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Remote Andros: Masculinity and the Cinematic Male Body as Liminal Space
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2015-06-06
Author(s)
Abstract (De)
Cinematic representations of thresholds, screens and bodily surfaces often act as tropes that signal transition and ambiguity. They “try to conceptualize a liminal situation, a not quite here but also not quite there configuration, an in-betweenness of sorts in which film functions as a threshold and space of passage… as a ‘liminal space’” (Elsaesser and Hagener 38). At the close of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), for example, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) stands in an open doorway at the threshold between domestic civility and the wild frontier landscape. The door in this scene acts as a motif for movement from one diegetic space (home and familiarity) to another (adventure and uncertainty), while also marking a space of cultural perception on gendered identity. Thus while the liminal can become a functional ideational trope through visual metaphors at the diegetic level, it is also working on an extra-diegetic level where cinema acts as a space for projecting and negotiating uncertainty or transition in the cultural imaginary. This is doubly true for representations of the posthuman. The posthuman and posthumanism are fundamentally liminal figurations: they mark an ambiguous space of transition and facilitate thought beyond conventions of embodied identity, subjectivity and anthropocentric technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988). Against a conceptual background of cinematic and posthumanist liminality, and taking into account ways in which gender discourses have been central to both – from the hero myth as a characteristically male cinematic archetype and Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze (1973/1975) in film theory to Haraway’s seminal Cyborg feminism (1883, 1985, 1991) – my talk will show how masculinity is mediated as and through liminal spaces of cinematic posthumanism in key scenes from three contemporary films: Katherine Bigalow’s The Hurt Locker (2008), James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and Spike Jonze’s Her (2013).
Language
English
Event Title
Approaching Posthumanism and the Posthuman Conference
Event Location
University of Geneva, Switzerland
Event Date
04.-06.06.2015
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
248207