animal domination both qualitatively and quantitatively; and, secondly, the normalisation of children’s bodies according to a eugenic ideal of healthy, white, hetero, and cis bodies was informed by the biopolitical governance of animals and vice versa. Reproduction signified a vital link between the two.
Copyright (c) 2025 Valerie Sofie Tollhopf https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Exchanging Symbolic Patriarchy for Narrative Patriarchy in The Royal Tenenbaums
This essay critiques the ideological basis of the conventional family unit by dissecting the presentation of patriarchy in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. The film’s portrayal of patriarchy is analysed through reference to deeply embedded cultural attitudes that permeate societal structures through storytelling. The prevalence of Christianity within American society is acknowledged to justify both situating Tenenbaum’s narrative within a predominantly Judeo-Christian tradition and referencing the Old Testament as a key influence upon standards of patriarchy. The research of biblical scholars is consulted to outline the various privileges afforded to Hebrew patriarchs within the thirteenth century B.C.E., revealing that the standards of patriarchy within this era informed the archetype of idealised patriarchy within the Old Testament. The attitudes of Royal Tenenbaum are recognised as acquiescent with the expectations of the idealised biblical patriarch, close analysis of the film revealing the ways in which he exhibits such entitlement. Analysis reveals that whilst the removal of Royal’s conventional privileges occurs within the film, this reduction and realtering of his position as a father-figure allows for a subliminal patriarchal privilege to emerge. The film exposes the narrative privilege allocated to the patriarch in conventional storytelling, such that the portrayal of growth and redemption within the father-figure is heightened and glorified, and the patriarch is privileged as the focal point to the viewer’s narrative catharsis. The film exposes the functioning of this process on an ideological level.
Copyright (c) 2025 Aaron Bowler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Prospero’s Tri-Filial Family Unit: Queer Childhood as a Tool and Threat to Heteropatriarchal Maintenance and Restoration in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest
This paper explores the quasi-familial dynamic in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, proposing that Prospero’s efforts to restore and secure patriarchal authority in Italy and on the island are contingent upon his abusive paternal control over three queer child figures: Ariel, Caliban, and Miranda. Drawing on early modern childhood studies and queer theory, this paper reads these figures as queer children: mutable, gender-unstable, arrested in development, and marked by naïveté. It is among the first studies to conceptualise these characters as a tri-filial unit whose queer identities are instrumentalised to construct a vision of heteropatriarchal stability. Prospero fosters his children’s queerness by maintaining them in queer states, manipulating these conditions to advance his heteropatriarchal agenda of securing his biological daughter’s marriage to the prince of Naples. However, as the play progresses, each child figure begins to resist or outgrow Prospero’s control, ultimately revealing the fragility and artificiality of the hetero-patriarchal structures he seeks to uphold. This paper argues that The Tempest exposes the inherent instability of patriarchal power, showing that the very queer identities Prospero manipulates become the agents of its potential undoing.
Copyright (c) 2025 Vanessa Romero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Carl Alexandersson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Eye-Level With the Child: Family, Power, Performance
Copyright (c) 2025 Siân Mitchell MacGregor https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Family: Binds, Thresholds, Articulations
Copyright (c) 2025 Alisha Palmer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Be Weary: Resistance and Refusal in Black American Music
Weary bodies are frequently seen as hopeless, withdrawn, or useless. The common understanding is that weariness is uncritical, limited by fatigue, and always politically inactive. In the realm of Black expression, however, the recurring affect of weariness (and its recognition) is one that elucidates an impasse of endurance and resistance. The seemingly diametric theses of Max Roach’s ‘Members Don’t Git Weary’ and Solange Knowles’ ‘Weary’ evoke this paradox of survival, bringing necessary complexity to discussions of subjugation, agency, and refusal in the Black American context.
Copyright (c) 2024 Danielle Stephenson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“Couldst thou not watch with me?”: Queer Orientation and Unresponse in Swinburne’s ‘A Wasted Vigil’
In his 1866 review of A.C. Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, John Morley expresses anxieties regarding the poet’s capacity for queer reorientation – his ability to bring transgressive erotic desires within his reader’s field of vision. The following year Swinburne published ‘A Wasted Vigil’, a lyric address to a beloved incapable of “watching with” the poem’s speaker. How does Swinburne address queer reorientation and the affective community between himself and his reader in his poetry? Using a phenomenological approach, this essay brings Swinburne into dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s work on affect studies and queer theory in order to examine the way in which ‘A Wasted Vigil’ articulates compulsory heterosexuality and queer possibility.
Copyright (c) 2024 VJ René https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Through Ecocriticism and Affect Theory, Exploring Climate Change Artistry: The Ice Receding/Books Reseeding Project
This article delves into the Ice Receding/Books Reseeding project of multidisciplinary artist Basia Irland through the lenses of ecocriticism and affect theory, uncovering its profound significance as a climate change artwork. An example of participatory artwork utilizing transmedia storytelling, this project provides a transformative platform that immerses audiences in the realities of non-human climate change impacts. Through an ecocritical examination, the article explores the intricate dynamics of human-non-human relationships depicted in the project, while affect theory sheds light on the emotional responses it evokes. Ultimately, I argue that participatory art is a crucial tool for climate change communication and activism, advocating for its broader adoption in addressing environmental challenges and fostering sustainability through the direct involvement of participants. Analyzing Irland’s Ice Receding/Books Reseeding project, the article underscores the potential of climate change art as a powerful medium for effective environmental communication and offers practical guidance for communicators aiming to optimize its impact.
Copyright (c) 2024 Giada Ferrucci https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“Our American Optimism”: Race, Recognition, and Belonging in Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
This paper explores Claudia Rankine’s representation of the feelings of racialisation in her 2004 poetry collection Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Contextualising this work within wider debates in Afropessimist philosophy, it considers how the poet’s portrayal of emotional pain, depression, and numbness exemplify a form of ‘social death’ instigated by the ubiquitous violence of antiblackness. Through close readings of select sequences, it argues that Rankine frames death as an ongoing structure of African American experience, rather than a singular event. In turn, this paper also considers how her innovative and hybrid “American Lyric” form functions to create a new grammar for Black self-expression in an ostensibly ‘post-race’ culture that obfuscates contemporary systems of racial inequality. It argues that Rankine’s collection cultivates an ethics of attention to the experiences and pain of others, offering poetry as a form of “exhausted hope” to challenge the dehumanising force of White supremacy.
Copyright (c) 2024 Molly McCracken https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“She Feels not Half What We Feel”: Oriental Affect Aliens and the Unhappy Queers in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse
In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s portrayal of Lily Briscoe’s and Elizabeth Dalloway’s “Chinese eyes” has drawn critical attention, but the lack of affective expressiveness in these characters needs further examination. Borrowing Xine Yao’s term “unfeeling,” this essay explores the relationship between Woolf’s use of Oriental imagery and disaffection. It argues that Woolf’s depiction of Oriental unaffectedness critiques Victorian patriarchal conventions and their constructed notions of happiness. However, in doing so, Woolf simultaneously perpetuates the stereotype of Oriental inscrutability. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s critique of happiness and her concept of the “unhappy queer,” this essay first examines Elizabeth’s restrained affective expressiveness, suggesting that Woolf’s characterization challenges the white sentimentality linked to the heterosexual definition of happiness in the late Victorian era. Yet, through the lens of Yao’s analysis of Oriental alienness, the essay contends that Woolf’s narrative still subscribes to Orientalism. Likewise, Lily Briscoe’s negotiation of her capacity for sympathy—especially in contrast to Mrs. Ramsay—highlights Woolf’s critique of patriarchal norms. However, Lily’s artistic vision is ultimately realised through her alignment with the Western affective economy, suggesting the author’s acknowledgement of sympathy and affectability as universal concepts—yet ones that are underpinned by a racial hierarchy.
Copyright (c) 2024 Qiujie Cheng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cosmopolitanism and Affect in Henry James’ The Ambassadors
This essay explores the interplay between cosmopolitanism and affect in Henry James’ The Ambassadors. It reads the novel’s protagonist, Strether, as an embodiment of the cosmopolitan flâneur and examines how he complicates and challenges this identity as conceptualised by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Due to his evasive cosmopolitan identity, Strether fails to maintain affective bonds with other characters. As such, The Ambassadors challenges James’ own sense of cosmopolitanism by staging various iterations of affect, most notably grief, guilt and loss, as undermining the cosmopolitanism the novel at first seems to promote. I conclude that Strether’s acute emotional responses can be read as a critique of the cosmopolitan flâneur who possesses a level of detachment that is not desirable. The novel levels a critique against cosmopolitanism’s seeming universalism. This tends to promote an abstract ideal that disregards the cosmopolite’s individual emotions and sensations – in The Ambassadors, cosmopolitanism is a fundamentally unethical way of living.
Copyright (c) 2024 Fabia Buescher https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From Fear and Anxiety to Vulnerable Collective Action: Lucy Kirkwood's The Children
In a seemingly tranquil cottage along the coast, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (2016) delves into the profound anxieties and vulnerabilities arising from an ecological crisis. Set in a post-nuclear disaster Britain, the play follows three retired nuclear scientists grappling with the consequences of their past decisions. Amidst a world in chaos, Kirkwood portrays the fragile relationships and emotional struggles of her characters, reflecting the anxieties prevalent in our own reality. Drawing on affect studies theories—such as Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” and “inconvenience,” Sianne Ngai’s “ugly feelings” and Clare Hemmings’ “affective dissonance”—this analysis explores how these concepts shed light on the characters’ experiences. Berlant’s ideas help us understand the characters’ necessity to adhere to routine as a means to avoid confronting larger, more pressing issues. Ngai’s “ugly feelings” expose the anxiety and discomfort that pervade their lives, while Hemmings’ “affective dissonance” highlights the internal conflicts and moral dilemmas they face. By emphasising these struggles, the play invites audiences to reflect on their own vulnerabilities and consider the need for collective action in the face of adversity. Deliberately refusing catharsis, the play underscores the persistence of unresolved crises, prompting viewers to engage with the issues presented on stage and consider their implications beyond the theatre.
Copyright (c) 2024 Claudia Maya https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Contesting the Prescriptibility of Emotion through Affective Encounters in Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012)
This paper explores how Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012) dramatises the subversive potentialities of affective encounters as an antidote to the isolating, profit-minded forms of posthumanisation prescribed by modern psychiatry. It argues that the play poignantly unveils how the convergence of the psychopharmaceutical industry with advanced capitalism and neoliberal ideology shape popular discourse around mental illnesses and the necessity of medically induced (self-)regulation of emotion. It also investigates how Prebble mingles crisis with hope in the piece by portraying the autonomy and unpredictability of affective bodily responses, which evade being translated into bio-data and destabilise biopsychiatry’s totalizing view of emotions as utterly controllable through the brain. My analysis utilises Rosi Braidotti’s theorisation of the posthuman subject as both susceptible to exploitation and control and as the site of resistance and ongoing transformation, as presented in her work The Posthuman (2013). It also employs Stefan Herbechter’s theories, as expressed in his book Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (2013), on how biotechnological developments, advanced capitalism and ideology converge, facilitating new forms of self-governmentality. Finally, it refers to Brian Massumi’s conceptualisation of affect, prevalent in his work “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995) as an intense autonomic bodily response which resists processes of control and manipulation. Ultimately, I argue that The Effect highlights the transformative potential of affective encounters and interconnectedness, functioning as resistance to modern psychiatry’s isolating prescription of emotional self-governance through self-medication.
Copyright (c) 2024 Magda Barouta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Remixing Britishness: Affect and National Pride in the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony
During the London 2012 Opening Olympic Ceremony, emotional moments such as the torch relay and the celebration of the National Health Service affected many viewers. Such a spectacle of national history and culture was wide-sweeping and is still remembered today as a moment of triumph for the country. With the Paris 2024 Olympics only months away, it becomes timely to observe how the sensorial spectacle of the Olympics works to create a certain emotional effect in its viewers, and how they leave with a specific understanding of what the nation stands for. Crucially, it is imperative to survey the ways in which national histories and cultures have been edited for an "Olympic affect" during the Opening Ceremony and comprehend why they play such a crucial role in contemporary political discourse. The London 2012 Opening Olympic Ceremony revealed a particular perspective on British history, used emotion and spectacle to recount a specific version of events, and attempted to garner a certain sense of national pride during a time of national crisis. In examining specific visual and auditory cues of this Opening Olympic Ceremony, this study will define the "Olympic affect" and examine the idealised Britishness that is performed, so that we may understand what kind of affectual and political power the Olympics hold.
Copyright (c) 2024 Claire Gray https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
What Moves Us? Emotion as Connection & Movement
Copyright (c) 2024 Isabel Schueler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reflection: Affect and Interdisciplinarity – Got Rhythm?
Copyright (c) 2024 Fraser Riddell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“Passion, Salomé”: Decadent Transformations and Transgressions of Feminine Sensuality in Huysmans, Wilde, and Strauss
Representations of Salomé have been hued in the paradoxical characterisations of the beautifully seductive and evil femme fatale. While some artists closely aligned their depictions to this Pandorian stereotype in collusion with narrative traditions of the oppressive male gaze, others challenged it through inventive reimaginations of Salomé, unveiling glimpses of the character’s complex emotive, psychological, and sensual universe that still manages to leave spectators ambivalent and discombobulated today. This article explores the transformations of Salomé in artistic representations of the Decadence across a range of media through a comparative reading of Huysmans’ novel À Rebours (1884), Wilde’s play Salomé (1891) and Strauss’ opera Salomé (1905). The interpretive changes in her characterisations – the femme fatale par excellence, the tragically fated heroine, the transgressive Decadent artist, the self-fulfilled hedonist – uncover a weaponisation of Salomé, transforming her oppressive patriarchal environmental conditions and the sexually objectifying male gaze that have often confined her, to reveal an empowered aesthetic of Decadent transgression that questions and subverts traditional gender and power dynamics, gender identities, and sensual feminine subjectivities.
Dirty Waters: Urine, Waste, and the Shimmering Trans Body in Nånting måste gå sönder or Something Must Break (2014)
This article examines genderqueer writer/director Ester Martin Bergsmark’s film Something Must Break (2014) and the trans gaze created through the film’s disjunctive imagery. I argue the film’s aestheticization of polluted environments and trans bodies posits a queer alliance between transness and trash. Similarly, Something Must Break’s repeated imagery of urination and body fluids representationally relates transness, waste, and transgressive sexuality to a politics of marginality, which Bergsmark employs in Something Must Break to express these relationalities as sites for creative difference and possibilities of being that exist outside of heterosexual norms. I use post-structuralist and queer interpretations of perversion to reimagine the film’s polluted environments and abject fluids as sites/sights of creation and liveability for trans bodies. I find in the refractions of polluted waters, blood, saliva, and urine in Something Must Break the same cinematic fissures that Eliza Steinbock argues allows for a uniquely trans gaze in their theory of shimmering. In considering a cinematic transgender gaze, Steinbock describes a cinema that eschews the visual reveal and instead portrays a lived trans experience not defined by dualities, but by disjunctions; thus, the unsettled, the (un)becoming, the “shimmering” aesthetics of trans embodiment. I argue Bergsmark achieves a cinematic trans gaze in their imagining of a queer space where pollution, trash, urine, and blood are not symbols of abjection and shame, but embody an opening-up, a vulnerability: a becoming that molds new forms of relationships, new forms of love, and new forms of creation.
Queering Sight: Visualising the Transversal Other in Josh Malerman’s Bird Box
The gaze has hitherto occupied a contentious position within theoretical discourse. While feminist and postcolonial approaches have succeeded in productively interrogating the unequal power dynamics produced by the gaze, purely naming and uncovering how these visual oppressions function do little to conceptualise possibilities of moving beyond sight’s vilification in identity formations. Unlike other physical senses such as touch and smell that have already been theorised as bases of ethical intersubjective relationality, sight has yet to be reclaimed as part of an affirmative politics to disrupt the exclusionary processes that undergird identity politics. This article is, therefore, concerned with queer interventions to rethink sight as a possible mode of transgression from restrictive binarisms within identity formation. It argues that sight instead possesses the potential to liberate bodies and constrained subjectivities from the coercive frameworks of visual objectification. By queering sight, the article positions itself as a rejection of dualistic paradigms by subversively envisioning identities as transversal processes of liberation and becoming. To this end, I will engage with Josh Malerman’s Bird Box (2014) where mediated acts of looking represent queer(ed) sources of danger and liberation. In its peculiar and particular denial of direct visual access, the novel’s aesthetics allow for productive possibilities of visualising the transversal Other.
Translating Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse into Surrealist Art
Virginia Woolf often crosses the boundaries between literature and painting in her writing, masterfully combining these two realms. However, her novels are only ever read within a post-Impressionist framework. In this essay, I aim to challenge this well-established notion by translating To the Lighthouse into the terms of surrealist art. Firstly, I compare automatic writing used by surrealists and Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique and free indirect discourse, also reflecting on their significance in Lily Briscoe’s painting. Then, I explore the concept of the surreal house and space in both surrealism and To the Lighthouse. Lastly, I develop the notion of Mrs Ramsay as a ghost and her influence on Lily’s final piece of art. To justify my translation, I return to Freudian psychoanalysis, which was fundamental for surrealists and equally significant for Woolf, although in a less immediate way. It is essential to note that existing scholarship does not associate Woolf with surrealism at all, and, accordingly, I am not going to argue that Woolf considered herself a surrealist, nor that To the Lighthouse is representative of the movement. Instead, I plan to challenge the form of Woolf’s novel, redirecting our transfixed gaze towards new possible dimensions of this well-known, extensively interpreted text, and assist in merging the realms of literature and painting.
Copyright (c) 2023 Hanna Agnieszka Liskowska
NOTES ON RITUAL AS HAUNTING // RITUAL AS HEALING
Ageing and Death: A Focus on How to Transcend Diseases for Transhumanist Movements
The concept of transhumanism is based on a specific understanding of human limitations that should or could be transcended. Among them, the question of overcoming our own corporeality through the delaying of ageing or death is of major importance for a new understanding of human plasticity and fluidity when shaping ourselves and our environment. As transhumanism advocates for human enhancement through technological means, it considers ageing and death as diseases and criticizes their necessity in the human evolutionary process. In light of this transhumanist question, this article discusses ageing and death as diseases for which there must be technological solutions. It underlines that a philosophical approach is necessary to highlight how correlated and interrelated those subjects are and tries to go beyond humanist dichotomies to make clearer how major notions (health, enhancement, etc.) are intertwined with each other and consequently shape our socio-political subjectivities. Given this context, this article discusses the fact that medicine is traditionally structured on a limit that seems to be more and more plastic to pave the way for new debates, such as human enhancement, morphological freedom, and biocultural capital. It then discusses how transhumanism tries to transcend what is considered human structures by examining death as a fatal degeneration that could be overcome through biological amortality and informational immortality.
Alberto Breccia’s Parody of Futurist Paintings in Modern Bande Dessinée: Resisting Transatlantic Fascism
During wars, art and culture often develop a “culture of camouflage” (Ojeda 68) to invite the reader to decipher hidden meanings as a form of political subversion. In Argentina, the ‘Golden Age’ of comics emerged in the 1940s in response to the rise of Fascist sentiments originating from the Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s transatlantic propaganda and flourished in the following decades. During and following the ‘Process of National Reorganisation’ from 1976 onwards, illustrator Alberto Breccia used graphic narratives as a form of counter-censorship as he appropriated Futurist aesthetics and the conventions of the modern bande dessinée. He considered this method as being able to allow “artistry and imagination [take] over from logical progressions” (Grove 25). Using this form, he encouraged the public to reflect on Argentina’s changing transatlantic landscape. This paper examines to what extent Breccia’s Le Coeur Révélateur: Et Autres Histoires Extraodinaires d’ Edgar Poe (1995) borrows Futurist visuality and makes use of the flexibility of the settings in Poe’s stories. This is done to recreate the haunting figures of history as they “turn away from the original work” to “conceive new forms of storytelling that explore the medium-specific properties of the host medium” (Baetens 7). This paper employs an interdisciplinary approach as, in addition to reading Poe’s original texts, this article also discusses Breccia’s appropriation of Futurist techniques, including “Divisionism, the use of threadlike brush strokes,” uniform application of colours according to their “precise tone and luminosity” (Rainey 9), and the dynamic sensation (Boccioni 46).