Visualizing Difference: Performative Audiencing in the Intersectional Classroom 9781315559919

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 8
Copyright......Page 9
Dedication......Page 10
Contents......Page 12
List of Figures......Page 13
Acknowledgments......Page 15
Introduction......Page 18
PART I Untangling Perplexities......Page 36
1 Ethnography, Pedagogy, and Performative Audiencing......Page 38
2 Writing and Audiencing......Page 57
PART II Playful Transformations......Page 64
3 Filming Difference......Page 66
4 Personalizing Narrativity......Page 122
Afterword......Page 151
Index......Page 154

Citation preview

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Through the performance of narration, this remarkable book demonstrates how subjectivity can be grasped as lived experience shaped by—and shaping—its physical, political, and socio-cultural contexts. In so doing, Elżbieta Oleksy deploys mature scholarship framed within a breathtakingly imaginative combination of intersectionality, critical pedagogy, and narrative praxis. It is essential reading for anyone interested in genuinely breaking the bounds of methodology, teaching practice, and narration within the social sciences and the humanities. Keith Pringe, Emeritus Professor in Sociology with a specialism in social work at Uppsala University; Professor Emeritus at London Metropolitan University; Honorary Professor at Warwick University; Affiliated Professor at Mälardalen University

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Visualizing Difference

In the wealth of literature on intersectionality as a concept, theory, political option, and methodology, little has been written on how it might be taught. Proceeding from theory to practice, Visualizing Difference fills in this lacuna and offers an original approach to a visual pedagogy that recognizes the necessity of integrating difference, while also inspiring the reader to convey meanings from visuals that directly bear influence upon their lives. This innovative volume proposes a novel approach to empirical investigation of the visual. So far, it has not been demonstrated how interconnections between various social differentials, such as gender, disability, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality intersect in a particular lived experience and shape the reception of visual texts. Oleksy thus focuses on documenting how critical analysis of films empowers students and gives them incentive to oppose normalizing power effects. Through students’ personal narratives, the reader will witness how subjectivity is indicative of the retrospective look at their own lives, which classroom experiences of watching and discussing the films have stimulated. This intriguing book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in Film Audience, Intersectionality, Sociology, Pedagogy, and Gender Studies. Elżbieta H. Oleksy is a Professor and Founding Director of Women’s Studies Centre, University of Łódź, Poland.

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Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality Core editorial group: Dr. Kathy Davis (Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht, The Netherlands) Professor Jeff Hearn (managing editor; Örebro University, Sweden; Hanken School of Economics, Finland; University of Huddersfield, UK) Professor Anna G. Jónasdóttir (Örebro University, Sweden) Professor Nina Lykke (managing editor; Linköping University, Sweden) Professor Elżbieta H. Oleksy (University of Łódź, Poland) Dr. Andrea Petö (Central European University, Hungary) Professor Ann Phoenix (Institute of Education, University of London, UK) Professor Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Syracuse University, USA)

Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality is committed to the development of new feminist and profeminist perspectives on changing gender relations, with special attention to: • • • • •

• •

Intersections between gender and power differentials based on age, class, dis/abilities, ethnicity, nationality, racialization, sexuality, violence, and other social divisions. Intersections of societal dimensions and processes of continuity and change: culture, economy, generativity, polity, sexuality, science, and technology. Embodiment: Intersections of discourse and materiality, and of sex and gender. Transdisciplinarity: intersections of humanities, social sciences, medical, technical, and natural sciences. Intersections of different branches of feminist theorizing, including: historical materialist feminisms, postcolonial and anti-­racist feminisms, radical feminisms, sexual difference feminisms, queerfeminisms, cyberfeminisms, posthuman feminisms, and critical studies on men and masculinities. A critical analysis of the traveling of ideas, theories, and concepts. A politics of location, reflexivity and transnational contextualizing that reflects the basis of the Series framed within European diversity and transnational power relations.

  6 Making Gender, Making War Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices Edited by Annica Kronsell and Erika Svedberg

  8 Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures Passionate Play Jenny Sundén and Malin Sveningsson

  7 Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies Edited by Mona Livholts

  9 Heterosexuality in Theory and Practice Chris Beasley, Heather Brook and Mary Holmes

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10 Tourism and the Globalization of Emotions The Intimate Economy of Tango Maria Törnqvist 11 Imagining Masculinities Spatial and Temporal Representation and Visual Culture Katarzyna Kosmala 12 Rethinking Transnational Men Beyond, Between and Within Nations Edited by Jeff Hearn, Marina Blagojević and Katherine Harrison 13 Being a Man in a Transnational World The Masculinity and Sexuality of Migration Ernesto Vasquez del Aguila 14 Love A Question for Feminism in the Twenty-­First Century Edited by Anna G. Jónasdóttir and Ann Ferguson 15 The Politics of Recognition and Social Justice Transforming Subjectivities and New Forms of Resistance Edited by Maria Pallotta-­Chiarolli and Bob Pease

16 Writing Academic Texts Differently Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing Edited by Nina Lykke 17 Gender, Globalization, and Violence Postcolonial Conflict Zones Edited by Sandra Ponzanesi 18 Gendered Tropes in War Photography Mothers, Mourners, Soldiers Marta Zarzycka 19 Assisted Reproduction Across Borders Feminist Perspectives on Normalizations, Disruptions and Transmissions Edited by Merete Lie and Nina Lykke 20 Rethinking Ethnic Masculinities Intersections and New Directions Edited by Josep M. Armengol, Marta Bosch-­Vilarrubias, Àngels Carabí and Teresa Requena Pelegrí. 21 Visualizing Difference Performative Audiencing in the Intersectional Classroom Elżbieta H. Oleksy

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Visualizing Difference

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Performative Audiencing in the Intersectional Classroom

Elżbieta H. Oleksy

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Elżbieta H. Oleksy The right of Elżbieta H. Oleksy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing i­n Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-67671-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-55991-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

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To all the students who participated in my course “Intersectionality and Audience Analysis” and shared with me enthusiasm for intersectional audiencing

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Contents



List of Figures Acknowledgments



Introduction

Part I

xii xiv 1

Untangling Perplexities

19

1 Ethnography, Pedagogy, and Performative Audiencing

21

2 Writing and Audiencing

40

Part II

Playful Transformations

47

3 Filming Difference

49

4 Personalizing Narrativity

105



Afterword

134



Index

137

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Figures

I.1 I.2 I.3 1.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14

Peeping Tom in Uśmiech zębniczy [Toothy Smile] (Roman Polański, 1957) Undressed Woman in Uśmiech zębniczy [Toothy Smile] (Roman Polański, 1957) Intersectionality Circle (Own Elaboration) Mural of a Girl in a Wheelchair. Artist Unknown Photo Courtesy of Elżbieta Oleksy Chantelle and May-­Alice (Passion Fish, John Sayles, 1992)  Chantelle Sits in May-­Alice’s Wheelchair (Passion Fish, John Sayles, 1992)  May-­Alice, Chantelle, and Rennie in a Boat (Passion Fish, John Sayles, 1992) Nichole and Her Father in the Barn (The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan, 1997)  Nichole Gives Her Deposition (The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan, 1997)  Thérèse, a Child Prodigy. “Who Taught You?” “—. . . Crooked Finger Helped a Bit.” (Antonia’s Line, Marleen Gorris, 1995)  Nichole Performing on Stage (The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan, 1997)  George Finds Out about His Partner’s Death (A Single Man, Tom Ford, 2009)  George’s Reaction to the News (A Single Man, Tom Ford, 2009)  George Lectures on Minorities (A Single Man, Tom Ford, 2009)  George Has a Heart Attack (A Single Man, Tom Ford, 2009) George Dies (A Single Man, Tom Ford, 2009)  Fariba on a Plane to Germany (Fremde Haut [Unveiled], Angelina Maccarone, 2005)  Fariba Changes Her Appearance in the Plane’s Lavatory (Fremde Haut [Unveiled], Angelina Maccarone, 2005)

1 2 7 27 110 111 111 112 112 114 117 118 119 120 122 122 125 126

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Figures   xiii 4.15 Mothers and Daughters. June Stands Alone After Her Mother’s Death (The Joy Luck Club, Wayne Wang, 1993)  4.16 A Short Recess Before the Return to the Village (La Source des Femmes, Radu Mihăileanu, 2011)  4.17 A Woman of the Village Carrying Water (La Source des Femmes, Radu Mihăileanu, 2011)  4.18 Women Hang a Cloth With This Inscription: “Your Hearts Are as Dry and Thorny as This Well.” (La Source des Femmes, Radu Mihăileanu, 2011)  4.19 Men Destroy the Cloth (La Source des Femmes, Radu Mihăileanu, 2011) 

127 129 130 131 132

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Acknowledgments

This book has been in the making for nearly four years and much of it was born of discussions with my students who over the years participated in my seminar “Intersectionality and Audience Analysis.” Class discussions, journals, and students’ written personal narratives have been the main source of inspiration and food for thought for me. Only a small part of students’ contributions, whether in the form of written assignments or in-­class discussions found their way to this book, but I owe a debt of gratitude to all my students in this seminar at the University of Łódź, including the GEMMA (Erasmus Mundus Master Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies) students from Europe, Africa, North and South America, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and also Erasmus students from a number of European countries who came to study in Łódź for a semester or two, students at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Granada University, where I had an opportunity to give seminars twice to GEMMA students and faculty members. To them all I say: “Thank you so much for your generosity and patience with my queries and above all for your sincerity and openness in sharing with me your very personal experiences.” My appreciation also goes to Professor Joanna Regulska and Professor Abena Busia, Chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. They both extended invitations to me to do research at their university on two separate occasions. I must also acknowledge help from the University of Pittsburgh, where I searched databases and library resources. As I have already mentioned above, this project was born out of my teaching at the University of Łódź and during my research fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, where I spent three months on a research grant graciously provided by the Kosciuszko Foundation based in New York City. My stay at Berkeley would not have been so fruitful and pleasant without the help and friendship I received from Professor Paula Fass and Professor Miryam Sas who made arrangements for me to give a presentation on my project and helped with the recruitment of students. The classes were conducted both on university premises in face-­to-face interactions with students and via Skype, with volunteers from film studies, gender studies, and psychology as participants. The reactions I

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Acknowledgments   xv received from the students surpassed my expectations. All were enthusiastic, hardworking, and clearly perceived the novelty and significance of the exercise. Paula and Miryam, without your help it wouldn’t have been possible for me to work with a group of students who, during their summer holidays, devoted their time to watching the films, engaging in vivid discussions on Skype and writing personal narratives. To you both I say “thank you so much.” I also thank my friends and colleagues for great discussions and encouragement, particularly to my longtime friend Helena Goscilo and again to Miryam Sas for their insightful comments on some chapters. It goes without saying that they bear no responsibility for anything that may be erroneous in this book. I thank Elka Kazmierczak for providing me with books and articles unavailable in Poland. I am indebted to Elena Chiu, Hannah Riley, and Jennifer Hinchliffe, whose professionalism and patience in assisting me at every stage of editing and proofreading of the manuscript proved invaluable. The flaws that remain are solely my own. Last but not least, I owe words of thanks to my alma mater for granting me leaves of absence during my research visits outside of Poland. Heartfelt thanks to you all!

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Introduction

Afterwardsness When I was a child and, later, an adolescent, I lived in an old apartment house in Łódź, Poland, where for a period of time filmmaker Roman Polański and his first wife, actress Barbara Kwiatkowska, rented an apartment, just above mine. Every morning children lined up in front of the house to see the couple leave in a taxi or a big, white limousine. At that time, Barbara Kwiatkowska was already a star in Poland, and her reputation put Polański’s in the shade. Decades later I was invited to the famous Łódź Film School to the screening of études directed by several Polish filmmakers, Polański included, who were all students of film directing at the school. In his piece (Uśmiech zębniczy [Toothy

Figure I.1 Peeping Tom in Uśmiech zębniczy [Toothy Smile] (Roman Polański, 1957).

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2   Introduction

Figure I.2 Undressed Woman in Uśmiech zębniczy [Toothy Smile] (Roman Polański, 1957).

Smile], 1957), the stairway of an apartment building was the only setting. There was hardly any action: a man was standing in the stairway peeping through a small window at a woman as she was undressing in her bathroom. This scene haunted me for a couple of days, and I wondered why. Something looked familiar to me. And then I remembered: the stairway where the étude was filmed was our stairway in the house where I had lived! With this realization, I recollected the whole context: the stairway, the bathroom with a small window overlooking the stairway, and a stranger who was caught peeping through one of the bathroom windows, the same on each floor, until it was discovered that the stranger was a Peeping Tom who was gazing through the bathroom window and spying on girls. News spread quickly and I and all the girls who were my neighbors realized that we might have been the objects of the stranger’s gaze and we shared the same trauma. Finally, we talked to our parents, and they complained to the janitor, who ordered keys to the entrance door for each family. Thereafter, the building was permanently locked to strangers. Parenthetically, it can be observed that Polański might have been inspired by that event to shoot his étude, or alternatively, the whole event was staged by him and the Peeping Tom was an actor. Only Polański knows the truth. If Polański had not “documented” the action, which had probably been hearsay among the tenants, and if I had not seen his étude, the incidents I relayed above

Introduction   3

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would have been buried in my subconscious forever. The psychological process that I experienced harks back to the sequence of action and deferred action, initially depicted by Sigmund Freud as Nachträglichkeit and further developed by Jean Laplanche as afterwardsness, which is an exact translation of the original Freudian term. In his Notes on Afterwardsness (1992), Laplanche elucidates: Freud’s concept of afterwardsness contains both great richness and great ambiguity between retrogressive and progressive directions. I want to account for this problem of the directional to and fro by arguing that, right at the start, there is something that goes in the direction from the past to the future, and in the direction from the adult to the baby, which I call the implantation of the enigmatic message. This message is then retranslated following a temporal direction which is sometimes progressive and sometimes retrogressive (according to my general model of translation). (1992, 222) Drawing on Freud and Laplanche, Paul Sutton suggests that in the process of audiencing, spectators incorporate, “remake,” and “carry” a remembered film with them. Enigmatic (and often traumatic) messages thus developed trigger a wish for re-­translation of the cinematic experience. Says Sutton, These enigmatic messages, structured by the temporality of afterwardsness, provoke the spectator into a process of reconstruction, re-­translation. At the same time the visual and aural stimuli of the cinematic experience may also have an immediate effect on conscious perception or trigger the traumatic recollection of a previously unconscious trauma. Subjectivity in this context would thus be . . . a process of “auto-­translation,” provoked by the message of the other . . . and this means that subjectivity alters in the process of auto-­ translation. (2004, 385) Now, I would like to explore the agential possibilities of the concept of afterwardsness, since I believe that this kind of audience-­oriented criticism provides not only a fruitful ground for the reconfiguration of subjectivity as the constant process of performative de- and re-­translation, but, when driven by cinematic experience or any other contemporary media, also creates new forms of political agency. Thus, I am putting Paul Sutton’s text into dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s (2005) view of the emergence of “optical unconscious” as a traumatic experience of modernity because I agree with Benjamin’s (2008) thesis that popular culture and modern media can be a breeding ground for the constant reimagining of political subversion and resistance.1 Furthermore, since the text raises many important issues, such as trauma, memory, identification, cultural policies, and usage of traumatic experience, I also rely on the book by Allen Meek, Trauma and Media Theories (2010), for I believe it provides deep and diligent analysis of the modes in which trauma operates in today’s media.

4   Introduction

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In his paper, Sutton argues that  film has always been thoroughly intertextual and has always sought to remake or (re)translate itself for differing generations and different nations. . . . spectators also remake films as part of the very process of spectatorship and that beyond the actual cinematic experience they carry a remade and remembered “film” with them. This view of spectatorship therefore takes afterwardsness as its motivating force. (2004, 386) This insight is valuable even if we take into consideration ideologically intended films that served as explicit propaganda (such as Soviet educational movies, partisan films, documentaries about wars, revolutions, etc.) but also allegedly “non-­propaganda” Western movies.2 If the audience is just a passive consumer of the ideological content, how is it possible that even during Stalin’s dictatorship we faced so much subversive art, for which many artists were even exiled from the state? I therefore strongly oppose Barthes’ idea of cinematic experience as “filmic paralysis,” or “cinematographic hypnosis,” as I elaborate below. First of all, I give credit to Barthes, since his texts on popular media culture, such as Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981), Mythologies (2013) or “Photographic Message” (1977) emerged from his leftist-­inspired phase, in which he felt deep concern and pessimism about postwar societies and consumerist culture. In his writings (using a semiotic approach, notably his concepts of stadium and punctum) he was trying to explore the possibilities of a traumatic image that would suspend language and block signification. The idea is this: the more direct the trauma, the more difficult the signifying connotation; accordingly, the fully traumatic image is the photo about which there is nothing to say. Barthes was trying to explore photography (especially the photograph of his late mother), not as a critical question, but as a wound. His main pessimistic argument is that mass-­media consumption manages to absorb the shock and eliminates the traumatic rupture of the signifying chains of ideologies. If we only consider images of constant violence to which we have become almost blind and deaf, or the necrophiliac images of dying children in Africa (which have the opposite aim: to induce shock, but again paralyze any real political change in the exploitative system), we must take Barthes’ remarks seriously. And his insistence is on the hypnotic allure in experiencing cinema. Indeed, if we recall some of our own cinematic experience, I am almost sure that we at least once found ourselves in a situation in which the audience laughs at the scene and provokes a chain reaction of laughing in which we participate after a while, though we did not laugh at first. So, to a certain extent, Barthes has a point in arguing for the special status of the cinematic spatial and temporal experience. Nevertheless, Barthes seems to sidestep the notion of the contextual agency of the audience immersed in the film. The audience is not under hypnosis, but may be inspired to initiate a free association process, a stream of thoughts and emotions both during

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Introduction   5 and after the process of alleged “filmic paralysis.” As we watch, we are not physically paralyzed: how many times have we frantically eaten all our popcorn because the movie was too exciting? How many times have we checked the time during the film for various reasons or commented on a certain scene with our fellow spectators? More significantly, what of the complicated simultaneous procedures with which our brain operates during film watching? The audience’s active participation, for which Sutton’s text pleads, is not only a fact, but a priceless possibility that must not be forgotten because, without it, we would be  an undifferentiated herd of sheep merely following visual sensations. Thus, I  argue that subjectivities in cinema houses do not vanish by blending into an  anonymous flow. On the contrary, cinema is a place where subjectivities emerge.3 Visual media do not just mirror (as a simple mimetic operation) our traumatic experiences; they are also embedded into a complicated matrix of understanding and interpreting that work differently with different subjects. Individual subjectivities in the audience are not just witnesses to the plot, but they are constantly produced as possible new (dis)identifications.4 Particularly for this reason, we must always be attentive to the goggles we wear while watching a movie. The 3D goggles which are offered to us in modern cineplexes sometimes tend to blur the fact that we, in fact, always perceive reality with the goggles of our gender, race, class, sexuality, geo-­political location, etc. Ironically, the illusion of excessive reality in 3D cinemas nowadays often tries to provoke the opposite effect: by seeing things as too real, the modern film industry tends to blind us to the very reality of the coded messages, what Barthes has profoundly theorized in his concepts of stadium and punctum: denotative anchorage that operates on a connotative level of stereotypes. We are constantly invited into cinema houses to feel more, so that we can see less. In today’s cineplexes I always wonder: what does this excessive “reality” try to forge?5 When all is said and done, cinema can be used to mobilize, passivize, inspire, and threaten audience’s agency. Critics on trauma and memory studies have registered the increasing production of traumatic images that function as trauma porn; others have argued against abuse of trauma narratives for the consolidation of national unity through film art, or against the deployment of trauma in what Guy Debord calls the society of the spectacle (1970). That is why I pointed out at the beginning of this Introduction that it is a high-­risk view of modern media and its (im)possibilities, but these can still be productive, once we take into account both the theory of afterwardsness and an intersectional analysis of audience response. In this approach, visual representations can be recognized, negotiated, and refigured. In this book I will deal with audience analysis on the basis of personal narratives and comments inspired by film watching and class discussions with graduate and postgraduate students from many countries around the globe. I situate myself within contemporary discussions on performative writing/audiencing. Performativity has an eminent career, which dates back to J. L. Austin’s (1962) original work on performative utterances later developed into theory of speech acts and his insistence that besides stating something about an event or object (constative

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6   Introduction utterances), in saying something we also do something (performative utterances) like promising something to somebody, ordering somebody to do something, etc. In short, we do things by means of using words. Also relevant is Michel Foucault’s (1978) theorizing on the performative notion of identity. However, I turn to Judith Butler’s emphasis on gender performativity, a “becoming or activity” which produces a series of effects. Butler (1990) argues that gender is not “natural,” but, rather, “acquired,” socially constructed through a series of performed acts, enactments, or performances. Likewise, university level teaching, any teaching in fact, can also break away from the traditional, static view of teaching conceived of as a science whose principal aim is to provide students with the knowledge of objective facts and instead, be seen as an activity, or a series of activities aiming at students’ performing various acts, such as writing, acting out scenes, engaging in debates, exchange of ideas, workshops, etc. In the process of performing these acts students gain knowledge and skills by means of self-­reflection and through experiencing the subject matter of learning rather than through absorbing ready-­made solutions provided by the teacher and found in the readings, they actively contribute to their learning. This is in brief what the performative teaching is about. In the context of this project, my interest lies in the performative character of teaching and studying, which entails a shift in the conceptualization of classroom priorities from providing new and reinforcing already acquired knowledge to performing creative acts. It is within this context that I de-­emphasize the axes of identity to focus on the fluctuating enactments or performances of subjectivity by those to whom agency is attributed. Thus, “[t]he shift from . . . attitudes and values to acts implicates a more fundamental shift: from the sociocultural construction of identity to the production of subjectivity” (Zelia Gregoriou 2013, 185–186). Consequently, I do not consider students’ identities; instead, I focus on their subjectivities. These issues and nuances have been effectively captured by intersectionality theory. I will now offer my reading (and personal–political deployment) of the theory of intersectionality, placing it in a fruitful dialogue with non-­subject-oriented theories, primarily with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) theory of assemblage. I do not want to take sides between intersectionality (as subject-­oriented theory) and assemblage, but I would like to argue that the process of positioning and performing subjectivities is a complex process of constant negotiations, dialogues, and (re)arrangements. Borrowing Jasbir Puar’s (2012) concept of becoming-­intersectional in assemblage theory, I contend that intersectional subjectivities and assemblage arrangements must remain in a constant tension of open dialogue and exchange. This means that the famous categories (sometimes ironically depicted as “feminist mantra” in the feminist production of knowledge) of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, etc., must not capture us and fix us like a simple product of identitarian vectors, but should be strategically used to explain our own lived experience and move us beyond, towards an infinite becoming of etcetera. Our lives, bodies, and subject positions are not merely passive products of different ideological forces (meeting points at a crossroads), but are processes, movements, sometimes

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Introduction   7

Figure I.3 Intersectionality Circle (Own Elaboration).

even inexplicable designs, which we cannot easily situate on the crossroads. Seldom are we interpellated without any identitary residual; luckily, we will always experience “lived excesses” that allow us to move between categories while at the same time changing their intelligible presumptions.6 By this I mean that, while inspecting intersectional subjectivities, we must always keep in mind what the ideological conditions are and which of them created the categories of race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, etc. in the first place. The categories should not be taken for granted as “innocent” tools of analysis moving towards the multicultural idea of political correctness. In her essay “I would rather be a cyborg than a Goddess,” Puar notes the ironical outcome of intersectional theories. Reflecting on the danger of reifying categories in contemporary feminist production of knowledge, she argues:

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8   Introduction [T]he method of intersectionality is most predominantly used to qualify the specific difference of “women of color,” a category that has now become simultaneously emptied of specific meaning in its ubiquitous application and yet overdetermined in its deployment. In this usage, “intersectionality always produces an Other, and that Other is always a Woman of Color, who must invariably be shown to be resistant, subversive, or articulating a grievance.” (Puar 2012, 5) There is no doubt that this danger is something that we should always keep in mind, since feminism lost its “innocence” a long time ago. The production of knowledge has become a minefield of categories and only through adopting them critically and questioning them can we thoroughly explain our own lives by simultaneously moving forward. Critics claim that categories of race, class, and gender are often used as Western ontological presumptions, taken-­for-granted categories of the modernist imperial project that perpetuates epistemic violence in the non-­Western world.7 Thus, the danger does not only lie in postmodern anxiety against the Subject, but it reminds us that sometimes, even unconsciously, we can slip into the projection of our own “grids.” Puar reminds us that we should embrace the qualities and possibilities of intersectional theories, but not use them as alibis for re-­centering white liberal feminism in the era of multicultural reification of differences. For as much as we try to refill our subject positions with different intersecting categories, we must also simultaneously question what are the historical contexts and assumptions that brought those categories about in the first place. Although this can be read as a small joke, I found it symptomatic, since this argument is unfortunately often used to undermine feminist struggle. In my view, these personal examples illustrate the fluidity and negotiable structures of the categories themselves; therefore we must always use them with caution and awareness of context-­sensible deployment. Becoming intersectional in the assemblage landscape should not provoke the “Olympics of oppression,” where the most affected ones can claim “the innocent” spot, but it should make us conscious about our standing points and urge us to shift them towards new paradigms.8 Such is my stand on intersectionality, which recognizes the diversification of cultures and criticizes the silencing of minority voices, the neglect of minorities’ contributions to world culture, and the rejection of alternative visions—a process of excluding identities other than those of the majority. Multiculturalism typically looks at groups rather than individuals and explores group identity rather than subjectivities of members constituting the group. Intersectionality goes further: it replaces the modernist emphasis on identities in common with a postmodernist, post-­structural concept of subjectivity, and a person’s sense of self. The latter perception embraces both stability and change, and signifies an endless process of becoming. With such a change of emphasis came a shift from identities in common, that is to say, from commonality and inclusion, from shared experience, to its opposite: exclusiveness and taking subject positions.

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Introduction   9 In  feminist theory, the emphasis on the commonality of women’s experience worldwide brought a questioning of the second wave of women’s rights activism. For example, many black commentators (e.g. bell hooks 1984) challenged those varieties of feminism that perceive the roots of women’s predicament exclusively in their disproportionate access to the means of production characteristic of wealthy Western civilizations. For, disclosing the material foundations of women’s social submission, as well as the relationship between the mode of production and women’s status—goals advocated by Marxist feminists—fails to embrace the experience of black women, who, like women in numerous Eastern European countries, traditionally had to work outside the home, unlike their white, Western, middle-­class counterparts. As I have argued elsewhere (Oleksy 2011), intersectionality has been used as a theoretical concept, a policy option, and a notion within popular culture. Unlike most theories, it has been adopted in a hard and soft form, scientific, and entertaining; published in books and journal articles by acclaimed scholars, but also used playfully on the internet. One of the most diverse and controversial contemporary concepts in feminism, intersectionality has been appropriated by highly regarded and popular blogs, such as Feministing, Racialicious, Salon’s women’s blog Broadsheet, and others, among them Body Impolitic. In the Body Impolitic blog, Debbie Tara Edison, an obese woman of color, writes how people reacted to her when she was obese and how they behave towards her now, when she is old: in some contexts I’ve stopped being fat . . . because my hair has gotten gray enough to make me look old. I notice this . . . on public transit: people who five years ago would have glared at me for seeking out a seat . . . now get up for me.  (“Intersections: Age and Fat/Race and Gender,” Body Impolitic blog) People also showed clear disdain for her, Debbie continues, when she was using the escalator instead of the stairs, because she was fat, and now they show understanding and patience, because she is old. Thus, at least for Debbie, age gives an advantage over being obese. Concluding, in her blog Debbie admits that she has found her own history through intersectionality. She identifies a number of intersectional categories which define her as a woman. She is half-­Taiwanese/Chinese, half-­white/Jewish who was raised by mixed-­class parents, able-­bodied, cisgendered, queer, high femme, and obese. This narrative seems to trivialize intersectionality, but it also illustrates how intersections travel with cycles of our lives. I have used major fragments of two entries by Tara because they clearly demonstrate that recent developments in social computing technologies, in giving people the tools to join diverse social networks, create niches for “living” intersectionality, for voicing specific forms of “lived experience.” This role of intersectionality should not be overlooked, especially in view of the fact that most scholarly literature on the subject, written

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10   Introduction in what Patricia Hill Collins describes as “exclusionary language,” with its gatekeeping function, is addressed to pen-­colleagues and postgraduate students (1998a, 142). However, the passages cited above also touch upon a more serious issue. They demonstrate that the open-­endedness of intersectionality embedded in the “and so on” or “etcetera,” conspicuously and almost unanimously used by critics at the end of any string of intersections, precisely points not only to intersectionality’s plurality but also to its ad infinitum quality. The question then arises: is the “diluted” character of intersectionality a deficit or a strength? There are at least two responses to this question. One of them assumes that the notion of a “center” be altogether gotten rid of, that is, a belief in Leslie McCall’s (2005) tripartite, intersectional methodology which suggests that interest in intersectionality was spurred by a postmodern “critique of gender-­based and race-­based research for failing to account for lived experience at neglected points of intersection” (2005, 1780). In her article “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Leslie McCall (2005), wonders why “despite the emergence of intersectionality as a major paradigm of research in women’s studies and elsewhere, there has been little discussion of how to study intersectionality; that is, of its methodology” (2005, 1771). In response to her own question, she proposes three methodological perspectives: “anticategorical complexity,” “intracategorical complexity,” and “intercategorical complexity.” The “anticategorical” approach assumes that an analysis of social mechanisms with the use of categories such as race, class, and gender falls short of a holistic account of intrinsic social relations and proposes the inclusion of more analytic categories, i.e. intersections. “Intracategorical complexity” contests universalizing essentialism in identity politics and approaches inequalities through lived experience at—heretofore— neglected axes of social stratification such as, for instance, the interlocked categories of gender, race, ethnicity, dis/ability, and sexuality. Through ethnography, the method works with a single social group, untangling the discrete categories of oppression permeating one another. The subtle line that advances McCall’s methodology in this category beyond previous research based on identity politics is what she calls unraveling “one by one the influences of gender, race, class, and so on” (2005, 1787) and showing how they route through one another. “Categorical approach,” argues McCall, “focuses on the complexity of relationships among multiple social groups within and across analytical categories . . . The subject is multigroup, and the method is systematically comparative” (2005, 1786). It should be mentioned that McCall’s approach is critically discussed by Lykke (2010) who proposes her own tripartite approach to intersectionality, and this topic is also dealt with in Oleksy (2011). While influential, McCall’s scheme, which is placed squarely within social science, does not constitute a response to an assumed need for one methodology for intersectionality. But should it? As has become increasingly evident,

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Introduction   11 methodology in social and cultural studies has not responded to the growing need of interdisciplinary work. In particular, the many functions of the internet have altered our understanding of the empirical, with its demand to address diverse social networks and audiences. As I have argued in (Oleksy 2011), recent developments in social media technologies, in giving people tools to join diverse social networks, create niches for “living” intersectionality, for voicing specific forms of “lived experience.” Nevertheless, I find McCall’s proposition useful for my purposes in this book. My research into intersectional critical pedagogy is poised between two of her categories, the second and the third: “intracategorical complexity” and “intercategorical complexity” or preferred by McCall, “categorical complexity.” Another way of answering the issue of ad infinitum quality of the concept of intersectionality is to follow Collins (1998a) who expresses concerns about McCall’s formulation: some sort of verifiable, objective knowledge that one can deploy with authority, the rubric of deconstruction disempowers the very same historically marginalized groups who helped create the space for postmodernism to emerge. (Collins 1998a, 145) For Collins, intersectionality is only a heuristic device that “references the ability of social phenomena such as race, class, and gender to mutually construct one another,” and she adopts discrete categories of gender, class, and nation to situate intersectionality in the discussion of the (American) family (Collins 1998b). However, both Collins and McCall agree on the methodology, i.e., the importance of studying groups, “with each group encountering a distinctive constellation of experiences based on its placement in hierarchical power relations” (Collins 1998a, 205), via self-­narratives. While both McCall and Collins stress the importance of studying multigroups, vis-­à-vis a single category, or a combination of categories, I have worked with undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students from different geographic locations, spanning Asia, Europe, North America, and South America, who represented different levels and fields of prior education, and who also embodied a host of intersections but they constituted one single group at a time. A single group of students, much diversified internally due to their nationality, race, sexuality, etc., who happened to enroll in my course at the same time. During the duration of this project, I was dealing with several such grops. Here, I use the term “single group” in the sense of “student group” which is taking a course at a particular time and place. This should not be mistaken to mean “a single social group.” Nina Lykke’s Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology, and Writing (2010) fills in lacunae and accomplishes several important feats. Lykke summarizes the major intersectional literature produced so far and offers the much-­awaited classification of categories within multilayered intersectionality research. We have to bear in mind that locating intersectionality within

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12   Introduction post-­disciplinary feminist studies is a shrewd strategy. Lykke’s review of the literature convincingly proves that intersectionality defies disciplinary placement, even though it inspires thinking in various disciplines. Also, it certainly “belongs” to feminism; it is a theory, methodology, and a policy tool that attends to feminist undertakings. Proceeding from thought to practice, the present volume offers a novel approach to pedagogy while demonstrating how intersectionality can be experienced, taught, and learned. In the wealth of literature on intersectionality as a concept, theory, political option, and methodology, little has been published on how it might be taught. My book fills in this gap and recommends a pedagogy that recognizes the necessity of integrating difference and inspires a relationship with the visual, whereby students negotiate meanings that directly bear upon their lives.

How The Book Is Organized First, I sketch out where my research is situated in the field of intersectional methodology and pedagogy. Second, I outline the history of audience analysis before moving to intersectionality’s preferred methodology: ethnography. Specifically, I draw on the findings of my ethnographic research carried out at the University of Łódź (Poland) and the University of California at Berkeley (USA). Drawing on this experience, I demonstrate how such innermost interdependencies as age, gender, disability, ethnicity, nationality, race, and sexuality can be better explored through audience analysis of intersectional visual products. In this pedagogical experiment, students first gain knowledge of intersectionality as theory, methodology, and policy option through readings and discussion in class. Subsequently, we view a selection of films (one per class) and discuss each of them. These discussions are recorded and transcribed. During the semester, students deliver written journals based on their own observations and perceptions of each film. These are augmented by class discussions, however it is up to each student’s discretion to what extent they incorporate class discussions into their journals. At the end of the semester, students write personal narratives, one per a selected film of their choice, interlacing their personal accounts, at times very intimate, of the selected film with their lived experience. I inaugurated the project with a small class of graduate and postgraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was a fellow in the summer semester of 2011. At Berkeley, the classes were conducted partly on the university premises and via Skype, with volunteers from film studies, gender studies, and psychology as participants. The reactions I received from the students surpassed my initial expectations. All were enthusiastic, hardworking, and clearly perceived the novelty and significance of the exercise. What needs to be stressed is that the copious intersectionality scholarship has paid little attention to education and pedagogy. Though theoretical books and essays figure prominently on the reading lists of graduate courses at numerous universities in the United States, Australia, and Europe, until recently the

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Introduction   13 availability of literature that would focus on empirically based research as regards audience analysis has been scarce. To compensate for this neglect, I propose an innovative undertaking whereby audience research is concentrated on the audience. In the case of my research, the concentration is on students and their perception of film as a work of art and a pronouncement of social or other reality. In this approach, providing students with theoretical proposals and concepts is important in order to equip them with analytic tools and a conceptual framework, which make it possible to interpret the meanings encoded in film, but the concentration is not on theories and concepts but on students, that is, the audience. Furthermore, students are invited to contribute to the analysis by means of personal narratives, journal entries, and comments inspired by class discussions, and they are also given an opportunity to propose some films of their own choice to be discussed in class. My task as a researcher is to draw conclusions that pertain to the analysis of a particular film’s audience on the basis of the material provided by a real audience, i.e. journals, class discussions, and personal narratives. I followed this logic in my research into visual pedagogy. As I have already mentioned earlier, for the purposes of this project I have worked with groups of undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students who represented a whole range of intersections, that is, they were diversified in terms of race, level of education, linguistic background, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. Intersectionality organizes the fabric of the volume: the subjects under study and the visual material. The text consists of an introduction, followed by two main parts that together comprise four chapters, and afterword. Part I, sets the terrain of inquiry for the entire work. In Chapter 1, I use insights from critical pedagogy to build links with the global movement of educational inclusion. My teaching practice is rooted in a conviction that pedagogy should be organized in such a way as to allow pedagogical subjects to freely construct themselves and their place in the world. Drawing on my experience with international classrooms, I present here the findings as regards the process and the outcome of three courses taught at the University of Łódź, and an informal group of students at the University of California, Berkeley. Most of my material comes from international students enrolled in the Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies (GEMMA)—an enclave of racially, geographically, and ethnically diverse students. GEMMA comprises seven European institutions: the Universities of Granada, Bologna, Hull, Łódź, Oviedo, Utrecht, and the Central European University in Budapest, as well as the State University of New Jersey, Rutgers. Students choose a host and a mobility university and, having successfully finished the program, receive a double degree. For comparative reasons, I also carried out the project with graduate students in a course titled Political Cinema, as well as doctoral students in a course titled Gender and Visual Culture. Differences in gender, disability, ethnicity, nationality, race, and sexuality characterized both communities of students, the majority of whom were women.

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14   Introduction In the final section of Chapter 1, I deal with attempts at subjectivizing the audience, as represented in Jerzy Grotowski’s (1997) “poor theatre,” and I explore the uses of Playback Theatre, which is an audience-­collaborative, interactive performance in which audience members tell their life stories and then watch these stories performed on stage by actors. In Chapter 2, I review early spectatorship theories and launch the discussion, already signaled in this introduction, on active audiencing as a method of feminist pedagogy. Good performative writing is akin to art: it tells a story that is personal, often painful, but is delivered in good style and involves emotions. It has a long history in performance studies, anthropology, and feminist writing. Part II opens with Chapter 3 which examines a host of films that address various forms of lived experience that underlined debates in my classrooms. The selection of films to be watched and discussed each semester over the period of the duration of the project was slightly alternated depending on student audiences. This was done in order to avoid concentration on mainstream (Hollywood) films and search for diverse national cinemas which represented various cultural and geographical regions: Antonia’s Line (Marlene Gorris, 1995), A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009), Fremde Haut [Unveiled] (Angelina Maccarone, 2005), La Source des Femmes (Radu Mihăileanu, 2011), Passion Fish (John Sayles, 1992), The Joy Luck Club (Wayne Wang, 1993), and The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997). In this chapter I also record the discussions and controversies among students that significantly influenced the ambience in the class. In Chapter 4, I present my students’ reactions to, and comments on, the films mentioned above. These reactions and comments take the form of written, personal accounts: weekly journals and one personal narrative. The essays that my students wrote as a requirement for the course represented manifestos of the diverse ways that culture has permeated their lives. They made subjectivity more intelligible, and their stories demonstrated an awareness of the power of writing. There is nothing more satisfying for a teacher. At the beginning of each semester, I requested that students fill out a questionnaire in which they informed me whether they agreed to have their work represented in the research material that I would send to a publisher and—eventually—that would appear in the book. They also advised me how they should be quoted in the prospective book: by first name or encoded. The questionnaire is attached below.

Questionnaire 1 2

First and last name: What age group are you? a b c d

Under 20 21–25 26–30 30+

Introduction   15 3

Would you describe yourself as:

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African—specify region/country American—specify region/country Asian—specify region/country European—specify region/country

4 5

Alternatively, you can describe your sense of belonging to any particular culture or geographic location. Please list your educational qualifications: Would you agree to be quoted if this research is published in a book? Yes No

6

If yes, would you prefer to be quoted: By first name By full name Anonymously (coded)

Whatever answer you’ve given in pt. 5, you can always change your mind and inform me about your decision! Additional comments: The volume closes with Afterword, where I briefly deal with the complexities of squaring off the different aims that I have set for myself: methodology, teaching practice, and narrative. The essays that my students wrote as a requirement for the course represented manifestos of the diverse ways that culture has permeated their lives.

Notes 1 Interestingly enough, Adorno (1998), in his famous argument with Benjamin (2008) upon the matter of popular culture (Adorno and Benjamin 1999), saw the emergence of new media representations as just another way of commodifying experience in the capitalistic circulation of information, imageries, resources, and people. For Adorno (2005), mass media only absorbed the shocking reality, making it sellable goods offered for mass consumption. Faced with today’s proliferation of blockbusters, terrorizing films, pathetic narratives, and ideologically problematic movies, we cannot but take into consideration Adorno’s argument who, I think, foresees the very concept of afterwardsness and therefore negates the activity of audience reception. While watching a movie, reading a book, or even taking a quick glance at the commercials with which we are bombarded every day, we do not function as passive objects simply engulfed by ready-­made information. Rather (as Sutton claims), we are in a constant process of redefining the meaning, which is not fixed within the motion picture, but is fluid, able to be re-­read, re-­translated, and de-­translated over and over again. This specific temporal hermeneutics of the film also provides specific hermeneutics of the subject, which is always embedded in a specific context (which is again multilayered

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16   Introduction and never a static unified discourse), and this provides a possibility for new forms of imagined communities and political actions. 2 I mean here the typical Cold War discourse that, unfortunately, prevails even today, in which Eastern Europe is depicted as a gray artistic landscape dominated by ideological propaganda and censorship, while colorful Western art is free from ideologies, censorship, and is dedicated “freedom of expression.” I stand by Terry Eagleton’s writing about esthetics and ideology, where he convincingly argues that the two are always firmly bound. Moreover, the hyper-­production of 9/11 pathos-­filled movies, blockbusters with an American president saving the plane from crashing, series about military honor, and family melodramas operate on very much the same level of “cinematic/ optical (un)consciousness” as Stalin’s cinema propaganda. The key point is how to frame and retell the ideological content according to the impact we want to achieve. If we consider overt propaganda narratives “less aesthetical, less artistic, less interesting,” then we need to analyze how our cinematic unconsciousness is shaped in the first place and from which ideological perspective we are judging the esthetics of the film. Of course, I do not claim that Stalin’s cinematic machinery is “a jewel in the crown” of Central European cinema, but I am arguing that a film’s intertextuality always transmits certain political messages and that the concept of afterwardsness is valuable for decoding and re-­coding those messages for our own political engagement. 3 The possibility of such cultural forms as film, photography, and literature to reproduce themselves ad infinitum is what Benjamin (2005) called “the loss of aura.” I deliberately call upon this term because I agree with Benjamin that the loss of an auratic, religious atmosphere around the specific artifact brings about its popularization, profanation, and politicization. Since I do not consider these processes necessarily negative, I stand by Benjamin’s claim that the loss of aura provides the possibility for audiences’ political engagement. If art is no longer deemed the work of shamans, aimed at privileged religious practices in which only certain people can take part, it means that art has become a contested field that can be worked on and worked through via audience response. 4 To illustrate this, we do not even need to look at modern cinema, but can glance back at Shakespearean theater. It was commonly known that the audience would act out from the seats, screaming at the protagonists not to drink the poison, shouting at the villains, etc. Far from passive receivers of the plot, they let the scene itself influence their imagination, creativity, and ethical judgment to such a degree that they could no longer sit calmly and merely observe. I believe this example might serve as an interesting starting point for future thinking about the temporal aspect in Sutton’s afterwardsness and how conventions of contemporary performing art have tied us down to our seats, allowing for digestion of trauma only retroactively. It might be challenging to think about the historical conceptualization of traumatic experience and trauma as such through this example. If the process of spectators’ inclusion allowed immediate reactions in Shakespearian theater, what can that tell us about the politics of representation of then and now? What is going on with the afterwardsness when some part of the response is “immediateness?” In light of my argument about the political enactment of an audience, this research would yield interesting views upon the hegemonic cultural politics and conventions of art. 5 I am using the word “forge” deliberately because of its ambiguous sense: both creating, making, constructing, but also falsifying, twisting, and copying. It was the word popularized during Stalinism for creating the New Man and New Woman. 6 In the field of literary theory, Judith Fetterly (1978) has developed the concept of the “resisting reader.” She urges women as readers not to accept patriarchal stereotypes of womanhood in literature as angels in the house, prostitutes, villains, mad women in the attics, femmes fatales, etc. Instead, she calls for the notion of reading as political activity, in which women can raise their voices against identities imposed to them in the books. To dis-­identify with the narrative means to resist, and to re-­open the text for

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Introduction   17 new representational possibilities of the female characters. I believe that this kind of interpretative agency can be fruitfully linked with Sutton’s text. 7 Furthermore, symptomatically, it was women of color (from Sojourner Truth to Combahee River Collective group, Chicana movement, postcolonial feminist criticism) who questioned the presumed all-­including feminist “sisterhood.” 8 This being said, one should note, that such concepts as “sexuality” or “nationality” do not have the same meaning in, for example, India and Europe nowadays. Many Europeans applauded the emergence of the “third sex” in Asian countries. It often turns out, however, that the administration allows people to choose their sex, but is explicitly inflexible about their belonging to a certain caste or religion, such as Indian hijras (roughly, a name for third-­gender). Pertinent here is Chandra Mohanty’s strong argument about different epistemological and political repercussions of hijab (a veil worn by Muslim women) in the non-­Western world: for instance, during the Iranian revolution in 1979, many middle-­class women veiled themselves to show solidarity with their working-­class sisters. Moreover, the very notion of “citizenship” becomes problematic if we inspect it from a historical perspective. After all, even after the French Revolution, not everybody had access to the category of citizenship. Thus, I strongly believe in the idea of “intimate citizenship,” for it allows us to occupy, mix, expand, and re-­formulate the locations in which we feel comfortable at a given moment, and to change them when they become too reductive. I see this action not as a postmodern fashion of luxurious fluidity, but as political awareness and active participation in the world around us.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. 1998. Aesthetic Theory. Edited and translated by R. Hullot-­Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Adorno, Theodor. 2005. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso. Adorno, Theodor and Walter Benjamin. 1999. The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Austin, John. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977. “The Photographic Message.” In Image-­Music-Text, edited by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland. 2013. Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation. New York: Hill and Wang. Benjamin, Walter. 2005. Selected Writings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Collins, Patricia, Hill. 1998a. Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Contradictions of Modernity). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Collins, Patricia, Hill. 1998b. “It’s All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” In Hypatia 13, no. 3: 62–82. Debord, Guy. 1970. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fetterly, Judith. 1978. The Resisting Reader. A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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18   Introduction Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume One, Introduction. (Translated by Robert Hurley). New York: Random House. Gregoriou, Zelia. 2013. “Traversing New Theoretical Frames for Intercultural Education: Gender, Intersectionality, Performativity.” In International Education Studies 6, no. 3: 179–191. Grotowski, Jerzy. 1997. “Towards a Poor Theatre.” In The Grotowski Sourcebook, edited by Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford, 28–38. New York: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory. From Margin to Center. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Laplanche, Jean. 1999. “Notes on Afterwardsness.” In Essays on Otherness, edited by John Fletcher, 260–265 (1992). London and New York: Routledge. Lykke, Nina. 2010. Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology, and Writing. London and New York: Routledge. McCall, Leslie. 2005. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” In Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 3: 1771–1800. Meek, Allen. 2010. Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and Images. London and New York: Routledge. Oleksy, Elżbieta H. 2011. “Intersectionality at the Cross-­roads.” In Women’s Studies International Forum 34, no. 4: 263–270. Puar, Jasbir K. 2012. “ ‘I would rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming Inter­ sectional in Assemblage Theory.” In philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 2, no. 1: 49–66. Sutton, Paul. 2004. “Afterwardsness in Film.” In Journal For Cultural Research 8, no. 3: 385–405.

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Part I

Untangling Perplexities

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1 Ethnography, Pedagogy, and Performative Audiencing

Ethnography Developmental processes that have affected higher education over the period of several decades, primarily in the United States and in Europe, but also in other parts of the world, brought about changes which resulted in the transformation of higher education from elite to mass higher education. Although the emergence of mass higher education should be hailed, it has consequences that were not fathomed by the architects of this shift: increased dropout rates, lower quality of instruction, unprofessional competition for students by public and private schools, oversized class populations, to mention only some of the negative con­ sequences of the transition process. The opening chapter of this book takes as its starting point an assumption that increased access to higher education, one of the resulting consequences of the massification process, has created major, educa­ tional inequalities worldwide. Most importantly, however, “massification” of higher education has had a detrimental effect on students with special needs, especially students with disabilities. Recent debates on inclusive schooling have emphasized the necessity of employing the concept of intersectionality in order to contest the neoliberal dis­ courses of education. Intersectionality treats on a par the categories of race, dis­ ability, gender, age, socio-­economic standing and, possibly, many others. Anastasia Liasidou (2012) uses insights from critical pedagogy in order to build links within the agenda of educational inclusion. She stresses that disabled people experience what she calls “intersectional subordination,” a term that was first used by American researchers in the 1980s, in order to draw attention to the experience of African-­American women (and not African-­American men) and white women. In view of the fact that educational institutions perpetuate inequality when it comes to disability, she postulates that special attention should be paid to individuals with disabilities. Combining insights from critical peda­ gogy and critical disability studies, she presents an emancipatory and analytical instrument to deconstruct “educational discourses . . . that evoke and legitimize the constitution of the ‘non-­ideal student’ ” (Liasidou 2012, 168). In the same vein, Parin Dossa (2005) offers a Canadian case of Mehrun, a forty-­year-old wealthy Muslim woman with polio. Dossa demonstrates that

22   Untangling Perplexities

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gender, disability, and race converge in some situations and not in others. Dossa writes: A disabled woman can obtain a career but cannot become a mother; she is perceived to be dependent rather than a worker. Mehrun’s class privilege distanced her from her African maids—as women they were miles apart. But this distance was not absolute as Mehrun could acquire an understand­ ing of her disability Otherness through their racialized Otherness. (2005, 2535) Dossa’s article carries the title “Racialized bodies, disabling worlds. ‘they [service providers] always saw me as a client, not as a worker.’ ” Such intellec­ tual juggling renders critical language obscure and should be used with care, for it instantiates escalatory lingo of oppression, not liberation. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson contends, disability as a bodily problem should not be addressed by normalization rhetoric, but rather “as a socially constructed identity and a representational system similar to gender” (Rosemarie Garland-­Thomson 2005, 1559). She makes an important distinction between classifying disabled people into those who identify themselves as disabled or those who see them­ selves as—in her own words—“people who are considered disabled” (2005, 1558). It is important to note that, on the subjective level, people with impair­ ments may identify as disabled or nondisabled, and people without visible dis­ figurements may identify as disabled—as I will demonstrate, with specific examples, later in this volume. In her text about the perspectives and limitations of critical pedagogy, Susan Gabel presents the pedagogical subject as a dialogical, narrating, autobiographical entity, a performing esthetic self, taking into consideration connections between doing and being. Emphasizing the particular dynamics in intersubjective relations, she sees subjectivity not as a pre-­given, essentially destined, and a priori stable identitarian situation, but instead points out that the “disabled” subject emerges as such within the dynamics of the pedagogical process. These remarks highlight the arbitrary definitions of disability, which situate “subjects of needs” in the cat­ egory of basically unproductive bodies. In this manner, I would like to argue that it is society that disables persons with impairments and, working within a bio-­ physical definition of “normality” and “health,” creates concrete social relations that produce disabling barriers. Notions of “able” and “healthy” bodies make us wonder what is the optimal performative minimum requirement for the body to be called “a body” and to be included in the membership of “healthy humans.” Thus, I will also rely on the works of activists Marta Russel and Ravi Malhotra, mostly on their article “Capitalism and Disability,” (Russel and Malhotra 2002) and Russel’s book Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of Social Contract (2002), and her thoughts on capitalistic production and commodification of dis­ abled bodies as “needs-­based” in contrast to “work-­based” productive bodies. In her historical analysis, Russel delineates the segregation of disabled people from the modes of production, establishing “disability” as an important boundary

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Ethnography, Pedagogy, Performative Audiencing   23 category. She pleads for radical reformulation of the rules of exclusion and the categories of disability and discursive context that brought them about. The perception of disability is also contingent on how disabled people define it. In her article, Susan Gabel (2002) describes her daughter’s perception of dis­ ability. It is important to note that both the mother and her daughter Tiffany are disabled. During a visit of a social worker, continues Gabel, she is telling the social worker that Tiffany is disabled, to which Tiffany reacts instantly: “No, not me.” Thus, Tiffany rejects being perceived as disabled and by doing this she pin­ points the key issue: the social construction of disability should be reformulated as it is the result of discriminatory social and discursive practices. There is also an important issue of the lack of adequate access to public buildings, for example, the provision of ramps, and addressing other physical barriers which still exist and negatively affect the functioning of disabled persons in society. And this is crucial, for the question of access does not only signify the possib­ ility of a person with impairments to move, enjoy, consume, and produce like “able” people, but it also refers to the foreclosing nature of the social structure itself, where some have the passport to access and some do not. The production of what Judith Butler (1993) calls a “constitutive outside” is the process of creat­ ing otherness and it follows from her concepts of abjection and the abject body, both of which Butler employs to interpret epistemological and social, as well as ideological, aspects of exclusionary practices. Other researchers point to the political and social ramifications of abjection which lead to social exclusion, disdain (Nussbaum 2004), acts of casting down and degrading of the body which, once it has fallen out of the symbolic order of normality, creates a cogni­ tive dissonance and is thus the subject of rejection and repulsion. Unfortunately, we live in a world of neoliberal imperative for constant circula­ tion, frantic movement on the production line, where productivity is measured by the efficiency of our bodies. The faster we learn, the faster we move, the faster we “get the job done,” the more appreciated we are on the landscape of constantly competing production. Marta Russel (2002) thus convincingly proves that the cat­ egory of disability is derived from concrete labor relations that create (and then discriminate against) the disabled body. In this light, we cannot help but wonder: what exactly qualifies disability as such? What are we unable to do when we are disabled? Since social Darwinism has been co-­opted perfectly into the raging mechanism of capital production, disabled people have become perceived as a specific burden, a disabled residual element, not capable of contributing to the circulation of capital. Even if we analyze the “healthy” bodies in everyday dis­ course, we can see how the power to produce and consume has engulfed our way of thinking about our bodies. The wallet has become the most essential prosthetic device we need in order to survive, move about, and have access to the social structure. The school system is also obliged to train bodies to grasp the meaning as fast as possible, shaping them to uniformity. People’s bodies have become valued by their ability to function like machines.1 Such an approach not only drastically influences people with disability, throwing them on the margins of poverty, but also creates a precarious fear on the part of “able bodies” of becoming disabled.2

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24   Untangling Perplexities In a Polish film directed by Andrzej Wajda, Ziemia obiecana (The Promised Land), which received an Oscar nomination for the best film in a foreign lan­ guage in 1975, based on a novel of the same title (published in 1899) by Władysław St. Reymont (Nobel Prize in Literature in 1924) there is an espe­ cially disturbing scene when the corporate manager finds himself confronted with a group of workers who stop working because of an accident: one of the workers had a terrible accident and lost his arm. The manager looks at his crawl­ ing, bloodied body with no sign of compassion, let alone remorse, as if nothing had happened, and he orders the other workers, who watch the scene with terror, to get back to work. The production must go on. The other workers are looking at the crippled body with its dreadful warning of what may happen to them. Thus, the arbitrary construction of disability intersects perfectly with gender and the labor market. It has become widely known that women are often asked intrusive questions when they are interviewed for a job. One of those intrusive, aggressive questions is whether the woman who is being interviewed is pregnant or planning to start the family. This is a good example of how questions about ability and health operate together to “contract” able subjects: the woman with sterile ovaries, or with some other kind of reproductive disability is more able for the process of production and therefore of better use to the employer’s main goal: making profit. This sheds light on the intersections of disability, class, and gender, where the economic use of the female body will be forced to reject maternity because it is treated as a disability.3 All of this said, I fully agree with Russel’s claim that disability is not a private family matter, a personal tragedy of a flawed genome. Disability is a political issue, given the ruthless intervention of economic agents into lives of disabled women. This way of engaging disability can also be traced in Susan Gabel’s project of breathing pedagogy. Teaching and pedagogical methods are not just mere instruments for passing knowledge to some already shaped subjects through some already shaped teacher, but they breathe, emerge, and coexist simultaneously with the political and ideological structures in which they are embedded. During the omnipresent climate of social activism in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s, many organizations of disabled persons organized to act for their rights, and even helped finance radical civil movements. These examples are important notes on rethinking disability and its political repercussions. Not only did the marginalized people (discriminated on the basis of ability, race, gender, sexuality) join together to gain access to the structure that oppressed them, but they strived to change the very structure itself. Ideological concepts are those that create structural barriers and classifica­ tions, and Althusser used a lot of ink to prove that schools and classrooms also  operate on a distinct level of social ideological apparatuses. Althusser distinguished what he called “Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs): the reli­ gious ISAs, the educational ISAs, the family ISAs, the legal ISAs, the political ISAs, the trade-­union ISAs, the communications ISAs, and the cultural ISAs (Althusser 1971, 143). They all, according to Althusser, nurture “submission to the rules of established order,” or in other words, represent institutional means of

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Ethnography, Pedagogy, Performative Audiencing   25 oppression. Of relevance here is the educational ISA, which includes both public and private schools of various levels. That is why critical pedagogy provides a framework which is of utmost importance: the ability to discriminate, divide, deny, and reject is also generated in schools. The stake is not only to erase prejudice and make people accept dif­ ferent bodies. Critical pedagogy aims at re-­elaborating and thus changing the entire structural system of schooling that provides a hostile environment for some children. Let us consider, for example, the obligatory access to schooling through “standardized” tests. The questions to be asked are the following: Whose stand­ ards are deployed in standard tests? How do those standards correspond to “non-­ standard” students? Are those standards also embedded in the discriminatory production of disability? Be that as it may, the fact is that those “standard tests” will allow or deny access to the schooling system disregarding the fact that some children will learn faster, some slower. Thus, “access” is the key word, because it points not only to (dis)ability of moving, but also to the (dis)ability of being a legitimate citizen, legitimate subject, body, human. Finally, I would like to offer an interpretation of what I think to be counter-­ representations of disability. If we rethink disability as a textual consensus of ideological apparatuses producing disabled bodies, then that gives us the space to rethink disability as such. I will point out some publications that not only offer a different approach to disability, but also question the meaning of the “body.” First, many malicious interpretations in the history of art have often dealt with the works of Toulouse Lautrec as a picturesque enactment of his own deformity. The beautiful drawings of the (again marginalized) people in Moulin Rouge have become nothing but the illustration of his physical frustrations. It is inter­ esting to critically examine traditional interpretations of his work, for also gender, class, and disability intersect in school curricula teaching the history of art. Lautrec’s burlesque dancers are connoted as disgraceful prostitutes, low-­ class people in bars as drunkards, and the artist is just a midget enacting his dis­ ability. The reading of his art as a projection of his own deformed body went so far that even nowadays there exists a so-­called “Lautrec syndrome,” depicting misshapen hips. Thus, Lautrec’s contesting of the classical concept of beauty is being framed as pathological, justified only as his way of dealing with his own deformity. But disability also produces, in reverse to those unfortunate interpretations, the beauty of the disabled body we are willing to gaze at. Likewise, David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man makes explicit the view of disability and deformity as an abject aspect of the human race. In that film, the protagonist’s misshapen appearance throws him below the level of a human being, animalizes him into a subhuman category, a monster to be hidden from the rest of society. The same mechanism of abject monstrosity is displayed in Disney’s adaptation of V. Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which Quasi­ modo is a monster, hidden in the tower, and Master Frolo’s major concern is that he must not be shown. The rigid and cruel world of humanity that he represents

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26   Untangling Perplexities must abstract and sublimate monstrosity and keep it away from the rest of human life while, on the other hand, he erotically desires a Gypsy dancer, which is again a stunning example of how different intersections of race, class, gender, and ability operate together to produce a “constitutive outside.” An example of a beautiful depiction of counter practices on disability is The Cost of Living, a film produced by the British dance company DV8 Physical Theatre, in which the discourses on bodily disability are challenged through movement and dance. The Cost of Living is a 2004 filmic version of a theatrical performance by the same company in which bodily movement, dance, music, and dialogue produce, at times, shocking but artistically refined performance and force the onlooker to redefine common perceptions of bodily disability. In one of the scenes, a man without legs, just a torso of a man in a wheelchair, peeps through the window into a room in which dancers rehearse. He gets off his wheelchair and walks into the rehearsal studio on his hands. Soon we see him joining the dancers and after a while he is performing a duet dance on his hands with a ballerina in a sequence of beautifully choreographed movements. It is a heartbreaking scene to watch. The impossible becomes possible: a legless person can dance. The performance not only provides access to the different and unex­ pected kinds of movement our bodies are capable of, but also questions the “nor­ mality” of the body and its movements. Thus, the concepts of healthy versus disabled bodies are redefined and an alternative space for re-­imaging (dis)able­ ness is created. The final example that I would like to discuss is the “mural city” of Łódź, a city which is believed to be well-­known in Poland for its international mural art festivals and an impressive number of mural paintings which do an excellent job of masking the old paint which is peeling off the walls of many buildings that have not seen paint and brush since World War II. While recently walking to the Łódź Kaliska train station, I ran into a street art piece, a mural, showing a young woman in a wheelchair. I do not know what the original intention of the artist was, who the artist was, and why she or he painted the mural just there. It is quite possible that the work was produced during one of the mural art festivals where the artists decide what and where they would paint. Interestingly, no one knows the circumstances of the work’s coming to existence, though I took pains to find out who the artist was: a very rare case of anonymous art created in the twenty-­first century! I will offer my own interpretation of it and I’ll do it with the conviction that street art offers unique and exciting interpretational possibilities which are not in any way circumscribed by time or place: street art is freely accessible in the public space and everybody has a free hand to decode and construe meanings encoded in the works of street artists. This particular piece, the mural, was of extreme signifi­ cance to me when I was writing this book. It is located below the flyover, near the train station. The very location of the piece of art makes me look at it as a strategically positioned, powerful image that designates the place of disability in society, presenting a trajectory of “efficient humans,” moving at speed in their vehicles to get from one point to another; the frenzied circulation of moveable

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Ethnography, Pedagogy, Performative Audiencing   27

Figure 1.1 Mural of a Girl in a Wheelchair. Artist Unknown. Photo Courtesy of Elżbieta Oleksy.

bodies on the trajectory of efficiency. Wheelchairs are below the standards of modern society: invisible, hidden, conceived in the suburban area of the city, far away from the city center. Moreover, the girl is depicted as if she were driving her “disability vehicle” being subjugated to the more efficient ways of moving, which are happening above her. For those bodies that are moving across the flyover above her, she remains invisible. Furthermore, the mural is located along the pedestrian way to the train station as a reminder that while moving from one place to another, we tend to forget that for some bodies access to modern trans­ portation is limited. Unable to find some other interpretation of this work of street art, I offer it here as a significant reminder that in the era of the metastasis of movements, we must slow down and rethink moving and what it means to be a mobile body. Not only are we self-­sustainable entities in motion, but the very categories of “health,” “motion,” “ability,” and “productivity” are brought into question as arbitrary, exclusionary, and oppressive.

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28   Untangling Perplexities As a companion piece, I offer my reflection on disability as it usually strikes us as a visual phenomenon. Gimps, crips, and invalids are bodies to be seen, or more precisely, to be avoided looking at. On the one hand, the perverse sco­ pophilia cannot stop gazing at the non-­normative body, but, on the other hand, one cannot gaze too long and the eyes move away from the “deformity,” repress­ ing the disabled body into oblivion. But, can we hear disability? Can we read it as a work of art? In a civilization whose beginning has been marked by the invention of the alphabet and writing, how do disabled bodies access language? If language is the primal marker of humanity (as we were taught in schools), and the basic means of communicating ideas, the question of disabled bodies’ access to language boils down to the ability or disability to access civilization itself. When disability starts moving through the words of poetry, which had been reserved for centuries for the privileged, the poetic language is de-­centered in its core. Something “crippled” happens with the language, something abnormal, and wonderful. In the culture obsessed with bodies and health, we are constantly impelled to perform health and resilience as much as we can. We always answer with: “I am fine, thank you, how are you?” citing the definition of fineness that covers the fact that we are all living, aging, and ephemeral bodies, not self-­sustainable and self-­policing. Instead, we reassure our fragile bodies that healthiness is some­ thing which is not “disableness,” and that “handicap” is misery brought to “inno­ cent victims” of the involuntary bodily condition of suffering. But still, we would want to suffer away from our senses because our senses are clear, healthy, functional, and fine. They cannot be disturbed by blurring dots of disfigured bodies and the murmur of the dissonant vocals of a deaf person. Our eyes are used to look at monuments of ancient Greek or Roman athletes and we enjoy watching freak shows that feature half-­bodied creatures. Our ears like to listen to Beethoven (who was, interestingly enough, deaf himself ), our reading experi­ ence is built on the grandeur of Byron’s poetry (who is one of the most famous cripples in Western literary tradition): we do not want to be disturbed by the simple fact that culture has shaped all of us in different formats, labeling us as valid or invalid. Now I will present some of the poems from the anthology Beauty is a Verb (Black, Bartlett, Northen 2011) and point at some key notions of disability poetry, also referred to as “crip poetry,” notably by Jim Ferris who offers what he calls a “serviceable definition” of crip poetry (Ferris 2007): poetry that seeks to explore and validate the lived experience of moving through the world with a disability. Sometimes referred to as crip poetry, disability poetry embodies a disability consciousness; it is informed by and contributes to disability culture. I chose to do so not only because of the beauty of the poems in the anthology, but also for reasons of the challenging medium of language in which disabled embodiment is expressed. There is a fascinating intersection between poetry and

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Ethnography, Pedagogy, Performative Audiencing   29 disability, forming the third language, language of the void: crippled, deviant, and beautiful. The anthology Beauty is a Verb calls us to listen to the void within the cat­ egories, the space of growth in the hollow itself, to tune ourselves up to hear the abjec, unfitted puzzle that disturbs the wholeness. Those poems are the poems from deep under, but not only as a poetic expression of the depth of the disabled embodiment of the soul, but also the underside of the social institutions, below visibility and audibility. Lyrical personas of the anthology are located underneath the level of symbolic institutions of any kind (including those of poetry and lan­ guage, as primary institutions of socialization that allow us access to humanity). The setting of the poems circles around marginalized spaces: waiting rooms in hospitals, asylums, crypts, wheelchairs, which are not “inspirational” places for “legit” poiesis. But what is amazing in crip poetry is its ability to re-­appropriate the discriminating signifiers (of “gimp,” “creep,” “monster,” “ill-­shaped,” “mis­ shapen”) and turn them into the poetic revolution of the signified. Sheila Black, one of the authors of the book, writes about the excruciating pains she experi­ enced while subjugated to the operations of straightening her “mis-­shaped” body: “That body they tried so hard to fix and straighten was simply mine and I loved it as you love your country” (Black, Bartlett, Northen 2011, 212). Another poet, Ann Kaier (2011) proudly tears down the walls of silence by saying that she has broken the old taboo and named her affliction, she called it hers. This poetic re-­appropriation of the disfigured body tries not to hew to the Western pattern of political correctness and euphemisms, but to embrace the lan­ guage more radically, so as to make us question not only whose bodies are not expressed, but also what our bodies really are. Jim Ferris, a proclaimed Father of the Disability Poetics Movement and one of the authors (whose poem is an opening prologue to the anthology), defined crip consciousness as the experience from the outside, from the abnormal, cen­ tered around lives which are not ordinary, where the edgy potential of that alien­ ated being lies in its “potential to transform.” The main goal is to take control over the gaze: a revolutionary scopic transformation that reopens the very con­ ditions in which persons with impairments are seen. This transformation in con­ sciousness attacks the exclusive logic of the world, trying to make it a roomier place. Crip poetics support the general tone of anthology with the idea that disa­ bility is not a pitiable tragic personal event, but a social construct, a culturally imposed condition. But what is immensely important is the realization that by claiming this, the authors do not try to neglect the pain and suffering; on the con­ trary, the awareness that one is not born a crip is supposed to deepen our under­ standing of otherness of any kind. Intersections of race, gender, and disability have never been more strikingly illustrated. The metamorphosis that the persona goes through is entirely imposed by the external forces of the cultural shaping of bodies, and s/he is the one who wants us not to be blind to that fact. This complex overlapping of the cultural and the personal within the anthology comes to light in Vassar Miller’s (2011, 53) essay “Dramatic monologue in speaker’s own voice.” The mere title speaks

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30   Untangling Perplexities about the multilayered discourse on disability, where the monologue of personal narration intersects with drama, which implies polyvocal confrontation, negoti­ ation, and encounter. This is important to emphasize because, by saying that dis­ ability is socially imposed, the authors of Beauty is a Verb do not want to claim self-­identification as laissez-­faire esthetics of the self, where they can easily ex nihilo re-­write their identities, but they are illustrating a difficult, often painful, but possible and life-­saving process of negotiating. The beauty, and therefore also the “ugliness” of disability, is a verb, a process of dispute, encounter, communi­ cation, and consensus of what the abled body is. However, the process of tran­ scending the limits of bodily experience and the ability to eroticize the misshapen body is perfectly illustrated in the poem The Devotee by Jillian Weise: I loved the way you limped to the stage, Do you know you are beautiful? Do you feel beautiful during sex? What is it like? (Weise 2011, 147) An erotic encounter of non-­normal limbs calls into question what we consider to be sexual intercourse, which bodies are possible (and thus allowed) to enjoy sex­ uality, how bodies are gendered and sexualized if they are not proper bodies. It brings us to the key question of what it means to have a body and to be the body in the world surrounded by other bodies. No wonder that disability poetry is often trans-­medially performed through live performances and dance. Furthermore, the disabled way of moving through society and the world brings also a non-­normative movement through the language of poetry. Lyrical phrasing and poetic techniques deployed in the anthology also depict the differ­ ence in the embodiment in language. For example, the author Larry Eigner, who suffers from Cerebral Palsy, used his difficult physical condition to manipulate the space of the blank page depicting his physical state embodied in the lan­ guage. Being condemned only to use his one finger while typing, he shaped the space of the page, reflecting the difficulties of disabled people to move in actual space. Being continuously distanced from the space, the poetic form shows us that alienated ways of encountering the world create alienated experiences, which demand a different poetic form: the whole orchestra risen up into the air for dancing after the storm (Beauty is a Verb, 36) Beauty is a Verb is an important book for many reasons. Since disabled people are auctorial personas of their narratives, it is unfortunately common that

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Ethnography, Pedagogy, Performative Audiencing   31 nondisabled people write about disability. But, on the other hand, even more importantly, the anthology shows that the voice of a creep, of an abject monster, of a gimp and dwarf, can open our world with a different perspective, making us see our lived experience as culturally shaped bodily codes of health and disease. These “deviant” voices also remind us that we are all subjects to the physical erosion of our bodies and that unless we are willing to change the tune of the song which we have been singing so far, our canon of ability, beauty, and legi­ bility will always remain exclusionary and foreclosing. As Ferris writes in one of the most quoted poems from the anthology: Let me be a poet of cripples, of hollow men and boys groping to be whole, of girls limping toward womanhood and women reaching back. . . Look with care, look deep. Know that you are a cripple too. I sing for cripples; I sing for you. (Ferris 2011, 94)

Pedagogy In this section I deal with how I use insights from critical pedagogy to build links with the global movement of educational inclusion. My teaching practice is rooted in a conviction that pedagogy should be organized in such a way as to allow pedagogical subjects to construct themselves and their place in the world. With Susan Gabel, I share a view of pedagogy as “a living, breathing text of experience that allows the narration of pedagogical stories to take any turn and possess any value as long as they are the turns and values of the pedagogical narrators” (Susan Gabel 2002, 179). I endorse participatory, engaged pedagogy, which is open to resistance and dissent and, therefore, anticipates the vulner­ ability of all pedagogical subjects (students and teachers). Consequently, I believe in pedagogy that should not pre-­conceptualize pedagogical subjects in terms of the intersections they embody, such as nationality, age, ethnicity, race, sexuality or (dis)ability, but rather “let[s] them emerge within interactions in the pedagogical community” (Gabel 2002, 181). I thus follow the route already delineated by Lusted’s (1986) emphasis on interactive creativity in a pedagogical situation, Patti Lather’s (1991) emancipatory/liberating pedagogy, and bell hooks’ notion of caring for students and seeing them as “whole human beings” (1994, 15). All of these postmodernist approaches to teaching counter a peda­ gogy of assimilation and standardization, with its rigid categories of curriculum, instruction, and evaluation, without the spontaneous interactive moments and exchanges of all pedagogical actors. In his book Investigating Audiences, Andy Ruddock (2007) presents a survey of methodological concerns with regard to qualitative and quantitative methods of conducting audience research and points to the importance of “. . . the quality

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32   Untangling Perplexities of fit between research question, method and conclusions.” (Ruddock 2007, 29). One of these concerns is about the limitations of experimental methods of audi­ ence research, in particular all sorts of surveys and interviews of media audi­ ences, which many researchers find artificial. One cannot but agree with Ruddock that the question whether qualitative or quantitative methods are better in studying media audiences is of lesser importance, once we remember that “. . . research is always conducted by a specific person in a particular place and time . . .” (Ruddock 2007, 6). Before I move on to deal with the particular place and time of my research, it is worth mentioning that Ruddock’s book is concentrating on audiences of com­ munications media, which report on various political and social events, and entertainment shows, hardly touching on feature film audiences. Drawing on my experience with an intersectional classroom, I present in what follows the findings as regards the process and the outcome of the course “Inter­ sectionality and Audience Analysis in the Feminist Classroom,” which I was teaching in the fall and spring terms of 2010–2011, 2011–2012, 2012–2013, 2013–2014, 2014–2015, and in the fall term of 2015–2016 at the Women’s Studies Center, University of Łódź. I collected data for my research from stu­ dents, mostly from international students who were enrolled in the Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies Program (GEMMA), and who participated in my courses at the University of Łódź. The student popu­ lation in this program represented an assemblage of geographically, linguisti­ cally, racially, and ethnically diverse groups. Seven European institutions, all from the European Union member countries comprise GEMMA: the Univer­ sities of Bologna, Granada, Hull, Łódź, Oviedo, Utrecht, and the Central Euro­ pean University in Budapest, as well as the State University of New Jersey, Rutgers. The program lasts for four semesters and students choose a host and a mobility university and, having successfully completed the program, receive a double degree. It is mandatory for each student to take courses at the mobility university for at least one semester. In order to have data for comparative purposes I also included material from three other courses, which I was teaching in different programs. Two of them were conducted at the University of Łódź: a course on “Gender and Visual Culture” offered to Polish doctoral students in the spring term of 2012–2013 and 2013–2014, and a graduate course “Political Cinema” in the fall term of 2011–2012, 2012–2013, 2013–2014, and in the fall term of 2015–2016. While on a fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, I conducted an informal class in the spring term of 2010–2011, with a similar syllabus that I used in the course “Intersectionality and Audience Analysis in the Feminist Classroom.” The course was voluntarily chosen by students of film studies, gender studies, and psychology. The analytical material for this project was elicited from students during the course of each semester through a choice of methods that allowed me to engage with different levels of audience involvement. The collected data contains recorded classroom discussions, which were subsequently transcribed, and two

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Ethnography, Pedagogy, Performative Audiencing   33 types of written material: (a) weekly students’ journals with commentaries on assigned readings and films which students viewed before and during classes, and (b) students’ personal narratives in the form of written essays in which participants reflected on their personal experiences, recollections, and associ­ ations as well as remarks and observations that were evoked in them through participation in class discussions and film watching. The classroom discussions represented a more spontaneous, ad hoc form of students’ reactions to what they had seen on the screen and what they had read about in the assigned readings, the weekly journals, and especially the personal narratives, and made it possible to elicit more reflective data not only because both of these data elicitation methods required a written form, which allows more time to think things over and revise, but also they were less stressful than a face-­to-face classroom discussion. Data collection for this project began in the fall term of 2011 and ended in the spring term of 2016. Within this timeframe I taught 49 GEMMA students (each semester with different small seminar groups). From the second year of the project, I also taught a course on “Political Cinema” to the students of American Studies and Mass Media major, altogether 75 students, in which some segments of the “Intersectionality and Audience Analysis in the Feminist Classroom” course were repeated. An important remark to make at this point is that GEMMA students and students enrolled in the American Studies and Mass Media major represented very much the same, at least formally, level of advancement in their academic careers: in both groups, students who were admitted to these programs completed a program of study at the bachelor level. Finally, in the spring semes­ ter of 2013, fall semester 2014, and fall semester of 2015, I taught a postgraduate course “Gender in Visual Culture” to doctoral students, altogether 20 students. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, I carried out the project with a small group of three students at the University of California, Berkeley. Thus, the data for this project was elicited from 147 students. Needless to say, only a fraction of stu­ dents’ contributions in the form of journals and personal narratives found their way into the book. Differences in age, class, (dis)ability, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality characterized all communities of students from whom data was collected. I did not perform a quantitative, demographic analysis of the student population for that was not my aim. Suffice it to say that the overwhelming majority of students were women and that the youngest student was in the age category “under 20” while the oldest one in the category of “30+.” All students were informed about the aims of the project at hand, authorized me to disclose information about them exclusively for the purposes of this study and agreed to include their contribu­ tions, that is, recorded discussions, weekly journals, and personal narratives in the book.4 Before enrolling in the GEMMA Program, all of them had completed a course of studies of three or more years and were holders of B.A. Degrees in various fields of the humanities and social sciences, and some of them already held M.A.s or Ph.D.s in areas as diverse as philosophy, political science, inter­ national relations, literature, media studies, and medical studies.

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34   Untangling Perplexities When it comes to the courses I taught and which were foundational for this project, students first gained knowledge of intersectionality as theory and meth­ odology through assigned readings, my lectures, and discussion in class. Subse­ quently, they viewed a selection of films (one per class) and discussed each of them. These discussions were recorded and then transcribed. The language of instruction for all courses was English. At the end of the course, students delivered written journals and personal nar­ ratives, interlacing their intimate accounts with a commentary on the films. It is important to note that the films selected for watching in these courses, especially in the GEMMA Program, were picked by me, and these were largely the same films to be watched and discussed over the period of the duration of the project. However, the students also selected some films. This strategy proved very useful because, by inviting students to propose films that represented their national film industry, not only did it make it possible to watch and discuss films which raised issues relevant to the subject matter of the course that would have escaped my attention, as some of them represented quite exotic cultures and regions with which I was not familiar, but it also presented the opportunity for them to con­ tribute to the course structure. Usually, the “canonical films” for the courses were presented at the beginning of each semester so as to provide a conceptual basis for intersectional, feminist oriented analysis of a film vis-­à-vis readings and discussions on intersectionality, audiencing, etc. GEMMA students were, on the whole, well introduced into feminism in other courses, after all GEMMA is a program in gender and women’s studies. However, I also took advantage of the fact that GEMMA students represented a spectrum of a genderwise, racially, geographically, and culturally diverse body, ranging from Europe, to Africa, to North and South America, to Asia, and I invited them to choose a film of their own which would be representative for their region or country, and which would be addressing issues of intersectionality from a variety of points of view. This way, students in these courses were not only takers but also givers, and their contributions were invaluable. Film watching, I wish to stress, was the main source of thought-­provoking material for in-­class discussions and an inspiration for students to reflect on the films vis-­à-vis their own experiences. As will be seen in the subsequent parts of the book, in some of the personal narratives the authors disclose their very intimate experiences and write about personal matters, something they probably would have never done if not for the experience of participation in the course, its structure, and format.

Performative Audiencing The relationship(s) between the audience(s) and the performers have often been dealt with, predominantly with regard to theatrical performances, by a number of authors, to mention just a few of the most recent: Mark Schechner (2006), Jessica Santone (2014), Deborah Newton (2014), so that the term performative audience is well in vogue in the literature on the subject of the role of audiences

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in art performances in general, and in theatrical performances in particular. In his Performance Studies. An Introduction, Mark Schechner famously asked: “What about audience participation?” (2006, 104) while Deborah Newton (2014) has recently proposed to introduce a new term into the lexicon of performance studies: the Metacommunicative Performative Competence (MPC), which she defines as follows: MPC implies that both performer and audience go beyond meaning-­sharing to re-­define their roles as participant co-­constructors and, in so doing, arouse one another’s senses to achieve the performative state of co-­experience in the here and now. (2014, 4) Thus, the audience is treated on an equal footing with the performer and can assume an active role in constructing the performance event. Newton’s approach, as much as theatrical performance studies in general and Butler’s concept of gender performativity, is admittedly inspired by the performative turn of the 1960s which was initiated by J.L. Austin with his insistence on the performative character of some utterances with which speakers do things rather than report on the surrounding world. It is worth pointing out, however, that interest in the involvement of the audi­ ence in theatrical performances, the subjectivization of the audience, goes back to Jerzy Grotowski’s (an internationally renowned Polish theater director and theor­ etician) much cited, and translated into many languages, text entitled “Towards a poor theater” (a translation from the original Polish version, Grotowski 1965). Grotowski makes a sharp distinction between what he calls “poor theater” (in Polish teatr ubogi), a theater in which the performers and the spectators reign supreme and the “rich theater” which he ridicules as a poor version of film and television productions. Since Grotowski’s work is mainly known, I suspect, to researchers and students of theater, and not so much to those interested in film, it is good to present some of his ideas, especially that the selected excerpts from his “Towards a poor theater” bear directly on the performer–spectator relationship: In the first place, we are trying to avoid eclecticism, trying to resist thinking of theater as a composite of disciplines. We are seeking to define what is distinctively theater, what separates this activity from other categories of performance and spectacle. Secondly, our productions are detailed investi­ gations of the actor-­audience relationship. (Grotowski 1997, 28) In the next passage Grotowski is very critical of contemporary theater, that is, “the rich theater,” and prepares ground for making a case for his conception of “poor theater,” stripped of the unnecessary, in his view, burden of “literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, lighting, acting.” What remains then is the essence of theater, the actors, and the spectators.

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36   Untangling Perplexities It [theater] cannot exist without the actor-­spectator relationship of percep­ tual, direct, “live” communion. . . . It challenges the notion of theatre as a synthesis of disparate creative disciplines—literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, lighting, acting (under the direction of a metteur-­en-scene). This “synthetic theatre” is the contemporary theatre, which we readily call the “Rich Theatre”—rich in flaws. No matter how much theatre expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologically inferior to film and television. Con­ sequently, I propose poverty in theatre. We have resigned from the stage-­ and-auditorium plant: for each production, a new space is designed for the actors and spectators. Thus, infinite variation of performer-­audience rela­ tionships is possible. . . . The essential concern is finding the proper spectator-­actor relationship for each type of performance and embodying the decision in physical arrangements. (Grotowski 1997, 28–38) Another approach to the performer–spectator relationship is represented in an improvised theatrical form, “Playback Theatre,” in which a company of perform­ ers spontaneously enact autobiographical stories told to them by members of the audience.5 In Playback Theatre formula, a host, also referred to as conductor, invites audience members to the stage. Single members come forward and tell their personal stories that subsequently are enacted on the spot by actors and musicians. This strategy is intended to empower the audience; give their personal stories center stage, and create opportunities for an agreement or argument, and build a feeling of community.6 The first Playback Theatre performance took place in New London, Connecticut, in the spring of 1975. The audiences were friends and families of the actors, who gathered together to watch their life stories instantly performed by a team of professional actors. A history of personal “enacted” narrative dates back to the establishment of the Playback Theatre Company in 1975 and spans four decades. Playback Theatre is an improvised method, in which audiences can participate and tell their personal stories to an MC (master of ceremony) who, in turn, improvises with actors and musicians. Through this process, the teller’s story is “unlocked” and allows manifold perspectives and subject positions, none of which are final. The Playback Theatre’s method was designed to create the spontaneous use of professional actors’ standpoints. Rowe (2005, 1) criticizes the often-­laid claim that “performers playback the ‘essence’ of the tellers story.” Instead, he proposes that, “since the past is irre­ coverable and only capable of being signified through the complex mediation of memory and representation, playback theater shows how the actors, in their unavoidable partiality, respond to the story.” Indeed, Playback actors do not

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Ethnography, Pedagogy, Performative Audiencing   37 summarize on stage the story they have just heard, they do not report on it. They act the story out following their instinct as performers. The Playback format of theatrical performance has enjoyed much popularity with audiences at schools, prisons, and centers for the elderly. Through an examination of Playback performances from the perspectives of performers, “tellers” of the stories, and the audience, Nick Rowe critically explores the nature, implications, and ethics of the performers’ response to the teller’s experience. He demonstrates how notions of the public are constructed, as well as the risks involved in improvising a response to a member of the audi­ ence’s story. Rowe’s “Playing the Other” (2007) was essential reading for drama students, drama therapists, and all those interested in the history and use of the theater. Jonathan Fox, the founder of Playback Theatre, described the first Playback Theatre performance as follows: It is Sunday afternoon in winter, the early afternoon sky bright despite a cover of cloud. The light pours in through the big windows of the church hall, in the center of which are placed about thirty chairs facing a line of plastic milk crates. On one side of the crates sits a collection of musical instruments. On the other side, brightly colored cloth hangs from a wooden prop tree. The voices of children resound in the hall as their parents usher them in and help them off with their coats. In a back room I am with my actors. We are facing our first performance with a new company and a new approach called Playback Theatre. It is totally improvisational. Our objective is to act out, using mime, music, and spoken scenes, the personal stories of the audience. (Fox 1994, 1) Playback Theatre’s traits exhibit an ancient but also an original type of social engagement by including members of the audience and, giving them agency in the show, empowers them and supports others through story. Says Linda Park-­ Fuller (2003): Playback Theatre involves a blurring of roles where performers become audience members and audience members become performers; it provides a metaphorical language where performances “answer” performances; and it invites a performative method of research and reporting that features inter­ rogating over evaluating.  (2003, 288) I have sketched the above as an interlude to the following chapter, in which I explore the uses of performative writing/audiencing and, eventually, reverse this model because the students I have taught, first, audienced a selection of films and, subsequently, chose one or more they had watched in preparation for writing their personal narratives.

38   Untangling Perplexities

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Notes 1 I deliberately use the “metaphor machine,” to point out the mechanism of the “able” body. The bio-­medical notion of “health” often constructs the body as a self-­sustainable and self-­managing organic entity, whose functions operate “naturally.” Quite opposite, the system in which we live incites us to become non-­organic machineries, whose ability is measured by productiveness. 2 This anxiety of falling beneath the standards of the “proper subject” is interesting, because it can lead us to rethink the notion of disability in light of racism. Many colo­ nialist conquerors often wrote in their journals and letters about the “fear of going-­ native,” because it drives them below the human, changing not only their cultural stratum, but also their ontological stratum. Thus, “native” and “disabled” becomes a subhuman category in its threatening potentials to the human. 3 Economic structure and its impact on women in the neoliberal landscape have proven a mixed blessing to women. On the one hand, women gained access to the labor market; on the other, in some countries, working women are encouraged to have children but they are not provided with any kind of social security protection, which would help them endure the intersections of multiple oppressions. 4 Some students opted for full first names and others decided to be anonymous and pro­ posed to use a coded version, usually suggested in their questionnaire. 5 With more than ten years’ experience as an actor with Playback Theatre York, Nick Rowe introduces the reader to the basics of Playback Theatre within a historical and theoretical context. He relays the history and development of the form from its concep­ tion in the late 1970s to its subsequent growth worldwide, as well as its relationship to the psychodrama tradition from which it has evolved. 6 An even earlier version of narrative performance, known as Improvisational Theatre, often called “improv” or “impro,” was a form of theater where most or all of what is performed: dialogue, action, story, and the characters/actors are created collectively on the spot by the players akin to the improvisation advances in present time. Modern improv/impro origins of narrative performance incorporate Jerzy Grotowski’s work in Poland in the 1950s and early 1960s, and, to name just a few, Peter Brook’s “happen­ ings” in England in the 1960s, Augusto Boal’s performances in South America in the 1970s, and The Diggers performances in the 1960s.

Bibliography Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press. Black, Sheila. 2011. “What You Mourn.” In Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Dis­ ability, edited by Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen, 212–213. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. Black, Sheila, Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen, eds. 2011. Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York and London: Routledge. Dossa, Parin. 2005. “Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: ‘they [service providers] always saw me as a client, not as a worker.’ ” In Social Science & Medicine 60, no. 11: 2527–2536. Ferris, Jim. 2007. “Crip poetry or how I learned to love the limp.” In Wordgathering. A Journal of Disability Poetry. Vol 1. Issue 2. June. www.wordgathering.com/past-­ issues/issue 2/essay/ferris.html (accessed January 2016).

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Ethnography, Pedagogy, Performative Audiencing   39 Ferris, Jim. 2011. “Poet of Cripples.” In Beauty Is a Verb. The New Poetry of Disability, edited by Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen 94–95. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. Fox, Jonathan. 1994. Acts of Service: Spontaneity, Commitment, Tradition in the Nonscripted Theatre. New Paltz: Tulsitalia Publishing. Gabel, Susan. 2002. “Some Conceptual Problems with Critical Pedagogy.” In Curriculum Inquiry 32, no. 2: 178–201. Garland-­Thompson, Rosemarie. 2005. “Feminist Disability Studies: A Review Essay.” In Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 2: 1557–1587. Grotowski, Jerzy. 1965. “Ku teatrowi ubogiemu.” In Odra 9: 21–27. Grotowski, Jerzy. 1997. Towards a Poor Theatre. In The Grotowski Sourcebook, edited by Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford, 28–38. New York: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice to Freedom. New York and London: Routledge. Kaier, Anne. 2011. “River Creature.” In Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, edited by Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen, 228–232. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. Lather, Patti. 1991. Getting Smart. Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern. New York and London: Routledge. Liasidou, Anastasia. 2012. “Inclusive Education and Critical Pedagogy at the Intersec­ tions of Disability, Race, Gender and Class.” In Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 10, no. 1: 168–184. Lusted, David. 1986. “Why Pedagogy?” In Screen 27, no. 5: 2–14. Miller, Vassar. 2011. “Dramatic Monologue in the Speaker’s Own Voice.” In Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, edited by Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen, 53–54. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. Newton, Deborah. 2014. “Performativity and the Performer–Audience Relationship: Shifting Perspectives and Collapsing Binaries.” In The SOAS Journal of Postgraduate Research, 7: 3–13. Nussbaum, Martha. 2004. Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press. Park-­Fuller, Linda. 2003. “Audiencing the Audience: Playback Theatre, Performative Writing, and Social Activism.” In Text and Performance Quarterly 23, no. 3: 288–310. Rowe, Nick. 2005. Personal Stories in Public Places: An Investigation of Playback Theatre. New Paltz: Centre for Playback Theatre. www.playbacktheatre.org/wp-­content/uploads/ 2010/04/Rowe-­Personal-Stories-­in-Public-­Places.pdf (accessed September 2015). Rowe, Nick. 2007. Playing the Other: Dramatizing Personal Narratives in Playback Theatre. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Ruddock, Andy. 2007. Investigating Audiences. London: Sage. Russel, Marta. 2002. Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of Social Contract. Monroe: Common Courage Press. Russel, Marta, and Ravi Malhotra. 2002. “Capitalism and Disability.” In Socialist Register 38: 211–228. Santone, Jessica. 2014. “The Economics of the Performative Audience.” In Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts. 19, no. 6: 30–36. Schechner, Mark. 2006. Performance Studies. An Introduction. London: Routledge. Weise, Jillian. “The Devotee.” In Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, edited by Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen, 147–148. El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press.

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2 Writing and Audiencing

Performative Writing Good performative writing is akin to art: it tells a story which is personal, often painful, but is delivered in good style and involves emotions. It has a long history in performance studies, anthropology, and feminist writing. As Della Pollock (1998) argues, performative writing conjures up worlds that are otherwise impalpable: “worlds of pleasure, sensation, imagination, affect, and in-­ sight” (1998, 80). Performative writing “dramatizes the limits of language, sometimes as endgame, other times as jouissance” (1998, 83). Performative writing is subjective, and paved the way to personal narratives. Personal experience stories are first-­person narratives usually created by the  tellers who convey and reflect on real-­life events in their lives. These stories are appropriated by their writers because they are responsible for identifying in their lives elements that are “story worthy,” thus bringing “their perception of those experiences together with the conventions of ‘story’ in appropriate contexts and thus creating identifiable, self-­contained narratives” (Sandra Dolby-­Stahl 1983, 268). In other words, their writing performances constitute enactments of their own experiences; thus, in this context writing is comparable with “audiencing,” “viewing,” or “spectating” in that it is indicative of the writer’s involvement in the performance of film watching. According to Dolby-­Stahl (1983, 80–94) performative writing can be described in terms of six characteristic features: 1 2 3 4

First, performative writing is evocative. It “brings the reader into contact with other worlds” which are intangible, the worlds of sensation, imagination, and pleasure. Second, performative writing is metonymic in that it demonstrates longing for something that disappeared in the past. Third, performative writing is subjective because it represents a dynamic relation between the writers and their subjects or readers. Fourth, performative writing is nervous in crossing theories, stories, and spheres of practice.

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6

Fifth, performative writing is citational, as it describes the world that is already performative, that is, “. . . composed in and as repetition or reiteration.” Finally, performative writing is consequential. It brings about effects that are comparable to J.L. Austin’s early distinction between constative and performative utterances.

Audiencing Initially, film studies research was modeled on literary criticism. It was a purely esthetic discipline; its study methods, such as textual analysis, were likewise borrowed from literature (e.g. Molly Haskell 1973). When audience research re-­ emerged in the late 1970s,1 it also appropriated literary methods of analysis: semiotics, and psychoanalysis. One of the major figures of this movement was Laura Mulvey (1975), who championed psychoanalytic feminist film theory and the voyeuristic male gaze, which garnered both applause and criticism.2 The male gaze, depicting a cinema viewing mechanism, was coined by Laura Mulvey in an essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” published in the British film journal Screen in 1975. Using psychoanalytic and semiological theories, Mulvey delved into a complex relationship between spectator and film text. She studied a number of classical Hollywood films in order to unveil a viewing apparatus whereby the male gaze, equipped with political, economic, social, and sexual power, consigns women to silence, marginality, and absence. In conventional narrative films, argues Mulvey, men are “bearers of the look” whereas women connote “to-­be-looked-­at-ness.” This is accomplished in a three-­step process: the look of the camera involved in recording the pre-­filmic event, the male character within the narrative, and the spectator who identifies with a male protagonist on screen. In the essay, Mulvey consistently used the masculine pronoun he to refer to the spectator. The essentialist binarism of Mulvey’s argument was challenged by a number of critics who pointed out that, in the signifying practices of the text, masculinity is not always aligned with activity. Nor is femininity permanently equated with passivity. Steve Neale (1983) questions Mulvey’s assertion that men are never sexually objectified within the space of the film, noting a voyeuristic gaze directed at male characters by other men in westerns and epic films. Jackie Stacey (1987) makes a similar contention regarding women and explores erotic exchanges of looks between female characters in contemporary, as well as classical, Hollywood films. Other commentators suggest that gender is not the only factor in determining subject positions in spectatorship. Race, ethnicity, class, nationality, sexuality, etc. are also key factors. hooks (1992) politicizes looking relations by actively proposing a viewing strategy, an “oppositional gaze,” that would negotiate hegemonic norms and values both in spectatorship and filmmaking. The option of an interrogating gaze, of looking back, of appropriating a visual space, of naming what is seen—in other words, creating a space for agency—became a key issue of the debate on looking relations in the 1990s.

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42   Untangling Perplexities “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was the subject of much interdisciplinary discussion among film theorists, that continued into the mid-­1980s. Critics of Mulvey’s article pointed out that her argument implies the impossibility of the enjoyment of classical Hollywood cinema by women, and that her argument did not seem to take into account spectatorship organized along normative gender lines. Mulvey addresses these issues in her later 1981 article, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” in which she argues a metaphoric “transvestism” whereby a female viewer might oscillate between a male-­coded and a female-­coded analytic viewing position. These ideas led to theories of how gay, lesbian, and bisexual spectatorship might also be negotiated. Her article was written before the findings of the later wave of media audience studies on the complex nature of fan cultures and their interaction with stars. Queer theory, such as that developed by Richard Dyer, has grounded its work in Mulvey to explore the complex projections that many gay men and women fix onto certain female stars, for example, Marlene Dietrich, Doris Day, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, and Liza Minnelli. Towards the end of the twentieth century, scholars turned their interest from the semiotics of static textual meanings encoded in film texts and the “implied” or “ideal” viewer (Sonia Livingstone 1998) to actual film audiences. Early spectatorship theory, pioneered by Jackie Stacey (1994), adopted ethnography as a research instrument, at that time used primarily by anthropologists, in order to study real audiences, not the film.3 Stacey’s method of studying audiences resorted to instruments commonly used in ethnographic research such as interviews, questionnaires, etc. The diversification of viewers as study objects constituted the next step, and by changing the focus from “audience” to “audiencing” (John Fiske 1992) deftly captured the process of generating and circulating meanings encoded in film and decoded as well as discovered by an individual viewer. Thus, audiencing draws attention to individual viewers who bring in their life experience while interpreting meanings encoded in a filmic work. John Fiske’s initial groundbreaking article contends that culture is an endless process of the social flow of meanings, and that audiencing is a fraction of this process. Fiske offers a short historical and economic background of the situation comedy Married . . . with Children, and records the controversy about its values. The show attracted a particular group of audience members: teenage students and young adults who assembled together on a regular basis. Married . . . with Children opened in the U.S. in 1987 on the Fox network. Two years later, Fox’s top-­rated show attracted 21 million viewers. The sitcom’s carnivalesque reversal of “normal family values” and its pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex were replicated by the audience. However, it provoked heated criticism from the pro-­family viewers. A wealthy campaigner, Terry Rakolta, attained publicity by demanding the withdrawal of the program “on the grounds that it resembled soft-­core pornography,” but in the U.S. the sitcom aired for ten years and it enjoyed popularity in a number of countries.4

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Writing and Audiencing   43 Fiske presents three approaches that can be considered in grasping the audience of the sitcom: Fox’s economic category of a segment in the market defined by the consumers; Mrs. Rakolta’s conservative values; and the students’ audiencing as the process of “producing, through lived experience, of their own sense of their social identities and social relations, and of the pleasures that this process gave them” (Fiske 1992, 253). Increasingly, people’s involvement in audiencing has become a critical way in which they experience their citizenship. Their social status as citizens of a particular class, (dis)ability, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, is “mediated through their audiencehood” (Livingstone 1998, 197).5 As Livingstone argues: While people obviously exist prior to any particular engagement with media, this position seems crucially to underplay the extent to which the media are implicated in the formation of contemporary discourses, both directly in people’s media-­immersed lives and indirectly in the sense that cultural discourses are fundamentally formed within a mediated environment. (1998, 212) We might further expand this viewpoint by indicating, after Barker (2006), that audiencing has already commenced, prior to actual spectating experience, when people accumulate knowledge and expectations, and form their social identities and relations. Audiences carry their personal pasts with them which continue after the cinematic event as the “audiencing encounter is given a place . . . sometimes providing the (cognitive, affective, emotional, sensual, imaginative) resources for conceiving self and the world” (Martin Barker 2006, 124). In the same paper Barker points to some inadequacies of audience research, of which the most relevant for my interests is his singling out of a tendency to ascribe various qualities to audiences without actually researching these audiences. In short, making predictions about audiences on the basis of speculation, instead of on empirical research. Reinforcing these opinions, the book proposes a novel approach to the empirical investigation of audiencing. So far, it has not been documented how interconnections between various social differentials, such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, (dis)ability, and sexuality intersect in a particular lived experience and shape the reception of visual texts, as well as providing audiences with a standpoint to query the dominant hegemony and actively oppose it. The goal in this book is to document how a critical analysis of films empowers the audience, in the case of my project, the students, and gives them incentive to oppose normalizing power effects. I would now like to return to Sutton’s (2004) article, which I briefly alluded to in the Introduction, to note a weakness in Sutton’s account. However, it is worth pointing out that for an author who so strongly stresses the importance of spectators’ active participation in film watching, his conclusions are subjective opinions of a critic, undoubtedly correct and inspiring, but they are not supported by research on the actual response of the spectators. What constitutes his

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44   Untangling Perplexities “analysis” are his own impressions about the film The Pillow Book, which he tends to generalize and universalize as the audience’s view. Therefore, it strikes me that his approach can be productively enriched by the intersectional method of the analysis of a real audience, which would take into account real data, not speculations, to explain the different dynamics of afterwardsness from the perspective of different subjectivities. For example: a child from a working-­class family will not have the same dynamics of retroactive remaking of the plot of Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as another child from an upper-­middle-class family, who happens to be a person of color, even though they might sit next to one another in the darkened room of a cinema theater, after having paid the same price for their tickets. A disabled woman or one who is a victim of domestic violence will enact a process of resignification of Lars von Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark differently than male spectators. Sutton’s stand on subjectivity and auto-­translation is convincing. However, he clearly realizes that the spectatorial paradigm that he proposed in his essay is but one attempt to push forward the theory of active audiencing. The model of spectatorship he offers for Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1995) is limited to textual analysis, and the active spectator is the critic/researcher—in this case, Sutton himself. While his article constitutes a formerly missing link between afterwardsness as psychoanalytic theory (both Freud’s and Laplanche’s) and film, it does not advance knowledge on active spectatorship. The only way to attain this goal is to engage with real and not only possible or imagined audiences in order to gain knowledge and draw conclusions about what a particular audience’s experience with a film had been. In my view, one of the possibilities to study audiences is to approach audiencing as a study combined with the lived experience of the spectators, which inevitably leads to a certain atomization of the results of the research thus conceived, since every spectator’s lived experience is different. This is especially important if it is further assumed, as I do, that the lived experience of the spectators is best approached from the perspective of intersectionality. Here again, spectators display a variety of intersections and it might be interesting to see to what extent and how the spectators identify with the intersections represented in a film. My interest in this book is somewhat different. I have concentrated on selected films whose central theme is depicting either an intersection, for example, a disability or sexual orientation, or the leading motif of the film is social exclusion or some other type of social disorder. Understandably, in many cases the films selected for this project focus on an array of intersections or, better said, they exhibit as many intersections as the spectators can identify with them. The next step is to see how the audience’s, that is, my students’ lived experience relates to the films they had watched. To get access to my audience’s reactions I have employed two instruments; both of them took a written format: a more immediate response, a journal which was to be presented within a week or two after the film watching and a more reflective one, a personal narrative to be completed by the end of the semester and which was selected at each student’s discretion. In the majority of cases, students were guided in their selection

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Writing and Audiencing   45 by the extent to which the film they decided to write the narrative on coincided in some way with their lived experience. There was also a preparatory phase before the journal was presented, a discussion immediately following the screening of every film. These discussions were recorded and later transcribed and some of them, one per film, included in the book. And so, Passion Fish is the source material to represent intersections of dis­ ability, race, and social status, while in A Single Man it is sexuality. La Source des Femmes is a mine of intersections, such as sexuality, misogyny, religion, colonialism. The women in The Joy Luck Club reordered the puzzles in the game of mahjong while they also reordered their narrative subjectivities. Fremde Haut has two intersections: sexuality and citizenship. The Sweet Hereafter is another mine of intersections: disability, sexuality, trauma. One problem with the above approach, which assumes that for each film under the analysis the audience will be able to identify at least one intersection, or a number of them, is that no one has proposed yet, to the best of my knowledge, a list of intersections from which it would be possible to pick the ones which one finds represented in a film. If that were the case, it would be enough to make the audience, that is, the students in the case of my project, pick from the “basket full of intersections,” and proceed with identifying them in a film. Things are not that easy, given the fact that intersections may well constitute an infinite set.

Notes 1 Commercial audience research, which was initiated in Great Britain in the 1930s and 1940s and was restricted mainly to participant observation, has now been criticized on several counts, one of them being that it reveals very little about why and how people use mass media. Neither does it analyze the consequences of that use. See Webster, Phalen, and Lichty (2006). 2 In Laura Mulvey’s scheme, classical American cinema prefers the male perspective of reception both on the narrative level (male plots, strong male characters) and the visual level. The woman in the classical film is the object of the “male gaze”; she constitutes a coded convention—a signifier, and, as such, she represents an ideological meaning only for men. The “woman as woman” equals visual void, absence, lack (Mulvey 1975). However, it is important to remember not only that Mulvey refers exclusively to an early Hollywood film in her initial article, but also that she subsequently provided a corrective to her 1975 article, which simplifies the makeup and responses of an audience. See “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by Duel in the Sun (1946).” 3 Unlike ethnographically oriented anthropologists who observe/work with their subjects over a lengthy period of time, Stacey uses the method as it is practiced in audience analysis, that is, through interviews, letters, and questionnaires. 4 Married . . . with Children aired in the following countries: Australia, Argentina, Austria, Belgium (Flanders), Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Latvia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Venezuela. 5 See Sholle (1991, 80–89) and Meers (2001, 134–144).

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Bibliography Barker, Martin. 2006. “I Have Seen the Future and It Is Not Here Yet . . .; or, On Being Ambitious For Audience Research.” In The Communication Review 9, no. 2: 123–141. Dolby-­Stahl, Sandra. 1983. “Personal Experience Stories.” In Handbook of American Folklore, edited by Richard M. Dorson, 268–276. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fiske, John. 1992. “Audiencing: A Cultural Studies Approach to Watching Television.” In Poetics 21: 345–359. Haskell, Molly. 1973. From Reverence to Rape. The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. hooks, bell. 1992. “Oppositional Gaze.” Chap. 7 in Black Looks. Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press. Livingstone, Sonia. 1998. “Audience Research at the Crossroads: The ‘Implied Audience’ in Media and Cultural Theory.” In European Journal of Cultural Studies 1, no. 2: 193–217. Meers, Philippe. 2001. “Is There an Audience in the House?: New Research Perspectives on (European) Film Audiences.” In Journal of Popular Film and Television, no. 3: 138–144. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Screen 16, no. 3: 6–18. Mulvey, Laura. 1981. “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” In Framework 10: 3–10. Neale, Steve. 1983. “Masculinity as Spectacle.” In Screen 24, no. 6: 2–16. Pollock, Della. 1998. “Performing Writing.” In The Ends of Performance, edited by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, 73–103. New York: NYU Press. Rowe, Nick. 2005. Personal Stories in Public Places: An Investigation of Playback Theatre. New Paltz: Centre for Playback Theatre. www.playbacktheatre.org/wp-­ content/uploads/2010/04/Rowe-Personal-Stories-in-Public-Places.pdf (accessed September 2015). Russel, Marta. 2002. Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of Social Contract. Monroe: Common Courage Press. Russel, Marta and Ravi Malhotra. 2002. “Capitalism and Disability.” In Socialist Register 38: 211–228. Sholle, David. 1991. “Reading the Audience, Reading Resistance: Prospects and Problems.” In Journal of Film and Video 43, no. 1–2: 80–89. Spencer, Liese. 1996. “Antonia’s Line.” Sight and Sound 6, no. 9, 34–35. Stacey, Jackie. 1987. “Desperately Seeking Difference.” In Screen 28, no. 1: 48–61. Stacey, Jackie. 1994. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. New York and London: Routledge. Sutton, Paul. 2004. “Afterwardsness in Film.” In Journal For Cultural Research 8, no. 3: 385–405. Webster, James, Patricia Phalen, and Lawrence Lichty. 2006. Ratings Analysis: The Theory and Practice of Audience Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Part II

Playful Transformations

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3 Filming Difference

This chapter examines seven films, out of several others that were viewed and discussed in class over the period of the duration of the project, which served as topics of debate in the classroom. This in turn was a preparatory exercise for students to write their journals, and finally their personal narratives. I have alternated films depending on student audiences, avoiding mainstream (Hollywood) films and searching for diverse national cinema: Antonia’s Line (Marlene Gorris, 1995), A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009), Fremde Haut [Unveiled] (Angelina Maccarone, 2005), La Source des Femmes (Radu Mihăileanu, 2011), Passion Fish (John Sayles, 1992), The Joy Luck Club (Wayne Wang, 1993), and The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan, 1997). In this chapter I also present recorded discussions about each of the seven films in order to demonstrate the flow of arguments and controversies among students that significantly influenced the ambience in the class. I begin with synopses and diegeses of films and, subsequently, pass to transcriptions of classroom discussions among students. The function of presenting both synopses and diegeses of the films that were used in all three courses (“Intersectionality and Audience Analysis in the Feminist Classroom” for doctoral students and GEMMA students and “Political Cinema” for MA students) that I taught to various groups of students, as described earlier, is not only to set the narrative background for each film and thus bring the films closer to the reader, which is worth doing in its own right, because some of them might be quite unknown to some readers. But it is also important to bear in mind that the interpretation of each film, the diegeses, was arrived at in class discussions, in an exchange of views among students and myself and was enriched by students’ written contributions in the form of journals and personal narratives. The decoding of each film was therefore negotiated among all participants of the viewing audience, including myself, and is thus another example of participatory pedagogy. I have to stress again that my thinking about the films owes much to my students.

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Antonia’s Line

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Synopsis Antonia’s Line (originally Antonia, 1995), directed by a Dutch feminist film director Marlene Gorris, is an enchanting feminist fairy tale that won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film in 1996. It is a fable on what could be perceived as feminism beyond the waves. In it, a spectator will not find the austerity of the second wave or the frivolity of the third generation. Unlike Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), designed, among other things, as an allusion to the emptiness and shallowness of chick culture, Antonia’s Line presents a world in which joyful, affirmative feminism is appropriated by all. A feminist utopia, one might say? Perhaps. But, in the words of one reviewer, how different from the “po-­faced, airbrushed, body-­double business of the Hollywood feature” (Spencer 1996, 35). Antonia’s Line begins as the title character (Willeke van Ammelrooy) is about to die and reviews her past. She arrives with her daughter, Danielle (Els Dottermans), at her native village, after World War II, to find her mother dying. Soon they settle down, and Antonia begins gathering around her all kinds of oddballs: a farm laborer, Looney Lips (Jan Steen); a village philosopher, Crooked Finger (Mil Seghers); a fertile “fallen woman,” Letta (Wimie Wilhelm); a rape victim, Deedee (Marina de Graaf ); and Russian woman Olga (Fran Waller Zeper), whose red hair makes her look like a Toulouse Lautrec prostitute (Jaehne 1996). By the film’s end, there will be four generations of Antonia’s line and a sizable community gathered at her deathbed. Relying on paintings by Brueghel, Bosch, Van Eyck to Rembrandt, and Vermeer (Jaehne 1996) as intertexts, time in Antonia’s Line is measured by cycles of nature, harvesting crops, sex, births, and deaths. Early in the film, Danielle wants to have a baby without having to marry. She and her mother go to a neighboring town and meet Letta who suggests that Danielle and Letta’s brother have sex. In due time, Danielle gives birth to a daughter, Thérèse. In a film that disrupts all categories, where almost every episode brings new intersections, the only character that is explicitly labeled is Thérèse. She is a child prodigy.

Diegesis The utopian thought of Western civilization has always been concerned with its sustainability in terms of keeping death, the ugliness of life, otherness, and dark separated from the borders of an encapsulated ideal world. All the imperfections of life are to be kept away from the pastoral and rationally constructed eu-­topia (an imagined, ideal place, different from the reality). Nevertheless, what seems to haunt Western utopian thought is the constant motif of shadow, a ghostly sign  of flaw within the utopia itself, a threat for an ideal construction of the world. Ever since Virgil, Moore, Swift, and many other Western male utopian writers, the topos of death, shadow, dark, and decay has represented a tragic

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Filming Difference   51 impossibility of an ideal community, indicating that utopia is constantly doomed to fail. Virgil’s verses In Arcadia Sum are echoed by Western artistic tradition and its obsession with the purity of a utopian world, where the shadow of death always interferes to spoil the ideally imagined world, which would eradicate all the human presence in its flaws. Antonia’s Line in that sense does provide an imagery of pastoral utopia: an alternative female community, located in rural areas after the war. The fact that the plot is situated after World War II only emphasizes the utopian dimension of the movie; the female community is thus extended to peace-­building: the masculine order of aggression, war, rape, violence is to be transformed and replaced by female solidarity, mutual understanding, wholehearted participation in the life of the community, and mutual support. The fact that the rapist in the movie is portrayed as a soldier only proves my point that the female utopia in the film is to provide an alternative to the violence of the masculine. Nevertheless, Antonia’s Line does not provide an enclosed, hermetically sealed utopia. The women in the film interact, go out to the city, change the gender roles within the city itself (Antonia’s daughter sexually exploits a macho male figure to get what she wants), the violent rapist also returns to the village (therefore, the borders are porous and flexible), the granddaughters go to school, protesting against university authorities, etc. The village community does not survive out of building walls to ensure the fortress of their world, but on the contrary, it reopens to different aspects of life in all its contradictions . . . and death. Many characters die in this utopia; they do not become immortal while participating in the peaceful community of feminine symbolic order: nobody becomes impervious to death. However, death itself is perceived not as we are accustomed to see it in our Western tradition: instead of a traumatic rupture of ordinary functioning, death in Antonia’s Line is given as a part of life. This does not mean that death’s sad and mournful effects are gone: all the characters suffer after the death of their beloved ones. But this does not fill them with an anxiety for life but makes them tell the stories of their loved ones, thus making the lives of their (female) ancestors continue throughout generations.

Transcription of the Class Discussion on Antonia’s Line Some discussants are represented by their first names and some just by letters, according to how they filled out the appropriate question in the questionnaire. D:

I just told you that I’d like to be a member of that family. It’s just so ideal, like I’ve told Lan, it’s the most accepting family. Whatever you want to do, the family members will support you. She built this community of diverse individuals, and the only rule was love and acceptance. It’s really wonderful. Lan: It’s like a kingdom. Mohamed: No. When she came it was not a kingdom, then she started to build that kingdom. And what’s the genre of the film?

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Lan: Drama. D: No, comedy. Lan: No. I don’t think it’s a comedy. D: It’s a comedy. I was laughing all the time. Lan: I didn’t laugh at all. Marine: The dead people rising, sitting in the coffin. What do you call this? D: I don’t know. Usually, it’s not a funny thing when someone is dying in

the movie, and usually it’s really sad. But I was like “What on earth is she doing?” Gorris is a radical feminist. She made a movie in which two prostitutes killed a client. Lan: What was the title of the movie? A Question of Silence (1982). D: A Question of Silence . But she’s from the Netherlands, isn’t she? Marine: Yes, the setting is a village in the Netherlands, but there is this convention of a fable here. For instance, characters speak two kinds of Dutch, which doesn’t happen in real life. There is a different kind of Dutch in the south, different kind of Dutch in the north, and there is a mixture in the film. Lan: It would have been more interesting if there was one male in Antonia’s Line. D: Yes, it would have been more interesting, I think. Probably one of them is gay. Lan: And there is a lesbian, Danielle. D: Yeah. I was just thinking that probably it would be more interesting if one of them was a man, and it would be more interesting to see how this man would blend into the family of strong women. Marine: Crooked Finger is a sweet guy, except he is so sad. D: I think he’s more than that. He’s got all these philosophies with him which is, I think, the very reason why he’s to bring some contrast that, you know, this is a village life, it’s supposed to be conventional, and then there’s someone very theoretical, very philosophical. The one that negotiates between the conventional village life and this high theorist here. And the only communication he has with the village is Antonia and her children. In that manner, it is actually Antonia’s line. She’s like the channel of communication that connects theory and practice. I’m really fascinated with how this is discussed in the movie. First of all, he is not sad at all. Then, when he wrote that letter, it was a sad letter but, at the same time, he cannot go on anymore with this life. There’s another one, Madonna, I don’t know, what do you think of her role in the movie? It’s so sad. Marine: She’s like the mad woman in the attic. Mohamed: But contextually, after World War II, there was this shift from convention into science, and he launched his ideas about science and genealogy of human beings. That’s why I’m saying that the philosopher was there to criticize that shift because what he got from life was just pain. In the end he said that. Especially, when Thérèse, who had been raped, was in a position to decide whether to give birth to Sarah or not. Marine: There was this Dutch student who said that the language they spoke in the movie came from very different geographical regions of Holland.

Filming Difference   53

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D: Maybe it’s intentional. Mohamed: Yeah, Dutch is almost like English. D: Really? Mohamed: Yeah. English stemmed from Dutch

at the age of the Tudors. Tudors ruled the British at that time, so English was a mix. Tudors came from Germany and Holland. Marine: There were regional languages in the film. So it was a mixture: Dutch regional languages. There was the language of the plains, and the language of the hill. On the basis of all these different details, she formed this kind of conclusion that this is actually unreal. It’s like a fable, like a fairy tale for grown-­ups of course. And there is the Catholic Church, and a priest, who quits eventually and is riding his bike and laughing. Catholicism is observed only in some parts of the Netherlands. We also mentioned Thérèse, Antonia’s granddaughter. In the movie she is depicted as a child prodigy. D: I think there is another thing that the movie is showing; you only face this horrible type of death if you do something horrible. Marine: Like drowning the guy? D: Yeah, and by his brother. Marine: Sorry, but he was hardly a human being. D: He was a monster. Marine: Yes, you know, Antonia came with a gun to kill him but, eventually, she didn’t kill him, and the guys took the matter in their hands. Mohamed: But other young people revenged. His brother was just sitting in the door. He had no idea. D: I think that the beauty of this community is that when something happens, they will all know. That’s why I think the brother is aware that he raped Thérèse. But of course for the brother the motivation is not only that he is a rapist, there are other things. He came back and suddenly he’s the master of the house. Well, money matters but, at the same time, the brother also knew that he was a rotten guy. Mohamed: But let’s check for the date of the film: 1995. It’s very typical for this kind of militant feminism because this was the second wave, and there was a handful of films that were using this militant feminism. It’s not as militant as The Question of Silence or Broken Mirrors. Antonia’s Line is her, sort of, way of getting rid of this violence. Well, actually, Gorris herself called the movie a fairy tale. D: I don’t know but there is The Muslim Women’s Center in the Philippines and it’s actually full of this community organizing against violence: Muslim women organizing Muslim women. Muslim women are working with Muslim women but they actually don’t go to their houses. You don’t go inside the house and tell the husband “hey, you will lose all your authority.” You don’t work like that. And it’s been growing through the years, so it’s been really good. Mohamed: Yeah, but you know, Islamic countries are completely different from Western ones, even from the Philippines.

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D:

But what I’m trying to say is that you can get those ideas that might be beneficial for you. Mohamed: Yeah, for instance in Morocco we have two kinds of feminism. We have secular feminism that most ideas are coming from western countries, and we have Islamic feminism, OK? So there is a clash between these two trends of feminism. It’s hard to convince both of them to come to a conciliation. If an Islamic feminist started to publish a book about how to enhance the situation of women in Morocco, then the secular feminists would say: “I think they want us to go back to old traditions, to pre-­Islamic context.” This is how it goes. That’s why the situation of women in Islamic countries is always the same and it’s not going to change unless you combine these two trends of feminism. D: But if they are so different, why do you need reconciliation? The only thing you can do is work with as many women as possible. In the Philippines, we have all strands of feminism. They’re so different but, for example, in congress, we have congressional representatives. They fight all the time but when it comes to producing a bill, they form a strategic alliance. Mohamed: Well, nowadays in Morocco, they are facing the problem of rape. Islamic feminists would say that the blame must be put on women because they leave their houses and they make-­up to allure males in the streets. Secular people would say “no, don’t listen to them.” It’s a hotly debated issue and we need to think about a solution because our daughters, our sisters are being raped. But nothing happens although they are discussing such kinds of topics in the parliament. But the rapist is not always sentenced, and there is no law to protect women who are raped.

A Single Man Synopsis Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009), loosely based on Christopher Isherwood’s novella (1964) of the same title, depicts a single day, the 30th of November 1962, in the life of George Falconer (Colin Firth), a middle-­aged professor at a small college in Los Angeles. Bereft by his partner’s death eight months earlier in an accident and desperately longing for him, George plans to end his life. On that day, he goes about his habitual activities: teaches a class, withdraws money from the bank, talks with a student, stops at a bar, and visits an old friend and former lover, Charlie (Julianne Moore). However, the day is far from wanting because George takes steps to get ready for a suicide. The most noticeable visual aspect of the film is the change of colors and their saturation. It navigates spectators through George’s experiencing of the world. We have no doubt whether it is a reminiscence of the protagonist’s joyful past or rather depressive presence. Slow motion along with multiple close-­ups make one think of George as an observer who pays attention to details in human interaction and who considers relations with other people as vital and of the utmost importance.

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Filming Difference   55 George’s story is, however, much more than a drama about losing a loved one. It perfectly illustrates interrelations between the private and the public sphere. The very fact that George is homosexual provokes some reflection on the socio-­political situation of the 1960s; starting from his being persona non grata at his partner’s funeral, through (still so much present) heteronormativity visible in a scene with a shop assistant and closing with George’s comment on topics which are to be passed over in silence during the literature course.1 Falconer’s lecture on Huxley is interrupted by the explanation of how fear works in societies and why people are afraid of invisible minorities. He gets carried away when he states that the Nazis did not hate Jews without a reason. The use of Aldous Huxley’s writings in dialogue perfectly combines with the omnipresent sense of isolation and solitude: We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-­transcendence; in vain. (Huxley 1954, 3) And Kenny, George’s student, says: “I’ve always felt this way. I mean, we’re born alone, we die alone. And while we’re here, we are absolutely, completely sealed in our own bodies.” Notwithstanding comments on Firth’s admirable acting, the film received mixed reviews. Critics complained that it did not match the prototype, Isherwood’s novella, which was one of the first works of the gay liberation movement. My students’ reactions to the film were likewise also mixed. They noted its constructed nature and the affinity between its cinematography and Ford’s sexist, misogynist advertisements.

Diegesis The film depicts a single day in a single man’s life engulfed by loneliness, grief, a feeling of fatality, and silent mourning. George’s last day is filmed as a numb routine in which he gets up, performs the morning rituals of dressing up, showering, eating, preparing notes for class, getting into a car, ordering coffee, smoking a cigarette or two, having random conversations with a gorgeous hustler and flirty curious student. He also enjoys an evening with his old lover, also an expatriate, like himself. As the whole day of encounters and impeccably performed rituals ends up, George has a heart attack and dies. The ending strikes as melancholic irony, since George is planning to commit a suicide the entire day, but what seems to be distracting him is the potential messiness of the suicide act: spilled blood, flesh, and bones on his perfect bed sheets. The meticulously planned suicide is replaced by a “sudden” heart attack, making a parody of his entire pedantic and carefully arranged life. The last day of his life affirms that things happen without planning, terrible things like car accidents in which our

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56   Playful Transformations beloved ones die, the dreadful fear that Cuba might blow up the USA, but also the events of joy and dance with an old friend, a naked swim with a curious student, an accidental meeting with a Spanish hustler, whose family story can move the protagonist and provoke authentic feelings of compassion. In other words, A Single Man illustrates a “simple” fact that life is what happens while we are planning something else. But why planning? Why arranging? Why is the protagonist so deeply involved with his objects that surround him? His beautiful house looks as if it was taken from a magazine cover, his car is a perfect example of a well-­ preserved old-­timer, his coffin clothes look like an outfit from a 1960s magazine of a modern man, and his behavior is purified from all the dust of what human life is about. Although I must agree that these excessive images of pedantry can strike as too polished and pretentious, my impression of the film was somewhat different. Judith Butler, in her works on melancholy and loss, convincingly proves that trauma or loss strikes the ego as the loss of the object of desire. The Self must incorporate the missing object in order to reshape its vulnerable existence because the loss of the object of desire reminds the Self of its own erosive nature and lack. The subject is reminded of its precarious existence once encountered with the trauma of loss and, through grieving it, tries to re-­incorporate the object of desire by a melancholic reflex of remembering, retaining, retelling, and reiterating. Thus, I argue that the obsessive patterns of George’s estheticized behavior show his struggle to deal with the loss of a beloved partner with whom he shared sixteen years. Every single thing he does (from entering the bank safe to buttering the toast) is careful, diligent, well managed, organized . . . and mournful. His movements, while dressing, show the particular vulnerability of his own body, faced with the fact that he could not attend his lover’s funeral (so he did not have a bodily experience of saying goodbye to his partner in passion and love). His shirts, so impeccably ironed, cover the lusting fading body that incorporates melancholy of a lost desire. Therefore, every single contact with another being (not only human and familiar, but also kissing a stranger’s dog) provokes his bodily colors to bloom. The intensification of colors also happens in his reminiscence of Jim. I called this flashback in the act of melancholic grieving a flesh-­back, in a literal sense. The flesh of vernacular, passionate, desiring life is brought back to the ghost setting of the single(d) man.2 The incorporation of loss tries to get through the flesh itself by experiencing interpersonal contacts. In a Butlerian sense, flashback really does function as flesh-­back. The constant urge to erase all the messiness and ugliness from the movie can also be interpreted as the subject’s dealing with the loss through fetishizing objects-­for-the-­sake-of-­objects. The neurotic tidiness of single(d) objects is again the protagonist’s desperate attempt to recover some sense and meaning in life. Faced with the traumatic fact that life is absurd and that during a cozy night one can, out of nowhere, realize that he will never see his lover again, George is surrounding himself with beautiful objects of vain esthetic allure. Every single thing he touches is vainly beautiful. There is no dust on the surfaces of his tables.

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Filming Difference   57 But this cleanliness can be viewed as the subject’s pathetic attempt to reinstall a lost meaning in the world of absurdity. A sudden and unjustified death of a dear person is a dreadful thing to cope with: it evokes absurdity and despair in front of the abyss of life. All the cohesive narratives in which we lived are broken and aggressively shaken. Furthermore, it is a common place in trauma studies to claim the trauma as a crisis of representation, our linguistic organization of the world collapses, cognitive matrixes are torn apart. The fragile human psyche has to deal with the loss in order to keep on functioning within the world, knowing that this world has already lost its meaning and that it never actually had one. The usual reflex is to try to re-­organize things, to reinstall the “meaning” into the meaningless world. The metastasis of objects in A Single Man evokes the desperate attempt of human fragility to deal with the loss. The single(d) man is constantly moving among the objects, but the presence of such an esthetical environment only increases his sense of loneliness.3 All the interventions in fashion and interior design in the movie point to the effect of being singled out. The bigger the house, the more beautiful it appears, the more George becomes aware of his isolation. Superficiality is all there is to it, and George will come to realize in an ironic twist of fate that life is not lived as planned, but as an event of sudden joy, and also sudden loss. Empty objects, which he diligently arranges, are the mere symptoms of his shaken life dealing with the loss. They develop meaning, but only as vain signifiers, which cannot replace the emptiness in his heart. We can surround ourselves with esthetic substitutes of loss, but those objects of order prove to be lingering for themselves, because (as George himself will acknowledge): Jim was not a substitute for anything and cannot be substituted with anything. Now I would like to compare A Single Man with Antonia’s Line in order to try to prove that George’s compulsive pedantry (which could be compared to the modern Obsessive-­Compulsive Disorders) is a symptom of his urge to cope with grief and the fact that life is absurd and messy. His house, designed à la Vogue, stands for utopia; he desperately tries to rebuild his esthetical fortress in order to cope with the fact that death would breach the borders of his impeccable life. There are a lot of drawers, closets, doors, locks in his house,4 as markers of his self-­preservation. On the other hand, Antonia’s Line provides spaces of nature, field: doors are constantly open, the attic where Danielle paints is connected to the entire house, even the church’s “sacred” space is being desacralized by the scene in which Antonia catches the priest having sexual intercourse with a woman in a confession room. Space in this film is opened to everybody and everything (except for the violence depicted in the character of the rapist): social otherness (illustrated in the character of Mad Madonna) is being welcomed, not to be absorbed into sameness, but to coexist as otherness within a polytonal community. The same goes for the otherness of Death, which is not expelled in a traumatic rejection, but is accepted as a painful but a necessary part of life. The community is grief-­ stricken having lost a member, but the solidarity and mutual compassion make it

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58   Playful Transformations bearable. When a female member of Antonia’s village loses her husband, all the women support her in particular female stoicism that embraces both jovial aspects of a “messy” life and its “dark” side of a sudden death. A Single Man is constantly trying to build not only his utopia of life, but also a utopian death, planning it meticulously and rationally. Antonia’s community embraces life in its jouissance: screams of love-­making, physical pleasure, but also the grief-­stricken screams of a wolf once a loved one dies. Inspired by Karen Jaehne’s essay on Antonia’s Line, I would like to make a pictorial comparison when it comes to contrasting these two views upon death. Jaehne makes a marvelous parallel between Breughel’s painting and the movie. The emphasis on the detail of a rural area, the plain, simple, and everyday life of villagers, filled with joy, passion, and bodily pleasures, can be found in both the film and Breughel’s work. On the other hand, I would make a parallel between George’s decorum of life and death to Poussin’s painting In Arcadia Sum. Poussin belongs to the tradition of French neo-­classicism, which propagated the strict decorum of what is considered Art. All the messiness of “low” topics (such as rural motifs, low-­class, grotesque humor etc.) are not supposed to be found in the “high,” extremely polished and rigorously rational painting. Not only did classicism prescribe what is to be art, but it also emphasized that all the irrational impulses are to be banned from “high” art, which should stand for elevated, intellectual rationalistic esthetics. Therefore, Poussin’s painting is aligned to a classical tradition, “high” topics, and expresses Western individualistic concern with death within utopia. George’s life tends to resemble this rigidity of form and the vain esthetics of classicism. Therefore, I believe that it is fruitful to connect his coping with death to Poussin’s painting, for it shows that death stands for a gaping wound within the polished world of an estheticized utopia. However, the rabelesque world of Antonia’s Line embraces simplicity, plurality, communal spirit, and an opened utopia that sees death not as a horror of absence, but as a miracle. Death thus becomes a necessary moment within the circle of life (which is also symbolized by metaphors of nature, field planting, and the fertility of women in the movie) and is being narrated by the daughters and granddaughters passed to us, as viewers, as the film itself. It is just at the end of the movie that we realize that it is Antonia’s great-­granddaughter who tells the story, which makes us realize that the film itself is a form of transgenerational passing of a female tradition, inviting us, as the (both female and male) audience to participate in this community. While George’s post-­mortem words are given in a vacuum of an isolated intellectual, Antonia’s last breath is being illustrated by her great-­granddaughter, as a living word, emerged from the community of women saying goodbye to their female ancestor. Therefore, instead of A Single Man’s decorum of death, the final impression that Antonia’s Line makes is that of the joy of life within the community of love, solidarity, and bonding, where people die, but time gives birth again and again.

Filming Difference   59

Transcription of the Class Discussion on A Single Man

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Zoran:

I love this film. When I saw the movie for the first time, I was very surprised, I have to say, by, first of all, that it was directed by Tom Ford, who is a fashion designer and a celebrity. I realized that he actually made a really good movie. I pretty much enjoyed it. I had that impression after watching it: a bit of sadness, a bit of melancholy. What I particularly liked was the role of Colin Firth. The second role that I really liked was performed by Julianne Moore. She showed the same phenomenon of loneliness, but in a very different intersection. She is a heterosexual woman, a friend of Colin Firth who is gay. I was thinking a lot about it because at the end it’s about friendship and who we can rely on in everyday life. The second topic is of course the loss of a loved person. I wondered how I would behave if I lost my partner. I think it’s a very personal thing to deal with a loss. There is no recipe for that. I don’t identify with Colin Firth, but I was compassionate. Planning his suicide or that episode with Julianne Moore when they are having dinner, and they talked, and actually they were resuming their lives in just a couple of sentences. Annemȳn: The eyes were really important. How the color changes, the shade of gray and then something happens with the eyes or his face and then you see the color. Barbara: Unfortunately, I didn’t appreciate the film. I have a problem with Tom Ford, because when I was a feminist active on the side of advertisements I found too many sexist misogynist advertisements of Tom Ford so I have a political problem with Tom Ford. When the movie started and I saw the cinematography, what in Italy we call the photography of the movie, it was so similar to the advertisements that I couldn’t really empathize with the movie. It’s just resistance, so if we need the audience analysis, in my case it was that I saw this similarity with the advertisements that disturbed me, not so much in the images obviously, because when the film starts, there’s a car accident and it’s not a man who is harassing an excited woman, as usually in his advertisements, but a very intense scene in which there’s a car accident and death, but the body is represented in this fashion style. It disturbs me. I love realism, neo-­realism and these kinds of movies and this film, for me, is constructed too much. For me it is even about normativity in the gay culture. Okay, it’s beautiful because analyzing the loss, the feelings that are contained in the movie are for sure very important to be represented, but how they are represented, I think, is very stereotypical. These upper-­ class gay people, dressed in Armani or Tom Ford, for me it’s difficult to empathize with, to empathize about the loss. I was mostly disturbed by this element of homonormativity, the class issue and the representation of these beautiful model bodies in the movie, and the cinematography is not to my taste. Annemȳn: I like that, in the morning, before he goes to work he calls Charlie, his best friend, and he says “bye, kiddo,” and she says “bye, old one.”

60   Playful Transformations

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Zoran:

The character of Colin Firth plays a perfectionist who is obsessed with positions. Lubna: It is his background as an academic. And that role he played in the movie: he was just a perfect man for this character. Annemȳn: I don’t know why this moment popped into my head but I’ve just remembered that when he drives to work, he looks at the children playing and the youngest kid, not the one with blond hair but the other one, takes a butterfly and places it between his hands and smashes it. There is death in that scene. He thought about those moments, the last time he said that everything is like it should be, he said something like that. And then when he is dying his partner is depicted as a ghost who comes to get him. Barbara: For me Tom Ford can just disappear from the world. Have you ever seen the advertisements of Tom Ford? They are super violent. Zoran: For me, one thing was striking: I agree that middle class has everything but I don’t see why not. People have the right to choose like everybody else. For me, it’s also a question of what for white middle class is very important in the conformist societies, that is the question of boredom. I think all that setting shows it perfectly. That’s why the relationship between the two lovers is something that comes up and somehow for me they are dealing with it. The second thing, I don’t mind about the representation of white middle class in this movie because of the person who wrote the script, actually the book written by Christopher Isherwood. Even though it’s not my favorite writer I think the best representation of the workers and the working class in Hitler’s Germany during World War II was given in his book, The Berlin Stories, where he speaks about Sally Bowles and that world was presented in Cabaret. For me, Cabaret is one of the ultimate pictures, because it represents that rise of fascism and how a minority culture in Berlin deals with that. For me, one of the anthological scenes is when the Nazi kids are singing “tomorrow belongs to me” in the park in Berlin. I’m always stressed with that scene. Returning to A Single Man, I don’t see the problem with it. I completely agree about the question of suicide, I mean, the question of suicide is not so easy to discuss, and we all have our own opinions, and I also disagree with the suicidal solution, but as Lubna said, it’s somebody’s choice. Lubna: I’m not thinking of it as a choice. I think that we have to accept how people commit suicide, what kind of dilemma they have. I just refuse to accept that if you commit suicide you’re rubbish, foolish or something. Barbara: If I may . . . probably I will commit a suicide. I already said it to my whole family. So it’s really different for everybody. I’m a suicidal person, I think about suicide. Zoran: And it’s perfectly normal to think about it. In the movie, the question of suicide is very interesting because, during the whole movie, we see that George prepares for suicide. In the way he arranged the bed, trying ten times to make a position for that. Actually those little things in his behavior show that it is not about suicide, it’s about life, it’s about what stops us to do that.

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Filming Difference   61 For me the scene with the student shows that there is some other solution than the suicide. And when he goes to the bank to take the money to give it to the housekeeper, and also his conversation with the little girl – all of this is about life, it’s not about suicide and how to arrange it. Annemȳn: I just remembered what he said, what he thinks at the end of the movie. He talks about these moments of crystal clarity when the world seems to come to being and everything seems fresh and new and then he says: “I can never make these moments last, but they are what keeps me going, they are what makes me alive.” And I thought, maybe this is what the color means . . . like, for example, he meets this beautiful Spanish man at the  bar, and he looks at him and there is tension, sexual tension. Also the moment when he tells the secretary that she’s so beautiful, maybe these are the moments of clarity when he sees how beautiful everything is. Zoran: Also one scene that really strikes me, and it’s a really big problem in a gay relationship, is at the beginning of the movie, when his partner’s cousin calls him to tell that his partner died, and that the family is forbidding him to go to the service (a sound of agreement from the whole group), which is actually dealing with a loss. Who has the right to deprive the other to deal with a loss? And it’s the ultimate inequality for me. Marta: It’s probably the most powerful scene in the whole film, right? Zoran: Yes, I was really depressed. Helena: And also in the speech that he gives in class to the students. He talks about minorities and people that are oppressed. Zoran: “Let’s speak about fear,” he says. Marta: Also we must remember about the time and place where it’s all happening. It was in the 1960s, right? Zoran: 1969, the Cuban missile crisis. Annemȳn: The eyes were really important. How the color changes, the shade of gray and then something happens with the eyes or his face and then you see the color. Zoran: In 1969 there was the revolt in Stonewall. Yes, but we are in the bourgeoisie so we don’t know that meanwhile there was a kind of huge movement for sexual revolution and against the Vietnam War. For the hippie movement everything was going on in 1969 in the USA. But the time of the movie was earlier, it speaks about the times nine years before. It’s the beginning of the 60s. It was one of the first novels addressing the topic of gays. Kinga: Yes, the timing is also important, because we see things differently. Barbara: This marriage issue is felt by the bourgeois homosexuals because, you know, there is a part of the movement which is not interested in the debate at all, we don’t see the point in having the possibility to have access to a structure which is oppressive, per se. If we look at the newspapers, one time I saw this collection of homosexual bourgeois male couples, no lesbians at all, about the right to get married, and the pictures were horrible. It was like the bourgeois family presented in the 60s in those advertisements, but with two men. It was kind of creepy.

62   Playful Transformations You missed last class of Gendered Advertising; we saw some of them. Mom, dad, and the children. Zoran: (talking about George’s relationship with his diseased partner) But in the movie I don’t see that they were married. They were just in a relationship for many years. They never spoke about marriage and they were reading books and they were talking; it didn’t look like marriage, just a closeness of two persons. Barbara: I have a problem with Tom Ford. Lubna: (laughing) You just focus only on Tom Ford! Zoran: I saw some of the adverts by Tom Ford, and I have a problem not only with Tom Ford, I have a problem with everybody (the whole group laughs). I was going to talk about the ones by Marc Jacobs, which are terrible, but this is the overtaking from the heteronormative culture, masculinity and their relationship with the gay culture, which is not the gay culture, but the “gay culture represented in the media.” A Single Man is about alienation and loneliness. Actually when the student asks him in the car park after the class: “do you need a friend?” and he says “why?” and the boy says “because you don’t look very well,” it’s a cry for help, it’s a message addressed to the others. That’s why depression is a cry for love, a cry for communication. Suicide is just one of the results maybe. But it’s also fantastic when he asks a 3-year-­old boy with a toy gun who shot him from a bush, he says “Christopher, would you like it if I killed you?” and the child said “no. . .” (laughter). And it just shows how he played with that surrounding that is not so understanding. Marta: We haven’t talked about his relationship with Charlie. Is she really bored? I got the impression that she’s depressed and she’s completely falling to pieces. I could imagine her not leaving her bed for days and, all of a sudden, when she has this conversation on the phone and they arrange for this meeting for dinner, she’s behaving as if everything was perfectly all right, and she’s putting on this make-­up, paying attention to appearances once again. Zoran: But she loves George Falconer, and he’s her friend. That’s why it’s nice to see that dinner when they are talking about their lives and resuming their lives, dancing. You can see the sadness in that, though. Barbara: He’s the only friend to her, and she’s the only friend to him. Marta: So why do you think he agreed to see her on the very evening that he was planning to kill himself? Because I realized what Helena mentioned today that if you’re planning to commit a suicide you’d probably break people’s hearts. You said it is selfish to commit a suicide, because someone who does it would hurt so many people around him. In the case of George Falconer, the only relationship left for him after his partner’s death was the friendship with Charlie. So was it the last goodbye? Kinga: The last supper. Annemȳn: I just remembered what he said at the end of the movie. He talks about these moments of crystal clarity when the world seems to come to

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Lubna:

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Filming Difference   63 being and everything seems fresh and new and then he says: “I can never make these moments last, but they keep me going, they are what makes me alive.” And I thought, maybe those beautiful moments like, for example, when he meets this beautiful Spanish man at a bar and he looks at him and there is this tension, sexual tension and the moment that he tells the secretary that she’s so beautiful, maybe these are the moments of clarity when he sees how beautiful everything is.

Fremde Haut Synopsis Fremde Haut is the original title of a film directed by Angelina Maccarone, released in Germany in 2005 and launched as Unveiled in its English translation. The film begins with the escape scene from Iran of the movie’s protagonist, Fariba (Jasmin Tabatabai). Fearing the death penalty after the discovery of her lesbian relationship, she flees from Teheran to Germany. When her application for political asylum is refused, Fariba resorts to an extreme solution: using a temporary permit of sojourn of a fellow inmate, Siamak Mustafai (Navid Akhavan) who committed suicide, she takes on a male disguise and leaves the detention center. As Siamak Mustafai, she works illicitly in a sauerkraut plant in the provinces of Swabia. Standing out from the coterie of other refugees, hick town machos, and petty criminals, Siamak quickly attracts the attention of Anne (Anneke Kin Sarnau), a female co-­worker. At the beginning, Anne is not aware that she is making advances towards a woman behind a false beard; that Siamak actually is Fariba with wrapped breasts, a lesbian who is at pains to masquerade as a man: both her body and her affections. The film’s main part gives a forceful account of how the everyday survival as an illegal refugee is additionally complicated by the everyday trouble not to be recognized as a woman. Fremde Haut, meaning literally “stranger’s skin,” as well as the English title Unveiled, conveys the movie’s key motif and tensions of Fariba’s emotional struggle and physical survival. Although any attempt at contact involves the risk of busting the façade, the events take their course and Fariba eventually reveals her real identity to Anne. It is Fariba’s dream to live freely as a lesbian and as a woman (both characteristics bearing their very own and also very intersectional significance, and the wish to work in her profession as a translator), and she finds a new lease on life when the two women bond to combat their circumstances and try to break away from the tristesse of the Swabian village. However, they are short on luck. When Fariba’s forged passport is checked by the police, her cover is blown. She is arrested on the spot in order to be deported back to Iran. The movie’s closing frame resumes its opening scene. The spectators see Fariba embarking on a plane. On board, she flushes her newly

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64   Playful Transformations issued documents down the toilet and takes on the male disguise of Siamak Mustafai again. This act subsumes the paradox between determination and freedom that Fariba cannot escape from, wherever she flees. The imposed identity of a woman, who is a misfit for her as a lesbian in Iran, versus the false skin of a stranger, which offers her survival “in orbit,” thereby preventing her from legally settling her personality, does not present any solution, but rather reflects the various facets of her dilemma. Both identities are limiting her freedom and hiding her true self under a veil—at times unbearably light, at times with a suffocating grip. On a meta level, Fariba’s story intertwines several plots: one tells a story of survival: raw and cruel without any sensationalist gloss-­over. The homophobic gender politics in Iran, as well as the relentless system of detention and deportation, report about the inhumanity of humans. Another layer of the film shows Fariba’s strength and pride in her desperate and yet resolute attempt to start a life from scratch and to animate the cultural emptiness and the void identity that she faces. Finally, her going unnoticed as a man, allows the spectator to watch and to experience a cultural community and a gendered and gendering culture from the position of a stranger.

Diegesis Fremde Haut, or Unveiled, is a film worthy to be examined in the context of a critical feminist audience analysis for several reasons. As the titles themselves suggest, Maccarone’s work unwraps and unfolds on multiple layers. Starting from its political line, Fremde Haut gives an account of the situation of women refugees, whose experiences often remain underrepresented in dominant discourses. With regard to gender and citizenship, the film provides a sound and critical juxtaposition of how two governments, Iranian and German, handle the trespassing of legal and normative codes of conduct. The audience is animated to question its assumptions about two states that are conventionally believed to be on opposite sides, when it comes to adherence to human rights. Both regimes put cruel measures in place against individuals who step outside the institutionalized regulations. The movie’s protagonist, Fariba, is shown as being under attack from both sides: Iran’s policy of capital punishment of gay and lesbian relationships, and Germany’s policy towards illicit asylum seekers. Although Fremde Haut does not descriptively amplify the related topics of criminalization and discrimination, the acting of the main actress Jasmin Tabatabai clearly conveys the hopelessness and constant distress. Back in Teheran, Fariba had to hide her lesbian sexuality from her professional and family environment. In Germany, however, when she takes on a male disguise, the notion of “a stranger’s skin” becomes literal. She has to submit not only to an external, but also to an internal exile. Surprisingly, Fremde Haut was criticized by German film reviewers for poorly elaborated political subject matter and the representation of refugee movements and asylum procedures. In contrast to this opinion, I would argue

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Filming Difference   65 that Maccarone’s movie, through its conscious choice to speak from a micro-­ scale, rather than dealing with facts and figures, communicates a strong political message. Institutional mechanisms of suppression and punishment provide merely a context, which serves to explore the protagonist’s micro-­world. In anthropological terms, one would speak of a “thick description” (Geertz 1973, 15) of Fariba’s intricate reality as a lesbian in Iran, and as an illegal refugee in Germany; all the more, since the film’s emotional charging and narrative density are not the results of a purely fictitious screenplay. Striving for authenticity, Jasmin Tabatabai, who has Iranian roots, was involved in the translations from Persian for the purposes of the film, and she also co-­edited some of the scenes and dialogue. In addition, the director’s focus on the protagonist’s individual fate encourages a feminist interpretation of power relations with regard to the marginalized from the epistemological perspective. Maccarone thus stretches the cinematic genre of drama to contain critical social fiction by focusing on the awareness of an individual vis-­à-vis social and political realities, which may not concern the viewer on a first hand or daily basis. Precisely therein lies the film’s political merit and contribution. The qualitative approach to the subject matter continues on the cinematographic level. Following the interpretation that the movie is concerned with an in-­depth portrayal of Fariba as a figure of social exclusion, I would now like to draw attention to this theme’s realization in technical terms and point out its feminist significance. In terms of cinematic visual conventions of narration, Fremde Haut represents an achievement of disavowing the “male gaze” in Mulvey’s sense (1975) and subverting normative cultural interpretations. Being narrated from the inside of “a stranger’s skin,” from “underneath the veil,” the only role with which the audience can identify, is, paradoxically, the stranger: an Iranian lesbian refugee. The movie puts the spectator in Fariba’s shoes and twists habitual presumptions about social norms and practices. The familiar context is depicted as a dominant and aggressive culture that defines and marginalizes Fariba as an illegal foreigner and a person of color in a white, rural village. In the course of watching, the Western viewer is therefore alienated from the sympathies he may foster for its familiar culture, gradually becoming a stranger himself. The uncanny confusion produces the desired effect: as the end credits scroll over the screen 90 minutes later, the viewer, just like Fariba, is left “in orbit.” The protagonist’s oscillation between a male and a female disrupts habitual ways of understanding sex and gender. Fariba’s going unnoticed as a man, allows for a critical close-­up of a gendered and gendering society that forges difference as the main marker of subject positions. Read through the conceptual lens of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity (Butler 1990), Fariba’s troublesome masquerade gives an illustrative example of how social identity and the sex-­gender coherence come into being as an effect of performative and meaningful acts. In this vein, Fariba’s disguise exposes the limitations of taken-­forgranted assumptions about apparently natural categories, like biology. Passing as a man, she turns the fundamental social structure of sex difference into a game

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66   Playful Transformations of appearances and illusions. What the film indeed “unveils,” is the constructedness of opposed gender categories and implicit dualisms that support the invisible coherence of imagined communities (Anderson 1983). However, Fariba’s veil or stranger’s skin are far from an optimistic interpretation as a subversive drag-­practice. Her camouflage is not an experiment, but a means of survival. Rather, Fremde Haut shows the disguise as a burden, and the pain of living in a lie as physically and emotionally exhausting. The final shot showing Fariba on the plane, where she once again takes on the disguise of Siamak Mustafai, subsumes this paradox between determination and freedom. Neither the identity of a woman in Iran, nor the stranger’s skin in Germany allow her to legally settle her personality in any cultural context. Thus, her survival “in orbit” extends from a temporary strategy to a permanent dilemma. Coming back to the ground line of feminist audience analysis, the movie’s capacity to enable the viewer to emphatically approach strangeness and difference, is its great political strength. Fremde Haut is therefore a painful and yet a cathartic piece. The display of strangeness as an individual and yet a universal human experience, reads as a stand for open-­mindedness and pluralism. Moreover, Fremde Haut is a story of survival and at the same time an affirmation of life. On the one hand, it is raw, cruel, without any sensationalist gloss-­ over with an uncertain end. At the same time, it documents Fariba’s will to live, which is expressed by her inner pride and strength. Her desperate and yet resolute attempt to start a life from scratch, and to animate the cultural emptiness and void identity that restrict her freedom, should be read as a plea for social change, especially towards sexual minorities. The film’s open-­ended conclusion leaves the spectator with a question as to the society’s morality without moralization.

Transcription of the Class Discussion on Fremde Haut Zuzanna:

I felt that I had to research the context of the movie, and I also found in the article that I sent to you that this was actually a good idea, because, let’s say, third world cinema or new Iranian cinema is about context and not individuals, and I wanted to share it with you. I had little idea of what this woman actually was going through, since she also could not talk, right? There were so many moments of muteness, when she was in front of the translator, you know, and in the office, when she is asking for asylum, she cannot tell what actually happened to her, what she actually did also, because there is a presence of an Iranian man. So I had to research the context of homosexuals in Iran, and I found a translation of the penalty code into German and I know now. Well this is a pretty contradictory situation for homosexuals and for transgender in Iran. Irina: Do you know anything about how Iranian culture used to deal with homosexuality for centuries? Because it was always penalized by the Koran. So how was it? Zuzanna: Yeah, I don’t know how it was earlier. I just know that under the new regime and the tradition, homosexuality is not Islamic. So there are also two

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Filming Difference   67 kinds of penalty codes for homosexuality in Iran. There is one which is called “tazir” and the other one which is called “had.” The first one being like . . . it’s a penalty by God, you know, it’s a religious penal code, and the other penal code “tazir” refers to the power of the state, to those in power, It’s like a governmental punishment, you are punished. Muhhayo: Religious and state? Zuzanna: Yeah, exactly. And there are two penal codes for lesbians and for gays, and at the same time it’s a schizophrenic situation, because in Iran trans-­sex people are granted citizen rights, so they get protection and they are not excluded from society. They are not facing big problems to find subject positions, yet homosexuality is penalized with that penalty, if it happens four times, and this is like an exception in the world. Iran is one of the four countries that actually kill homosexual people. They also promote the idea of fault and of sin and I think, you know, when you are born with an in-­between body. OK, it’s not your fault, it’s not your sin, you get reassignment surgery. Iran is number one in sexual reassignment surgery in the world. But as soon as you transgress the rules, the rules of the Koran, the rules of a citizenship conduct, you are getting severely punished, this is policed very strictly. Irina: She wants to live like a homosexual woman, not a heterosexual one; so she is illegal. She uses this appearance, male appearance, as a tool, a masquerade, to hide herself, to protect herself, but she is not comfortable in this. Muhhayo: Because she was dating Anne, and in their relationship she was a “he.” Irina: But she is a lesbian! (laughter) Muhhayo: Yes I know, but between lesbians there is one dominating, I mean like men and women, right? Irina: Oh, this is just a stereotype! Zuzanna: I mean, you know what, I think you’re falling a little bit back on these heteronormative interpretations of relationships that are not heteronormative at all. So you are judging something with a model that does not work with the material. You know, you need to abandon this vision of man–woman, woman–woman, man–man, in order to really understand the particularity of those relationships. It will never work when you are trying to look on homosexuality through the prism of heteronormativity. Irina: I think that they are two persons with female morphology, but we know nothing about their sexuality and what they think and how they conduct themselves towards this gender system, which divides humankind into two types here. Zuzanna: I was interested in why the director would give a title Unveiled to the English version because “Stranger’s Skin” is not a problematic translation, it works. And the answer she gave was: “Fariba does not have to wear the veil anymore, when she arrives in Germany, but she has to hide her true self behind a male disguise. She longs to get rid of this ‘new veil’ and at the same time fails to be unveiled as a woman by others.” Then she was asked

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68   Playful Transformations what the meaning of Fremde Haut was, and she said “Fremde Haut could be translated as a stranger’s skin.” On the one hand, it means that you are wearing another person’s personality and on the other it has an erotic notion to it. I personally watched it under the title of Fremde Haut, so this shaped my perception. And of course for Fariba the veil doesn’t work because she may take it off because she actually is a lesbian woman. Muhhayo: When I was watching this movie, I found myself split into two halves: one half was judging her because of what she has done. She hid Siamak’s body, and she buried him and even though she prayed, still, still half of me is judging her for not acting. Zuzanna: What would have been a good action or good conduct? Muhhayo: My understanding was just to inform the people that someone died, to let this body be buried in Iran, where during the funeral his parents would come and cry and properly bury him. On the other hand, I was constantly trying to put myself in her place. You know, how she wrapped her breasts with these bandages, and how she felt awkwardness, this stressed her, you know. She lived in constant stress, she kept her hands in her pockets all the time, this is the sign of the stress, you know, and she is sweating all the time, her face is shining, all the time when she is, like, approaching someone, she cannot talk, communicate freely, since she fears that any time she can be disclosed and when she sees the police officers, I felt so miserable for her because, you know, she was so miserable. I wish you knew Persian language to understand the verses that she was reciting, they were so beautiful. Zuzanna: When she was singing? Muhhayo: Yeah. Zuzanna: Can you say something about that? Muhhayo: It was about Shireen, the beloved one, who is waiting for her, whose eyes are like stars, and . . . I just can’t remember right now all the words, but this was a beautiful, beautiful love verse. In this case a homosexual is like reciting this verse to a woman. I was impressed. Zuzanna: Yes. And then he/she is . . . singing this song and . . . you know, disclosing her secret openly, you know, singing it, and no one understands, no one can understand her. Muhhayo: I was laughing at the fact that Iran was mixed up with Tajikistan twice here actually (laughing). You know, like maybe after this movie people will start differentiating Iran and Afghanistan and in the Middle East with Tajikistan, you know, because Tajikistan is totally different and I was just laughing at this, how people can mix up two totally different countries, you know? Zuzanna: But that’s something also I wanted to talk about with you. I mean this movie actually is about a female, a lesbian protagonist. It tells us a lot about masculinity, the construction of masculinity, how masculine role expectations work and it also tells so much about this superior and ignorant and culturally, or inter-­culturally, illiterate “white West.”

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Muhhayo:

They mix it up because they don’t know the difference; like when I mix up not by culture, by appearance: Japanese, Chinese, Korean. I will never recognize, when seeing, whether the person is from Japan or China or Korea. They almost all look the same for me; so I was told that people from Asian countries, like Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, they all look the same and this is not, you know, like something that annoys me or offends me; it’s not because I know that living together, neighboring countries must have something in common. Irina: What we saw in this film was how German culture was represented. Well, we saw one side of the coin, right? And I think that the director wanted to demonstrate maybe the primitivism of this heterosexual model, which dominates over the world, yes? Because they are very heteronormative in Germany. They are these hegemonic, alpha males. Zuzanna: You know, I think in this moment, concerning this white rule, supremacy and ignorance, we also only perceive and see this, we are of course all the time on Fariba’s side. She is the person that we identify with and we stay with her behind the veil. So she kind of takes us in her position and what, I think, this movie achieves at this moment is also how a stranger, how a marginal figure, that goes unnoticed, because of this secret, allows us to experience this German rural sauerkraut culture. It is only possible because Fariba goes unnoticed, as a man, you know. So she takes us on this challenging trip that exposes how cultures work without even seeing. They’re thinking as usual, they’re working as usual. In this way she shows this great potential of intruders that unveil others’ modes of lives, that can give a critical eye, that just, you know, have this double knowledge. I cannot think of a different technique to expose what she’s experiencing there without having this moral finger upward . . . so this is, you know, almost like ethnography. Irina: Yeah, I wanted to add that that’s very interesting that the only person who understood her was a woman; and this protagonist was the only homosexual agent in this heterosexual society. It highlighted perfectly this moment of how homosocial male society is organized, is built. This society is hyper-­ masculinized, macho-­like and homophobic but sometimes also homoerotic. We could see how the men in Unveiled were bonding with each other. We also discussed the topic yesterday in our class about “cripple masculinities.” Our culture is organized this way that men are forced to form groups, these groups bond and, however, they are prohibited to express their homoeroticism, their homosexual desires. That’s why they have to find different ways of . . . resolving this pressure balance. That’s when she (Fariba/Siamak) appeared in that social group. They took her as a man and they forced her to go with them and to share male experiences and male practices, like prostitutes, clubs or watching TV. . . Muhhayo: They were treating her well, until they figured out that “he” was a she. Zuzanna: I have one last plot, leading us back to A Single Man, because. . .

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70   Playful Transformations (laughter) Yes, because, there are differences of course and I will read out to you a little piece or, you know, just a couple of lines of text. Please tell me what you think about it and what you would like to talk about. It is, of course, about esthetics. I was in a pensive mood after watching the movie and I wrote down: “The issue of invisibility reappears again. Unlike in A Single Man, the invisibility of Fariba’s homosexuality is not hidden behind and compensated for with a spectacular esthetics. The scenery is depressing for it operates with poor alternation of settings, interiors, even the people’s clothes are always the same, as if this reflected the narrow-­mindedness and the primitivism of the people around Anne and Fariba. Sameness and monotony continue in further scenic motives: The routine of work at the plant, the endless field of the sauerkraut heads, the eternal temporariness of Fariba’s roommate stuck in a wait loop . . . the tristesse of these entire scenes, represents the boredom and inadequacy that Fariba faces. On the other hand, the deviation and strangeness, the exotic desire and fantasies of escape, which link Fariba and Anne, are symbolized by airplanes that depart near the sauerkraut field. However, they are only small spots, rapidly disappearing from the endlessly gray sky over Esslingen. The forbiddenness, illegality, and death threat that Fariba faces, are obvious motives in Fremde Haut, starkly contrasting with the impalpable trouble of passion blockades and emotional incompleteness in A Single Man. It seems that Fariba can find a sort of shelter or even home in female bodies, which are assigned a protective attributes and a caring nature, but let’s leave that discussion at the side for a moment, but she has no own life and existence permission in the body, the personality, that she inhabits. She is very nomadic and constantly harassed by external forces, whereas George remains always someone afraid from an inside distress, even with his most intimate friend and lover, a partner. So he forces himself to lead this normative life. The discourse of punishment is not at all present in the movie. George is paralyzed and the self-­surveilling forces (in the Foucauldian sense) operate at the inside.”  What do you think, what was your experience of esthetics? Irina: Absolutely contrasting esthetics. In A Single Man it is astonishing beauty and here, yeah, really gray reality. And in Unveiled, well I think that her surroundings, this esthetics aims to represent her internal situation, yes, her state of mind, maybe her state of soul. Muhhayo: How about the suffering? The tristesse, you know . . . in comparison of the two movies? Irina: In A Single Man, suffering is closed inside, blocked in his body and somehow we can see it sometimes in his eyes when he cries but he is always so restricted, so closed and. . . Zuzanna: There is sadness, but there is a different quality of sadness, I think that, in A Single Man, there is this overwhelming beauty of dead objects,

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Filming Difference   71 you know, of course of objects that do not have life, but they are so beautiful that you would assign life to them. Fariba is just the other way round; she maybe has just this little pendant but she is not pretty, she has some old clothes, things that do not belong to her, but unlike A Single Man, she somehow fuels them with her life, with her strategies of survival, with her agency, so this is what she does, this is the different relations to objects, I think, you know, in the two movies, right? Irina: Well, you pointed that she is making everything around alive. Zuzanna: Yes. Irina: So it’s esthetics of life. . . Zuzanna: Yeah. . . Irina: And in A Single Man, it’s esthetics of death. Zuzanna: Mhm. Absolutely. You know, when she is, for example, ditching the grave, you know, for the passed away man whose identity and documents she takes on. She decorates it with a stone and leaves her pendant there. So, on the no man’s land of a detention camp, she completes a deeply religious and traditional ritual. She does it the best she can. “The esthetics of life” is a very beautiful expression, which you just coined. Irina: Yeah . . . I agree, very interesting idea. Because in A Single Man, yes, I could notice this “lack of life.” He is facing his death and he’s slowly dying . . . by the end of the movie.

Passion Fish Synopsis John Sayles’s Passion Fish (1992) narrates the story of May-­Alice Culhane (Mary McDonnel), an actress who becomes paraplegic as a result of a spinal cord injury she had suffered in a street accident. The film opens with a dynamic sequence, characteristic of the director’s method: May-­Alice is lying on a hospital bed and watching an episode of a TV series in which she once played a character called Scarlett. Passion Fish is a postmodernist collage of soap opera and feature film; in this composition of stylistically diverse narrative orders, the main role is played by the same person. Conceived of as a satire on commercial productions about illness (“sickness of the week films”), Sayles’s work criticizes the images of women propagated by American mass culture. In television series, women have accidents, lose sight and memory, are deprived of their reproductive organs—in a word, they are manipulated by the apparatus of mass culture. Although the topics addressed by Sayles’s film would suffice as material for several soap operas, what makes it unique (and non-­commercial) is the absence of sentimentalism and a consistent avoidance of situational takes. In the initial episodes, the viewer is struck by the callousness and routine of the hospital bed. May-­Alice is surrounded by pairs of helping hands and voices, which belong to no one. Although she is encircled by hospital employees—nurses, psychologists, physiotherapists (significantly, no doctors are present)—May-­Alice,

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72   Playful Transformations subjected to physiotherapy, gradually loses her willingness to co-­operate, and finally her motivation for living. All of this is depicted masterfully, devoid of any sentiment or any proclivity to sensationalism. May-­Alice returns to her native Louisiana, to the old, rundown house on the bayou. She spends time watching television and drinking to excess. Sayles skillfully introduces the viewer to the gothic atmosphere of the old mansion, evocative of such classic images of the South as the thriller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), in which one of the characters is also disabled. After many failed attempts at hiring a nurse, May-­Alice employs Chantelle (Alfre Woodard). Soon it turns out that a calm and composed Chantelle also undergoes crisis; in the past, she was involved in criminal activities in Chicago’s black ghetto, and lost custody of her young daughter. The film traces the convalescence of the two women who discover the meaning of life in friendship. Chantelle is a far cry from the stereotypical maid, familiar from countless screenplays and novels. A qualified nurse, intelligent and confident, she can fully match May-­Alice’s causticity and does not bother with pacifying the arrogant patient, as in this dialogue: MAY-­ALICE: You been doin’ this long? CHANTELLE: No. You? MAY-­ALICE: What did they tell you about me at the agency? CHANTELLE: You’re a T-­10. MAY-­ALICE: What else? . . . Did they tell you I was a bitch? CHANTELLE: On wheels.

The rhythmic narration is accompanied by a parallelism in the cropping of the two characters. In a particularly sophisticated shot, each woman is shown separately. Chantelle is quietly weeping in her bedroom; May-­Alice is watching television on the first floor. The camera embraces Chantelle’s black profile against the milk-­white gleam of the moon. These two images of solitude situate the heroines in a much larger context than is suggested by their dialogues. Chantelle’s biography is reconstructed gradually, from numerous elements, strewn about like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Despite her excellent upbringing, she fell prey to the social heritage of her race. Her caring, provident parents were unable to protect her from the fatal influence of the environment. Sayles may also be suggesting their own mistakes in raising Chantelle. Having liberated themselves from the ghetto and settled into a successful life, they exerted unwarranted psychological pressure on the adolescent girl. Sayles’s film is a challenge to American popular culture. The director reveals the heartless, ludicrous sensationalism of television series plots. Their absurdity consists in the lack of a message, non-­functionality. Exposing these factors, as well as the mind-­numbing fragmentariness of such productions, he stigmatizes the commercialization of American mass culture.

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Diegesis Passion Fish is a moving, unpretentious story, framed as a snippet from life. In what follows I would like to prove this point by focusing on the developing consciousness of the two women in different, intersectional grids. My aim is to point out how their relationship evolves throughout the plot and how it moves them towards their own intra-­psychological development. Furthermore, the protagonists’ specific disabilities paradoxically enabled them to achieve a more intimate relationship with each other, but also with themselves. In these terms, the movie makes us wonder about our own ability to perceive changes and tragedies in life and how we are taught to overcome them. In this way, I argue that the movie simultaneously educates us, as viewers, to develop a different sense of perceiving the plot, given that it is not produced in a typical Hollywood style, one to which we are, unfortunately, used to. May-­Alice is a beautiful woman who ends up in a wheelchair after an absurd car accident, after which her career as a famous soap opera actress is brought to a demise. On the other hand, Chantelle is a handsome African-­American house nurse, with a turbulent past of drug addiction, after which her career as a mother was taken over by her father. May-­Alice fails at performing her identity as a popular diva, the object of other women’s admiration, and Chantelle fails at performing her identity as a mother, the object of society’s admiration. Furthermore, both women are located in the South, which is a specific place, culturally, and linguistically. May-­Alice returns from New York to her childhood house and she recollects that she had to spend a lot of money to get rid of the Southern accent to be an actress in New York. Chantelle goes to perform her duty as a nurse and helper for the white woman. Being a black house-­helper in the Amer­ ican South cannot but recall historical layers of slavery and racism, which are still unfortunately present in the American South. Therefore, for May-­Alice, getting into a wheelchair meant not only falling back on her professional career as an actress, but also falling back into her past, which she obviously did not make peace with, since she constantly drinks alcohol.5 Chantelle, who is a house­helper in the big house in the South is black, with the condensed history of black people being “animated cattle” in the South before the abolition of slavery. Moreover, Sayles himself claims that he intentionally picked the South for the movie’s setting because, if you came back as an unmarried woman in your thirties, people would know about it, and you would know that they knew. Thus, May-­Alice comes back as a failed subject in many ways and Chantelle comes in secrecy: we virtually don’t know anything about her until the sudden appearance of an obscure character from her past and her daughter. Up until that moment, she exists in the audience’s eyes as a woman with no past, arrogant, and silent, mysterious and afraid, well-­intentioned towards her spoiled patient, but rigid, and proud. She has a painful bodily anxiety about sexual intercourse, but she manages to start something that would seem like an emotional relationship with another man, also black, and she probably had some affair with a mysterious troublemaker in her past. But we don’t know anything for sure. These two

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74   Playful Transformations women, two failed subjects, are slowly unfolding in front of our eyes while they are simultaneously unfolding in front of each other. All this said, it is precisely the moment of failure that triggers protagonists to gently open up towards other people and establish a deeper and more human relationship in their vulnerability. Paradoxically, failing to reach the “full” level6 of humanity leads them to opening up for more human contact, and developing an intimate and moving friendship with each other. It is precisely the exile existence which reconnects these two failed subjects to integrate in a much more passionate relationship and develop a stronger sense of human contact. For instance, when May-­Alice has her first physical therapy with a friendly Southern doctor, she is arrogant, haughty, reserved, and sarcastic to every single remark the doctor makes. At that point, she is still suffering from the shock of her failure, and is not willing to accept the new life situation that defines her as a failed actress, a failed woman, and a failed human. No matter how hard the doctor tries, May-­Alice stays in an auto-­ironic mode of rejecting friendly contact. She repeats the same pattern with all the nurses that come to her home. Every single one of them will abandon her and she herself masochistically enjoys self-­hatred.7 The only one that will stay is Chantelle and we are not even sure why she struggles so frenetically to keep the job, putting up with somebody who does not respect her efforts. On the other hand, she does not stand for a typical poor black servant, suffering under the capricious disabled mistress. Chantelle herself is harsh, bossy, and at the beginning, although she is practical and helpful, we can’t truly notice that she empathizes with May-­Alice’s condition. But still she stays. We will only afterwards find out that the reason for her holding to this job is because she has already failed in everything else. Her daughter has been taken away from her, her life has become a traumatic, silent ruin that keeps haunting her, and even love-­making means pain. She slowly unfolds as a vulnerable person who has established the mask of rigidness as a survival strategy. Both women suffered losses and traumas, their wounds have joined them together by force. However, it is exactly these wounds that will also be the points of their connections and their alternative relation to themselves. Vulnerability and failure, as qualities condemned by society, will force them to find an alternative source of strength, which does not lie in self-­isolation and performance of sovereignty, but in a mutual relationship and opening up to others. This act of opening up is precisely what vulnerability is all about: instead of trying to preserve themselves by putting up an immunity shield against the world, their own wounds make them bond to each other in an affectionate and non-­hierarchical way. After May-­Alice has become fully aware of Chantelle’s and her own vulnerability, she goes again to her physical therapy and this time she will even try to establish friendly communication with the doctor, but the doctor won’t be that much interested.8 When being subjugated to the impairment, May-­Alice’s only window to the external world is television. Sayles makes a point that although she is an exile from the mass culture of soaps, it is still coming at her through her TV. It is only when she turns the TV off that she is able to appreciate what is around her. This

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Filming Difference   75 is relevant on many levels of the movie. At first, May-­Alice constantly performs the act of frustration and anger because in the show she had been starring in, she has been replaced by a “healthy” actress. She cannot stand her condescending fake friends seeing her in her vulnerable position in the wheelchair. She watches TV as a sort of hysterical self-­punishment, with constant auto-­ironical jokes, but still cannot seem to let it go and accept her vulnerability as a value. The car accident brought her dreadful traumatic knowledge that real life is not plotted as a soap opera: she will not miraculously stand up from her wheelchair (as we might expect in the typical trashy twist); her childhood love will not leave his family for her, although he does show affection; she will not wake up and realize that everything was just a dream and continue to enjoy her fabulous life as an actress. The car accident will make her question all those narratives. When the producer of her show comes to offer a spectacular come-­back, she refuses it, because by that time she has already become aware of the absurdity of those scripts. She mocks his plan to commodify her disability into an exciting plot of the new season and rejects spectacular commodification aiming at a more meaningful life. Thus, disability actually makes her aware of the complexity of real life, which cannot be subsumed to the linear plot of a soap opera. She realizes that instead of “happily ever after,” where good guys and good girls have multiple weddings, and disabled people magically become healthy, real life is much less spectacular and much more intimate. She comes to realize (as do we, the audience) that life is an assemblage of events: one can fall in love with a married man, Chantelle finally manages to start an emotional relationship, but nothing happens in the end, the audience is not presented with the heartbreaking twist in which the ex-­drug addict manages to get back her daughter and live happily ever after, or a handsome man makes up his mind to abandon his family and run away with his wheelchair-­bound, high school love, while the kitschy words “The End” are flashing on the screen showing a beautiful sunset. Neither of the protagonists will experience a soap opera ending, because life has neither soap opera plots nor its happily-­ever-after endings to offer them. Instead, life is a collection of occasionally important, tragic, and life-­changing events, like car accidents, drug abuse, alcohol addiction, motherhood, and daughterhood, but it also consists of minor, “unimportant,” trivial events such as printing the photo of your nurse in a darkroom, having a boat ride with your friends, listening to your beloved talking about passion fish, talking silently with your nurse on the boat, intimately sharing suffering. After they have learned and accepted the fact that they are neither super heroines nor villains (who in binary distribution of soap opera roles should deserve punishment or happiness), May-­Alice and Chantelle will both grow out of their shells of protection and self-­preservation. They will abandon defensive mechanisms and become vulnerable. They will become truly vulnerable only to rediscover their genuine power. They will abandon masks and roles to become human. My students who watched this film confessed that it had somewhat “betrayed” their expectations, since so many issues are just initiated in the movie and do not

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76   Playful Transformations reach their final conclusion. We did not get to see whether Chantelle would have her daughter again, whether May-­Alice would confess her love to her teenage sweetheart, whether the two heroines would start a homoerotic relationship, whether May-­Alice would give up on her acting career and become a professional photographer, and Chantelle would act as her muse. Instead of that, we are puzzled at the final scene where the two women are just talking and the concluding sentence is: “Chantelle, you really need to learn how to cook.” It therefore comes as a surprise to realize that our own senses have been “trained” to seek the plot unfolding and reaching a conclusion, to watch out for the twists of action, to predict the development of the movie and reach a final (usually happy) end. We are all trained to look upon life as a soap opera. Instead, this film provides us with a snippet of life, one full of pain and pleasure, where different intersections of race, disability, social position, identity, and economic status co-­ operate together and put people at various crossroads; because life actually is no big deal, just people and their moving expressions of intimacy which render them warm-­hearted and beautiful.

Transcription of the Class Discussion on Passion Fish Meggie:

Yes, it’s intersectional. For me it was like that exactly. It was like all of these different things in one place, and that was so exciting. So many different things that I could have felt were matched by their markedness, like disability, like being a woman, like being just in any minority position, and they were all happening in the same creative space. Fareed: It seems like in this production there is this line that encapsulates at least the richness of the central trio characters. A sort of swamped guy, the African-­American nurse figure, and then the central protagonist. I think, it was the modus operandi of the movie which consistently tried to challenge, at the very least for the main core of the narrative, a sort of a static view of identity. In the fact that, for instance, with the African-­American character we get the sense of her actually sort of bourgeois upbringing that’s challenged. That challenges the sort of some classic Hollywood movies; you know, “Oh she’s in detox, she’s been on the street.” All of a sudden we are forced to negotiate between different socio-­economic positions colliding within each character. I thought it really brought up to the front of the line the central heroine when she says: “That’s far more complicated than that.” It seems like identity was more complicated than that, for not only the sort of heroine at the center dealing with disability but for all three of the main characters. Sanggyoung: I don’t know, like in the scene between Chantelle and May-­Alice, Chantelle keeps saying “I’m a nurse, I’m your friend, not your servant.” I don’t know, she tries to find herself, like identify herself, like get out of, get rid of her past but still wants to be linked to the past. Fareed: There’s that line that sort of made me laugh, that I guess also points to,  as you mentioned, being disabled. The film suggests socio-­economic

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Filming Difference   77 disability or at least the stain of it. When they quarreled, having this back and forth, I guess, about various addictions, and May-­Alice says at one point to her: “You don’t even get drunk, you’re spoiling yourself,” as though the addiction was standing from her sort of bourgeois upper-­class predilection. She has that capacity, even if she’s physically disabled, she has that sort of freedom, of negotiating it, to engage with the vice just for the argument. She herself was faced with another type of addiction and says: “Oh, this is just merely another addition to my life at leisure,” but something much starker, a reflection of her marginalized state. The rhetoric introduced in this scene, regarding the very differences in their respective addictions which would then be their respective disabilities. When one of them happily engages in it, and the other one suffers by it, by not being such a big drunk, but by being haunted by it. I’ve found that as being an intriguing nuance of the scene. Meggie: Yeah, especially in the last scene when they are talking about plain domestic relationship rules, and she’s saying, like: “You’re gonna have to learn how to cook,” and it takes more of a romantic tone, but it’s not. It’s like poking fun at times, saying that two women can have that kind of a domestic relationship, and it’s totally different. Fareed: When her colleagues came from New York, one of them delivered a short line: “I didn’t ask for the anal probe,” four versions, each picking one word of the sentence. It was a master. Sanggyoung: There’s this scene where May-­Alice’s friends are visiting May-­ Alice, and they kind of tease her. It’s kind of a comical scene. And then May-­Alice just writes a memo “Please help me get out of here,” and then Chantelle helps her. The scene just makes me like . . . it’s not a relationship like an employer and employee, or superior and inferior. At that point it was like . . . I don’t know . . . like mama, mum, or guardian. It was kind of heart-­ warming. Fareed: I think this motif of returning home is quite interesting in the film because she has to fight her demons once again. She escaped from the home town to be somebody else, somebody better. But before she was afraid that her colleagues would laugh at her and later she comes back not as a celebrity but as a disabled person in a wheelchair. She maybe constructs herself once again and to interact with those people very directly. Meggie: Yeah. When all her friends that she used to work with, it was just a kind of temporal drug for her, for May-­Alice’s identity. And she was forced to kind of grapple with the fact that she had become this new kind of person. And then, the way that she used to act with her old friends, and the way that they treated Chantelle, that was a really interesting moment. Remember the scene when the blonde woman goes like: “I didn’t ask for the anal probe” for like a million time. She was exploring all the time really problematic aspects of being a woman actor in a certain role . . . it’s just really, really moving. Fareed: She’s able, all of a sudden, to return to this screen test, to that kind of traumatic if not sort of sharp moment of change. And another, it was such a

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78   Playful Transformations surprising moment in the movie because by and large the friends that came to visit her, they are like comic characters. Welcome to sitcom territory by John Sayles! As the article we read says, sort of suggests, that identity is an endless process of becoming, but to me it was that tension in the film between these comic interludes and the central more dramatic ones. And one is saying “Look how they are, these people are very dynamic thanks to the movie,” but at the same time we’ve got like he was saying to the rest of the world how we are supposed to understand how the identities are created through these other frameworks. Meggie: I definitely think that their relationship is an inter-­subjective bond, by far I was thinking about the mutual care that went on throughout the whole movie. They wouldn’t have been able to talk to each other if they both hadn’t been through different things, and hadn’t brought those different things to the table. And so, by seeing themselves in something that wasn’t themselves, they were able to get better. That makes sense. Sanggyoung: We didn’t know a lot of her story until the final part of the movie. We just know she is a little bit lost, she is sad, she cries. It can be sensed that she has some dark secret in her past. She is rather quiet and frank with the patient. We find out that she was a cocaine addict but she’s recovering but because of this addiction she lost the custody of her daughter. So the grandfather is taking care of her daughter. He visited Chantelle and he promised that if she keeps going like that, he will let the girl stay with her for the summer and she will have a chance to make up for her past. Fareed: I wanted to continue to develop that theme of the duel. Because my question refers to Rennie; does he serve as the figure to reinforce this idea that May-­Alice is now becoming to accept disability as a part of who she is rather than an all-­defining feature? When she leaves the message “And if you call, don’t even bother to leave me a message, I’m going to crawl into a hole and die,” it serves as an insurmountable block to real interpersonal connection. And do we see Rennie as being the figure which represents her acceptance of disability and understanding that she can have a personality, and be perceived as a personality that exists apart from her physical condition? Or does Rennie himself also have an arch that the film articulates in his own relation to his subjectivity/identity? Has that already been fully formed before he came into contact with these two women who are having an inter-­subjective bond, or does he himself define the connection with these two figures in how he reassesses himself? Meggie: I think that a way to answer that may help to be looking at the title, and this is, by no means, the total answer to that question. Rennie is the one who tells the tale of passion fish, and gives it to both of them, and connects them in a tangible way and I thought that was a pretty meaning-­making moment for the film. Fareed: Can you elaborate? In terms of him in relation to the women, or the women in relation to themselves?

Filming Difference   79

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Meggie:

I’m not really sure, I’m reluctant to say that it was him in relation to the women, because it didn’t feel like she was super worried about making sure that he liked her, or making that whole thing happen. It was just the thing that he invited her out on the boat and she was like “Okay this is what’s going to happen, I guess you’re gonna fix my boat, I guess you’re gonna be around, and there is going to be something interesting going on here.” I don’t necessarily think that he was this fulcrum of the connection for them, but he was definitely a point of reference. I don’t know . . . I don’t have any answer. But I liked that, she didn’t shy away from romance, it was an overtly sexual moment, but then looking back, it wasn’t. What do you think? Sanggyoung: Surely romance provides telling points in their lives, it seems like this film is kind of a typical, heart-­warming movie. Meggie: Whether or not it’s sentimental, I think my mother would cry while watching it. She’s got brothers and sisters who are disabled, and she’s a special education teacher, and deals with this kind of thing all the time. It definitely was emotional for me to just see how it unraveled so wonderfully. That was kind of warm and fuzzy in the final scene. Fareed: At the end of the movie, there’s a scene when May-­Alice rejects the offer when he tells her that she will be in the show not only in the wheelchair but also blind. She was like furious. She was like: being in the wheelchair is not enough for the TV show?

The Joy Luck Club Synopsis The Joy Luck Club (1993) is a film based on the episodic novel authored by Amy Tan, under the same title, directed by Wayne Wang. It recounts the relationships between Chinese American women and their Chinese mothers in the United States. The viewer delves into the lives of eight women: four mothers born in early twentieth century during imperial China and their four daughters born into privileged and affluent families in the United States. Four Chinese immigrants, Lindo Jong (Tsai Chin), Ying-­Ying St. Clair (France Nueyen), An-­Mei Hsu (Lisa Lu), and Suyuan Woo (Kieru Chinh), live in San Francisco. Each mother has an adult daughter: Lindo has Waverly (Tamlin Tomita), Ying-­Ying has Lena (Lauren Tom), An-­Mei Hsu has Rose (Rosaling Chao), and Suyuan Woo has June (Ming­Na Wen). They often meet to play mahjong (a traditional Chinese game played with tiles by four people) and tell stories. The film unveils the mothers’ pasts and reveals how their lives were formed by the conflict of Chinese and American cultures. They also realize that they should activate their family bonds and bonds with one another. The film opens with a prologue scene of a mahjong game. After Suyuan’s death, four months before the time of the film, her daughter June (Ming-­Na

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80   Playful Transformations Wen) is invited to replace her mother at the playing table. In the prologue, her mother bought a swan from a Chinese merchant who was selling it as “a duck that stretched its neck [to become] a goose.” When she had left China for the United States, she kept her pet and brought it to the United States. In the immigration zone, officers dragged away her pet, but she managed to pull a swan’s feather. Suyuan had kept the feather, planning to give it to her daughter. The film then leaps to June’s farewell surprise party in San Francisco for her forthcoming reunion with her twin sisters in China. It reveals the hidden pasts of the mothers and their daughters and how their lives were shaped by the clash of Chinese and American cultures as they strove to understand the past of their family.

Diegesis A French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1984–1988) claims that we all tend to tell stories about our lives since narration is a cognitive matrix through which we can come to terms with our lives and comprehend them as an intelligible form— retelling the stories of our personal lives always contains protagonists, a plot, and a breaking point, and we tend to (re)write our lives and put them into narration in order to catch the sense and recollect the losses. This cognitive–narrative strategy is particularly deployed by subjects who have suffered sudden and unexpected trauma. A traumatic event brings a collapse of the mind’s linguistic and representational capacity: we are faced with the abyss of absurd that ruptures the linear coherence of our life narration. Instead of a harmoniously narrated story, we are faced with fragments; a wounded tissue of our fragile life needs to be recovered. All of a sudden, we are dealing with a jigsaw, a puzzle that misses a piece. Trauma studies with a psychoanalytical approach to trauma call this a void: an unspeakable gap that re-­ signifies our experience as we had known it and places us into a different realm of meaning. What used to be a linear narrative, becomes a bleeding wound and we constantly knit a story, as a jigsaw, trying to fill in the missing piece. That is precisely what the women in The Joy Luck Club are doing: reorder the puzzle tiles in the mahjong game while reordering their narrative subjectivities. All of them suffered some traumatic loss and the latest one is the loss of a dear friend Suyuan, who actually started the club, the Joy Luck Club. They invite her daughter June to play the game in her place: “They wanted me to take her place,” June says. In the game of constructing the puzzle, June figures as a missing piece for the club. She is to take the place of her passed mother and find missing sisters in China. Moreover, she deals with missing pieces and traumatic events in her own personal story: she is the one who lost her mother. There is a beautiful scene where all mothers and daughters are taking photos together and while every mother is giggling with her daughter, making harmless jokes, June is set aside, holding a letter from her half-­sisters, as a symbol of her trying to recollect the memory, as a missing piece in her jigsaw.

Filming Difference   81

Transcription of the Class Discussion on The Joy Luck Club

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Hsiao:

I have to say that when I saw their childhood I was so shocked because it’s just like my childhood. . . Stephane: Which character, in The Joy Luck Club? Alice: The daughter of the modern dad . . . The daughter that starts the narration. Stephane: June, right? Hsiao: Yes. I saw lots of Taiwanese or under the one-­baby policy Chinese have this, that we have to learn lots of skills like playing piano or painting even, I don’t know . . . just like that, like me. I have started half a year piano, one year French, several years for computer, typing or something like that, two years in a band. . . Stephane: Well, we have an interesting situation here: where were your mothers born? Danielle: Taiwan. Hsiao: Taiwan. Stephane: So, both of your mothers were born in Taiwan. When was your mother born? Danielle: 1963. Hanh: 1960. Stephane: And when was Taiwan established as a separate country? Danielle: It was 1911, in China we had the country, but then we took refuge in Taiwan and it was in 1949. Hanh: Yeah. Danielle: We established a country in Taiwan. But I actually don’t know if my parents were born in China or in Taiwan, but my knowledge will be that ever since we are Taiwanese, we are not Chinese. Many parents in Taiwan forced their kids to learn music, learn dancing, art . . . everything. But the parents worked long hours so they had to figure out what their kids should do after four o’clock or five o’clock. Stephane: So it’s like in the U.S., right? Danielle: Yeah, but it’s not in my case. I don’t know why . . . maybe my parents are different; they’re from the working class. So they don’t really pay so much attention. They pay attention to my schoolwork but otherwise not really. I’d spent a lot of time in the countryside and also a lot of time just being with my grandparents instead of learning a lot of extracurricular talents. Dina: That is so interesting . . . I mean, I was born in Yugoslavia. After the war, it changed name to Serbia and Montenegro and then just Serbia. My position is so much far away from yours and still I had the exact feeling during the film. I also felt as if that could be my childhood. That is so amazing. . . Hanh: My grandparents always show off to their friends that their grandchildren have learned lots of skills like playing piano on stage. Danielle: When I was a kid, I was living still with my grandparents in the countryside, in the mountains with the farmers, so there was no comparison.

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82   Playful Transformations And what we compare is how much insight you get from the forest, or how many crabs you caught from the river, or fish. That was what we were doing. And then, when we moved to the city, we spent time reading or watching TV. It’s not so much that the kids feel inferior, I think it’s mostly the parents. I spoke to my mother once, and she actually sent me to learn piano. But I’m not a really patient person, so I did really bad, had to sit there for one hour just playing the same tune. I couldn’t really stand it. But she sort of expressed her regret that I didn’t continue. I didn’t want to continue. And I guess she was under some sort of pressure that she sent me to learn how to play the piano, because I didn’t ask her to let me do that. Stephane: Alice? Alice: About the movies or my childhood? (everyone laughs) When I was a child, there was this kind of attitude towards the children to push them to do stuff, especially sports, piano, etc. But of course it depended on your status, the higher you were the more things you could afford. Dina: In my country it depends. While I was going to the music school, not every­body could afford it. It was hard to get an instrument to play after the war years. But nobody forced me to play. I really wanted it. For me it was so interesting at the beginning. But today I think that it is different. Almost every child goes to music school, like it or not. I believe it has to do with their parents’ wish to show off with them. You know like: “Look at my family, we are so culturally elevated. . .” It has to do with vanity. Stephane: Hanh? Hanh: I think that in The Joy Luck Club I can see myself in many situations. I see difference between family valor between Western and Eastern. I find that in an Eastern family, maybe it’s just my family, but even if we have many conflicts with our parents, we still respect them and love them. We feel thankful, we want to pay back. Stephane: Recompense them? Hanh: Yes, we really feel thankful. Stephane: There is much respect for the elderly, for the parents and grand­ parents, right? Hanh: Yes. And maybe we know that our mothers gave us birth, so we shouldn’t hurt them in return; so in many situations we feel this closeness. Danielle: I have to say that it’s this ideology that I’ve been fighting against for all my life actually. It’s this compensation that we have to make to our parents. It’s not that I don’t love my parents. It’s just that Confucius’ teaching, it’s hierarchy, pure hierarchy, that because your parents gave birth to you so you owe them everything, and that you should obey them and even, when they are not right, they are so oppressive, they don’t let us make our own choices. And when I was fighting with my mother and she would always say “But I am your mother!” and I would say “So what?”

Filming Difference   83 Stephane:

Bad girl! (laughter) Danielle: Yes. I am a bad girl. She gave me a lot, but now these “a lot” includes good things and bad things to me, personally. But I feel resistant watching the film [The Joy Luck Club] because it in a way is portraying the dilemma for the young people like us, like me, and our life choices. But then it’s still portraying this great Chinese mother’s love and then I cannot stand it, because I think it’s very oppressive. Hanh: New generations are more liberal now. To me it’s also the same, I do not follow my parents’ way of thinking: you should just stay at home and get married. (laughs) But we still respect them. I’ve seen in many western films that children can react to the parents. They are more liberal now. Danielle: But the way their parents are treating them is also violent, in another form. I’m not portraying physical violence, but it’s oppression, and oppression is also violence. I do see a lot of family love in this film, but I have to say I’m very skeptical towards it. Dina: I completely agree with you, Danielle. . . . And I support you entirely. In my country it is also the same. They raise us in order to make us feel grateful for being alive on this planet. There is a dreadful Serbian saying when a parent becomes angry with the child: I gave life to you, so I might as well kill you . . . It is precisely what surrounds paternal relationship in Serbia: power to control children’s lives. It is rigid and oppressive. And whenever you stand up against that arrangement, they see you as ungrateful . . . or disrespectful. . . especially if you are a girl . . . and then you should feel guilty . . . I completely agree with you, Danielle. Stephane: There is a sense of guilt that her daughter is carrying with her. . . . Do you recall the last scene when they both laugh and cry? They actually fight all the time and then, in this beauty parlor when they are getting ready for the wedding, they quarrel, but the result of the quarrel is the compassion and understanding. Hanh: A son is always preferred. When we get married, we’ll be far away from home, we belong to the husband’s family. It’s this consent that we belong to the husband’s family. And our parents just stay with their sons because they can take care of them when they get old. And they want to give birth to the son because the son will take care of them and will carry the linear ancestry. Danielle: Carry the family name . . . but you see, it’s all based on interest. They want to have a son, because the son will basically take care of their money. Dina: I am with Danielle on this. Tradition and patriarchy are used to secure the capital in the family. Family name is just a token of it. . . . I remember that my father wanted to take my mother’s surname. . . . That would be a funny thing to do in Serbia. My grandparents from my mom’s side don’t have sons, so my father offered to take their surname in order to continue their family tradition. . . . He was probably sucking up to his future father in law (laughs). But anyways, everybody thought of my dad as an excellent gentleman. . . . Especially because my grandfather comes from a Muslim family.

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84   Playful Transformations

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My father’s family was so furious (laughs). . . . After that gesture, he “got” my mother (laughs). Stephane: I think it somehow supports a feminist way of looking at things when the child is given the mother’s name. And there were ages of not having that option at all. So ideologically it serves an important issue. Just giving the father’s name to a newborn child is one of the mechanisms of patriarchy.

The Sweet Hereafter Synopsis Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, based on the novel written by Russell Banks, is a serenely composed, deeply moving tale of loss and healing which touches on the issue of disability. On an icy winter’s day, in a close-­knit village in British Columbia, a school bus full of children slides off the road and onto a frozen lake, where it sinks. All the children but one die; the oldest girl, Nichole Burnell (Sarah Polley), who survives the accident, becomes a paraplegic, and will be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. As the despairing parents are healing after the tragedy, a lawyer, Mitchell Stevens (Ian Holm), arrives with a hidden agenda. He goes from house to house to goad the people to a class-­action lawsuit to compensate them for their loss. If he wins the case, and he is sure he will, Stevens will receive one-­third of the settlement money. However, Stevens is not interested in the remuneration of his efforts. In his twisted way, he needs a culprit to answer for his own tragedy. His only daughter, whose life he once saved when she had been bitten by a baby widow spider, is now a drug addict and—possibly—HIV-­positive. Stevens wants the state to pay for his and the parents’ tragedies. However, his attempts are fruitless. Nichole, who is the key witness at the deposition, offers false testimony, declaring that the driver, Dolores Briscoll (Gabrielle Rose), drove too fast on the frost-­laced, slippery road, and thus caused the accident. Earlier, before she and her father drive to the deposition, Nichole, who prior to the accident was involved in an incestuous relationship with her father, casually says, “I’m a wheelchair girl now.” Long shots taken during a severe winter in Canada are accompanied by haunting music and a hypnotic voice reading a poem. The Sweet Hereafter would not be the masterpiece that it is without “The Pied Piper from Hamelin.” The old German legend, evolved into a full-­length tale written by Robert Browning, is recited by Nichole. She performs the story about a piper who arrives in a city in order to lure rats away with the magic pipe he plays. Since the people of Hamelin reject to pay for his service, he takes revenge and leads the children away from the city in the same way as he has done with rats. One of the children is disabled and does not manage to enter a “wondrous portal opened wide.” Of the films we discussed in class, students found The Sweet Hereafter the richest in meanings. Fareed, a French-­Arab-American graduate student, noted “a detached quality of an afterlife” in the film and commented that, “unlike other

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Filming Difference   85 films where people were consciously playing different roles—you know, at the same time I was George [A Single Man], I was also the real me; at the same time that I was a married Turk [Head-­On, Fatih Akin 2004], I was also a liberated female. Here there’s that interesting disconnect between the different façades of their identity.” Focusing on Nichole as the only child who survived the accident (and was thus left behind as were other children, like the lame child in Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” [1888], which is an intertext for The Sweet Hereafter), Fareed saw Nichole as a character that “captures the powerlessness of the children brought to the cave, the cave being here the barn [where] her father brings her to do the quasi-­incestuous relationship . . . Even though the film lacks the usual horror towards incest, it’s presented very lightly and maybe that’s what makes it all the more horrifying.” He added that, compared with Antonia’s Line, The Sweet Hereafter differs in “almost lamenting the ephemerality of identity formation through the community.”

Diegesis I would like to focus on the father–daughter relationships in The Sweet Hereafter by exploring a complex process of how these two roles are defined, their inter­ dependency and intersectional layering between disability, authority, gender, and age of the two structural, paternal relationships: the lawyer and his daughter Zoe, and Nichole and her father. As many approaches to identity analysis, inspired by deconstruction theories have shown, identity as an essential, non-­changing, and life-­long characteristic of a person, turns out to be a social construct, a category which is culturally imposed. Instead of following this path, we are to talk about shifting subjectivities, liable to changes, fragmentations, and plural agency exposed within the power frame that creates them as such. In this way, subjectivities become radically historicized and their definition changes due to the different discursive forces set upon them. Death (and its culturally constructed repercussions), when it occurs, brings one of the most radical changes in people’s lives. Even linguistically, it changes the identity of a person within the community: people who lose their spouses are called widows or widowers, children who lose their parents are referred to as orphans. However, interestingly enough, people who lose their children do not possess cultural and linguistic nomenclature for their status of being a mother and a father without a child. I guess that the actual trauma of losing a child is so terrifying that it exceeds the language capacities of nomination. Since almost every single character in the movie deals with some kind of a loss of children, I will try to explore the relationship of those daughters who are actually still alive, but both living as “failed” subjects: Zoe is an HIV-­positive drug addict and Nichole is a “wheelchair girl,” instead of daddy’s little rock star. Their subjectivities, shaped by the relationship with their respected fathers, respond differently to their life situations and the authoritarian figures of their fathers. While Nichole’s newly acquired disability empowers her to assume an active role towards her father, Zoe cannot seem to

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86   Playful Transformations escape the enchanted circle of depending on either her father or drugs. For sure, I do not claim that Nichole is thus a more emancipated daughter than Zoe, but I point out that in this multifaceted and chronologically perturbed narrative jigsaw, different aspects of power and resistance shape characters and their (dis) abilities. All the parent–children relationships in this movie are interrupted by some violent act. It is either the bus accident that causes children to die, or the incestuous lust of Nichole’s father, or Zoe’s addiction problems. Focusing mostly on Nichole and Zoe, I argue that during the development of the plot, the fathers’ violence is depicted as some kind of phantom allure that haunts the relationships. Furthermore, the fathers’ horrific and uncanny violence towards their daughters is reinforced by the musical background of children’s songs. During the “romantically” portrayed act of incestuous violence, Nichole recites the children’s poem, which only contributes to the ghostly image of her father’s violence: the fact that incest is illustrated as tender love only emphasizes its perverse nature. On the other hand, parallel to that, the father recalls a scene from his daughter Zoe’s early childhood, when he had to make a cut in her neck in order to save her from a deadly insect bite. He is singing a lullaby while holding a knife next to her head. This scene is splendid, for it condenses all the uncanniness and spooky ambivalences of their relationship. In order to save his child, the father must make a cut on her neck, which sheds irony on the future, in which she begs to be saved by destroying herself with drugs, while he is entrapped in his own self-­pity, claiming that there is nothing more he could do. The juxtaposition of soft fatherly tenderness and violence is deployed in both Zoe’s and Nichole’s cases: incest is depicted as a soft love-­making whereas life-­saving is depicted as potential throat-­cutting. Moreover, both scenes have music for children in the background, which increases the uncomfortable impression in the viewer. Also, interestingly, the only glimpse of a functional father–daughter relationship in the movie is given in its absence: the lawyer/father tells his story to Zoe’s old friend who has harmonious ties with her father, since they are both successfully socialized, healthy, both of them are lawyers and co-­workers. Moreover, the solicitor retells his story in front of the young woman who actually represents everything that he may not have: her relationship with her father is the lawyer’s lost imagination of a perfect scenario for Zoe, in order to continue his career path and become a successful lawyer. Instead, both he and Nichole’s father face the demise of a perfect “daddy’s little girl” projection, since life makes them encounter the reality where they do not control their daughters’ lives anymore. It is also worth pointing out that the two daughters in this constellation of power relations respond differently to their fathers’ actions. Nichole’s accident makes her gain agency and resistance, thus enabling her to become a grown woman, negotiating her disavowal with an abusive father. Her disability makes her recognize the porosity of a central paternal authority, and upon realizing that identity roles are transit and fluid, she forbids her father to own her “wheelchair” body anymore. She acknowledges the productive potential of her acquired condition and resists the power of subject formation. She denies her father’s access

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Filming Difference   87 to her room, demands a lock, and makes it impossible for him to take advantage of her handicap and use it to his own profit and gain. Thus, Nichole’s wheelchair identity provides her with both agency and revenge, of which she was deprived before, being her father’s mere projection of a rock star toddler. Furthermore, it is extremely important that her final agential response to her father’s scripted plans and a revenge on her father come during the legal hearing. She also forges9 her new situation by acquiring juridical legitimacy for her newly acquired capacity and power. Her active turn is significant on many levels: she empowers her own strategic position, renounces her father’s authoritarian regime of truth by telling a lie, and obstructs the egoistic, hysterical plan of the lawyer, Zoe’s father, to initiate a group lawsuit. Thus, her act of forging the story directly implicates the refusal of what Lacan calls Nom du Pere and that is why it is important that she denounces that “law” during the testifying session. Therefore, she manages to tear down many layers of law, reclaiming her own agency and subjective reinterpretation. But we must also take into account Zoe’s reaction towards her father. While Nichole assumes an active role in breaking up the vicious circle of “family romance,” Zoe seems to be able to accept only a re-­active agency. There is a topos in children’s psychology that a child often comes to auto-­destructive behavior in order to punish her/his parents for something that has not “worked through” in the relationship. We can only imagine and guess all the problems Zoe experienced in her childhood.10 Thus, her auto-­destructive behavior can be interpreted as a daughter’s revenge and punishment of her father. Here, a gender dimension of this kind of behavior can be pointed out, since daughters enact the auto-­aggression, incapable of expressing the aggression towards the outside object of anger. In other words, unable to cope with her father, Zoe repeatedly punishes him by punishing herself, falling more deeply into addiction and self-­ destruction. A psychoanalytic interpretation might come in useful at this moment, because we are often confronted with the scenes of her as a baby, lying in bed with her naked parents. It can be claimed that her self-­destruction also bears traces of infantile regression which brings her back to the Oedipal mirroring stage, where she desperately seeks her father’s approval by denying her own subjectivity. Furthermore, her mother is diligently eradicated from the film’s narrative. The daughter stands for the “lost innocence” of childhood, which is a topos of the Law of the Father: in order to be “correctly” socialized, an infant must reject the  mother, making her body simultaneously a desired and rejected entity. We can argue that Zoe’s constant phone calls can be interpreted as a daughter’s desperate attempt to reach for the security and nurture of her mother, who is displaced from the film’s narrative. On the other hand, she tries to approach the mother’s body by regression: every time she calls, she informs her father that she sinks deeply into destruction, and finally announces that she is HIV-­positive. She cannot assume an active role and renounce the Law of the Father, as Nichole did, but she reiterates the same Nom du Pere logic that frames Oedipal drama, forces a child to embrace the symbolic order by renouncing her mother, putting

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88   Playful Transformations the daughter into a constant fight for identity and still disabling her to achieve one. She remains entrapped in the double-­coded overburdening Law of the Father, dreadfully depicted in the scene in which he sings a lullaby while holding a knife.11 While Nichole’s father tries to commodify her disabled body, Zoe tries to sell her blood to get money. Nichole will impede her father’s ambition and reclaim her body again, but Zoe will stay encapsulated within the same logic of being “owned” by her father. Although Zoe’s father does not own her in a sexual way like Nichole’s father, Zoe is owned by her father’s image of her and she doesn’t seem to escape its specular logic. The fact that she constantly addresses him as “Daddy” only proves this interpretation. She will not be able to escape the infantile regression and Lacanian imaginary stadium, for she repeatedly cites her identity as “daddy’s little girl” by simultaneously destroying the image of “daddy’s little girl.” Her phone calls thus act like an uncanny parody of the “daddy’s little girl” script, since instead of a cute toddler who would show her daddy how beautiful and good she is, we are faced with her as a decaying daughter screaming how ill and misfit she is. The message can be easily decoded in oppositional terms: the common one “Look daddy, I am drawing you and mommy,” gets replaced with “Look daddy, I am HIV-­positive.” Therefore she represents a tragic impossibility of a daughter to reassume her life. While Nichole manages to transform her vulnerability into resistance and agency, Zoe stands for a victim whose agency has been radically erased. The only “agency” she has is prolonging her suicidal path of self-­destruction, unconsciously punishing her father. All this said, I would like to point out another level of agency Nichole manages to bear. By obstructing the class suit action, and by assuming an authority over her own life, she also indirectly succeeds in bringing justice to Zoe’s life. The lawyer goes from house to house to press the community into a trial against the bus company. While watching the film, we cannot but wonder what his motives are and why he is so frantically dedicated to conclude the story of the accident in his own way. Moreover, he does not act like a common vulture, aiming to profit from other people’s misfortunes; he makes it clear that if he fails, he will not charge for his services. This can be interpreted as being that his eagerness to make the community sue the company is rooted in his egoistic wish to get retribution for his own loss of a daughter. In his own twisted way, he believes that if the parents get their retribution from the state, he will also get a piece of justice for his own pitiful condition. The selfishness of this request tries to make all the families work for him: they should be agents of justice for his own mournful condition. While speaking to Zoe’s friend on the plane, he portrays himself as a victim and he abuses the tragedy by showing up as a stranger in the community, inspiring them to act for their rights, while in fact they would be acting for his revenge against his abstract notion of fate, which put him in that victimized position. Nichole’s father also tries to profit from his victim position, since he measures the worth of his daughter’s body now, when she has lost her sex appeal and

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Filming Difference   89 stage performance potentials. If she cannot be the object of his sexual desire, she might as well be worth something as a compensatory vessel. In this way, both fathers abuse the victim discourse, cynically portraying themselves as victims. This kind of abused victimology becomes their tool for compensating for their losses, and they deliberately want to assume the role of injured subjects so that they can fulfill their individual ambitions. No wonder that of all the parents in town, the lawyer finds Nichole’s father the easiest one to communicate with. While the others show hesitation and question the action of a lawsuit, Nichole’s daddy finds a perfect co-­worker in the daddy lawyer. However, Nichole will precisely break down this fatherly alliance with their story. And it is precisely because of this that she manages to pull out Zoe’s missing agency. In this active role she will make it impossible for Zoe’s father to fulfill his twisted sense of justice. Zoe might not be able to reclaim her agency from her daddy, but Nichole will render justice to her by not allowing the lawyer to succeed in his plan. Although it might sound too radical, I claim that Nichole also manages to establish an indirect daughters’ solidarity. She acts instead of Zoe, which is an important twist on the ideological level of the movie: the lawyer seeks those community acts instead of his selfish needs and he fails. On the other hand, Nichole will act for Zoe’s lack of agency, thus replacing the selfish egoism of the Law of the Father with the female solidarity of daughters whose bodies are decaying. Although this interpretation might seem too striking and too harsh, I stand by it, because I believe it has the potential to tell us more about the political repercussions of the movie: decaying, injured, and vulnerable bodies can be empowered through the solidarity of those rejected and marginalized. Disability and Butler’s idea of vulnerability and resistance echo together through the indirect solidarity of the two young women, although they never met each other throughout the plot.

Transcription of the Class Discussion on The Sweet Hereafter Fareed:

It has a detached quality of an afterlife, this whole film has a sense of limbo, which I often thought that the movie was heavy with its symbols, but then the idea of detachment, where no one knows their place anymore, seemed that the community was like a ship after the accident that became roadless. The notion of hereafter was fairly poignant. The film had the same melancholy that you’d associate to a place without a place, lost after this tragedy. Rua: The movie is an intertext. It’s based on a novel by Russell Banks, which carried the same title. But he adapted only a small portion from the book. It also has this rhyme that Nichole reads. It’s Robert Browning’s. Fareed: In terms of the discussion of identity there’s something powerful about the atmosphere of detachment in the film. Unlike the other films where people were consciously playing different roles: you know, at the same time I was George, I was also the real me; at the same time that I was a married Turk, I was also a liberated female, and so on. Here there is that interesting

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90   Playful Transformations disconnect in the film between the different façades of their identity, and I guess it is repeated over and over again. Like when the guy with the mustache (Billy Ansel) tells Mitchell or someone in relation to him: “You don’t want a lawyer, you want a witch doctor.” And even in the first lines of dialogue Mitchell says: “Who am I talking to? I don’t know if I’m talking to my daughter or someone else.” Again, Browning’s poem was attached under the narrative of Nichole’s story. And that notion of the lame child and how she’s once now defined as a lame child and at the same time during the scene when she testified, you can see she’s playing the troubled daughter. Nastily I thought that the most powerful scene for me was the one Sangg­ young was mentioning, when he says: “My child was in my left hand and I was a father, and in the right hand I had a knife. I was a surgeon ready to cut her throat.” This movie is different from the pictures we have seen precisely because these people are in intersection of identity but they’re detached in some ways. From the films we watched, I found that scene the most powerful, that image of the daughter and the knife floating. Rua: I don’t know if you remember that there is a poem, Pied Piper, which is recited when Nichole goes to the bar with her father, instead of going somewhere else and they end up in that bar. In the background there is a recitation of this poem, before she was with two small children reading this story to them. Then when she’s having this incestuous relationship with her father, which is not shown in any detail, I think everybody guesses what happened. It’s like songs of innocence and songs of experience. She is at the same time innocent and experienced in something that she shouldn’t be experienced in. Fareed: And it is so bizarre when we first see the relationship that maybe just means to raise the surprise of that final scene of incest, and we have the traditional father–daughter relationship. Mitchell is nostalgic for the simple love of his daughter. We see that melodramatic intense relationship that we have and then we cut immediately. When we finally get to the barn sequence, it’s when we are child-­naïve to that possibility, because the film makes us want to embrace the simple father–daughter love or what seems to be the simple father–daughter love. That relationship seems so oddly tense, and then the film inverts our expectations by showing us the traditional, nostalgic view of a father–daughter relationship right out of a Hallmark postcard and turns it into a subtle incest, we no longer feel comfortable in that reality. So in this whole sense feeling of community there is no longer any sense. And this is strange because The Sweet Hereafter is such a quiet film in many ways, there is not a lot of hysteria like in A Single Man. I felt the entire time after the barn scene an unease with all relationships being formed in this world. You could see that they were built on lies in the same way as A Single Man said, we live our lives with masks, with different façades. I felt that The Sweet Hereafter was a reality where I can no longer feel comfortable with any type of relationship being presented and no longer knew what was someone’s real face and what wasn’t.

Filming Difference   91

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Rua: Yes, exactly. Fareed: And, I guess,

in some ways regarding the questions that the film raises in terms of the community, what is different in this film from the other ones that we’ve seen, is the idea of very much isolated personalities. All of them, to some degree even Passion Fish, form an intersubjective bond because of their relative isolation either by class or by their handicap. Here this film is different because there is this sense that this intersubjective bond is formed throughout, people that find themselves not solely by their own experiences but also by how they fit within their own respective niches within the community. I think in some ways it’s like Antonia’s Line. I think this is the film that is more akin to that, but here rather than that idyllic thing we can understand, the chasm that forms is in the community. The moment that it’s shattered by a cataclysm like here, the death of an entire generation of children, we begin to realize by watching The Sweet Hereafter the importance of connection not only with one’s family or one’s lover as in some other films, but with the existing group of people that interact with each other every day. I found, in some ways, The Sweet Hereafter was an interesting extension to some of the films we’ve seen, almost unlike the Dutch film we saw, in an almost lamenting view of the ephemerality of identity formation through community. Rua: I think that the poem in the background just reveals what is happening. It’s very dark there and we actually see that this barn has been accommodated to have a sort of a bed there, but we don’t see the act itself. That background poem reveals actually the loss of innocence. Fareed: I’m just reviewing that scene from my vivid memory. I guess, the portion of the poem that is read is about that lame character who cannot go with the other children, who is left alone. In this, maybe I just read this wrong, because I was taking the imagery from the poem and checking what my mind will do with it, it seemed that she associates the Piper with a sort of anger towards her father, that would make us believe: oh, it’s Piper reacting. I thought that she was being pulled into the cave with him at that junction. When I was reading the poem, though it’s definitely about the lame character being left behind, it is also about how this adult force controls and ensnares children. The scene to accentuate this moment of incest and powerlessness that is subtly suggested, even though it is right to say that the film lacks the usual horror towards incest, it’s presented, I guess, very lightly and maybe that’s what makes it all the more horrifying. We see in this movie she’s both the lame character as well as the other portion of poem that she identifies with, the children being totally ensnared. Meggie (has just joined the chat): Did I interrupt something? Fareed: We were just talking about the symbol of Nichole. I said that I think she’s both the lame character and she also captures the powerlessness of the children brought into the cave. The cave being here the barn that her father brings her to do the quasi-­incestuous relationship. And ultimately, Professor Oleksy was suggesting that Nichole becomes a very empowered figure by that scene in the courtroom when she’s able to back the father’s power.

92   Playful Transformations

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Meggie:

There is a psychological phenomenon called survivor’s guilt. Frequently, the parents are experiencing survivor’s guilt too. You always hear you should never die before your children die, because you want to die before your kids. They were hating that they were alive and they were making these really bizarre decisions. Fareed: There is a powerful moment with the innocent bus driver, when she says “I never used to feel that way when I had my kids.” One of the points that I suggested earlier on was that this shows the ephemerality behind the intersection of the community as an important root for the construction of identity, but ultimately this movie shows that it’s a very fragile connection, because the very moment the children die, when there’s a cataclysm in this community, is the very moment when everyone’s detached and brought into this terrifying limbo. The bus driver now has to deal with an existence without meaning, without anything she can cling onto. So the survivor’s guilt is linked to this notion of community foundation, and the guilt itself cracks the very foundations of this group that we see, which is, I guess, an inversion of Antonia’s Line. Meggie: Yes, I agree wholly. When I was watching it I was thinking that the parents and the adults in the community were able to negotiate the differences among themselves, especially the rich parents. And the way that everyone kind of understood them, you remember the bus driver, she had such a beautiful boy. And the presence of the children as a future living in the community, and then it disappears and suddenly there is this harsh environment to bear. Fareed: You ended with the word “bear,” which is just delightful. In terms of bear, there is this really powerful moment when we see scattered photos of the bus driver who is not above co-­opting someone else’s family, someone else’s kids, even her husband’s own words: “My husband said that the community is judged” and then Mitchell asks: “Is that what he said?” This is a woman who is totally able to create mental constructs in order to give herself foundations. But there is something very troubling, or very poignant, or both, when we see that one of the pictures on the wall is just a frame. That breaks the quotes around the kids and makes us understand that this is a person who does feel a parental bond. Rua: Although the town people are punished, the children cannot be saved. Even though Nichole collects the money from the lawsuit, well, I don’t know. I found that the name Nichole means “victory” in ancient Greek, it’s a kind of half-­victory. Maybe the town people who can have reflexive moments in the future, they can be saved, but the dead children and Nichole can never be saved. Fareed: I guess that’s where I have a question about Nichole, about Nichole’s victory or half-­victory. Even though she’s innocent to some degree, she gains a canniness and an ability to play out different aspects of her identity for her own. There is that moment at the end when she says: “Do you think he’ll let me keep the computer?” I thought, beyond the deliciousness of the

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Filming Difference   93 joke there, it was also an important suggestion that her handicap which created for so much of the film a profound sense of isolation and a reminder, as she keeps saying “I don’t want to talk about the accident,” at the end seems to suggest that because of her handicap, and maybe I’m wrong, referring to the computer in her room, she can now become purely a daughter through her handicap, not a sexual object. She says: “Daddy, it’s very hard for you to think of me as a rock star.” All of a sudden the disability flows itself off from the physical subjection to her father. I found that to be a really interesting element, that was not in Passion Fish, the way that disability allowed her to grow and develop. Rua: Sure. Fareed: I don’t know. Again this movie often throws me off, because from the very first moment it deposits the normal relationship between father and daughter, the lawyer and his daughter and the hateful and spiteful disconnect between them, and against an incestuous relationship which we initially see as, you know, “I love you, daddy,” in purely normal terms. And it’s always hard to grasp on to this moment, so with that scene when she was trying on clothes, I thought that this was going to be another scene when the movie objectifies her as a physical object. But then when we see it as it plays out that she is being asked in some way to co-­opt the role of a wife, we realize that she was being framed in a very limited way. So the conversation afterwards makes me think that Mitchell was trying to position her as a wife figure. I thought that that scene, looking back on it, without the thinking “Oh no, we’re going to have another scene of incest,” was a scene where that woman was defining herself by her own terms. I was telling Meggie that one of the best scenes of the movie was when Ian Holm was talking about the spider bite sequence. That’s the point when he says: “She loved us both equally then, just as she hates us equally now, but I was a better actor.” He took on the role of the confident patriarch during that sequence. That seemed to me like a moment when his relationship with his daughter is very difficult to define precisely because there doesn’t seem to be any presence, as in the Nichole–father relationship, of any sexual dimension. But it seems that the patriarchal love soured, we almost see who Mitchell would have become in twenty years’ time. Every time we see Mitchell with his children, we see the nuclear family or parts of a nuclear family at its happiest. Ian Holm’s character presents the same reality of: “Yes, it was great then, we would sleep together in bed and we were all happy, and it was awesome.” Rua: Yes, but that was the outing. That was when they were camping and his daughter was bitten by the baby widow spider. And he rescued her. Fareed: It was a cabin, was that where they were? These are clearly bourgeois people. When they camp, they go to cabins, not tents. That’s the thing about this movie, as subtle as it can be with Nichole’s own oftentimes wordless performance, you know; she doesn’t say anything and yet we feel all the speech that is going through. This is a film that is not at all below showing

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94   Playful Transformations us a shot of Ian lifting his daughter up, clearly as though it’s a Kodak moment. But I think that these moments carry real way, precisely because the film was not afraid to show us what happens afterwards. Ian Holm’s relationship with his daughter is so terrifying in some ways. When he receives a phone call from her, he just detaches totally, there is no warmth, only bitterness. All of a sudden that’s a framework for how we can understand the relationship between father and child, parent and child, presented in the community that he arrives at. Rua: So what’s his role really in that movie? Meggie: At least to draw a trust between a really messed-­up father and him. At the rough end’s point maybe to tell what parenting can be. I was constantly challenged by not trying to think about what it would look like to be a child with these parents. Fareed: But through the magic of movies you can see that it’s terrifying. (laughs) I thought at the same time that he was providing us that framework of parental bond, with which we can compare and contrast, either Mitchell or Nichole’s father. He also was important for scratching the wounds of the community. The bus accident that we see distorted and fuzzy in his handheld camera as though he’s a tourist basking in this monument to death. He is important as a character for revealing the seizures that underlie this space. There is that possibility, it seems, that without Ian Holm this community would only continue on its willfully myopic path. Ian Holm is a force of a magnifying glass that forces the community to look upon itself. Maybe that’s another lesson beyond the ephemerality, that it shows the blindness that the community has to productively move forward, in order to incorporate all these different fractions and people—whether it’s the low-­class worker or, in the case of their family, the upper-­class college students that smoke marihuana and come to town—in order to incorporate all these people successfully, all these different identities that are seemingly diametrically opposite to each other, it must create a sort of glaze that flattens their differences. And the way it does that is by just having everyone pretend that everyone else around is all right, even though when, as Messiah, Ian Holm comes, he’s able to scratch a little bit and uncover the moral blackness that the community doesn’t want to confront, which lingers at its center even before the accident. Meggie: And the ambiguity of that paternal or maybe sexual relationship that the mature masculine looking at the young feminine is so hard to figure out. There are even moments when even though you want to sympathize with Holm’s character and you want to say “He’s having such a hard time . . . she’s spiraling and he can’t do anything and he can just offer her money.” But his gaze on her is very detrimental, like “there is no hope for you,” it’s very cold, calculating, and it bothered me. Fareed: Yes, it seemed terrifying. Whoever the friend is, that is like a Greek chorus in which we can appreciate the madness that is in Holm’s character, that sits with him on the plane, then listens to him. We understand how much this relationship with his daughter overtakes him, so that he himself

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Filming Difference   95 can see his world over and over again. He can’t take in another woman, another youth. That sort of detachment in Holm’s character when he speaks about his daughter is very frightening. Meggie: And it ends with her having a sexually promiscuous marker—she is HIV-­positive. She furthers his faith of that moment like he’s thinking “Okay, it’s definitely not just in my head.” He is cold and he is done with her because when their paths come together, it ends with the same ruined woman persona. Fareed: Do you think that we were seeing the daughter from his perspective? Because I know we see the daughter in his imagination as wonderful, and beautiful, and calm, “Just look at her beautiful eyes!” Well, it’s clear that the film is framing, as we even have a point of view shot from Ian Holm’s character’s perspective as if to reinforce that we see at least in the nostalgic flashback the daughter through his eyes. Do you think we see the daughter through Ian Holm’s eyes when we see this purely damaged character: “Hey, daddy, I’ve got the news. You’re ready, daddy, you’re ready? I went to sell my blood.” Is that actually the character or is this how Ian Holm has distilled his daughter into this lost woman archetype. Rua: So what do you think is driving him? He’s so passionate about winning this case, and he almost does. So what’s driving him? Sanggyoung: Money? Rua: No, I don’t think it’s money. Fareed: (laughing) This is a quiet subtext of the movie; he’s greedy. Rua: No, I don’t think so. He’s angry because his daughter is like this. And he’s angry that there’s someone to blame for the condition of the road, for the accident, and not the driver. The driver is innocent. He’s just so angry. And he’s always on the case and it’s so important to win it. Well, it’s always important for a lawyer to do that, but I think he is very passionate about it. Fareed: In addition to what Meggie was saying, I think that when he’s talking with the family and he enters that sort of überlawyer mode, I almost give him my card: “Please, represent me,” you know, when he says “I want to give your anger a voice.” We feel bad for the man at the beginning, we think “Oh, he’s broken inside, he can’t win a fair price at a gas station, let alone a case.” But then the moment when he’s talking about the case he’s so convincing and it’s almost overbearing when he says “I want to give your anger a voice, because I don’t believe in accidents.” And I think that he’s right then. His malaise stems from the possibility that beyond what happened to his daughter, he’s feeling an overbearing existential frustration. Sanggyoung: I remember in the Piper’s story where people were rich and they were spoilt, like upper class. Fareed: Do you see him as the Piper? Rua: It’s getting very abstract but OK. I was wondering if you saw any analogies between the Piper’s story, Nichole, and broader community. Are we supposed to use that poem as a framework to understand the auxiliary characters around him?

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Meggie:

I don’t know. I think there’s a lot going on in the movie, and there is no single label to explain all of this. It’s interesting that Nichole is older than the kids, she’s the oldest one on the bus, she’s coming to maturity, she’s losing her innocence. Fareed: And her father, even though he visualizes her as a mature sexually available rock star, you know there is that moment when she understands her father has trouble with dealing with the space that she occupies as an individual on the cast with maturity beyond adolescence when she’s thrown into . . . well, not thrown but she’s pushed into her room and they explain, “Your father has been working all week, what do you think of it?” and she said “It’s interesting, I feel like a princess.” All of a sudden you see how the father is visualizing her not as a sexual object but as a child whose horizons extend only to fairies and princesses.

La Source des Femmes Synopsis The Source (La Source des Femmes), Radu Mihăileanu’s movie with an art-­ house touch, is set somewhere in a remote village between the north of Africa and the Middle East. The consequent drafts have become the new change of seasons, bringing no relief to the land and the people. The women from the village traditionally fetch water from a mountaintop spring in the blazing sun on a daily basis (no matter whether young or old, pregnant or nursing), while their idle husbands drink tea in the bar and mournfully discuss the weather. The educated Leïla, an outsider, and a wife of a local teacher Sami, begins a sex strike movement among the women, supported by the elder Vieux Fusil (meaning “old flintlock”), to force men to bring water to the village. The women will face a strong reaction from brutal men and of the women with traditionalist views. Among them there is Leïla’s evil mother-­in-law who plots a scheme to get rid of her. Adding drama to the already saturated situation, Leïla’s old love comes to the town “to study the bugs.” Unaware of the past, women arrange the meeting for him and Leїla, hoping that she will persuade “the journalist” to write a piece about their dangerous battle for dignity. When Leїla finds out who that journalist is, she refuses to talk to him, but his presence in the town anyway drives a wedge between Sami and Leïla. The townswomen must have their way at all costs: their determination leads up to a final, free-­spirited battle pitting feminist yearnings against Muslim mores.

Diegesis The film narrates a story of Leïla, a beautiful and educated Muslim wife who lives in a mountainous village. The film begins with an upward climb. Women

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Filming Difference   97 of the village walk the rocky path to the hilltop with their pails to fetch some water. Back at the village there is some happy singing: a baby boy that was born! And then a piercing sound of a plangent, sad song intrudes. Leïla is the one who performs that unfitting song, asking, pondering. The women do not pay attention to Leïla’s words. They hush her with their lively dancing and songs. Every day, in the scorching sun the women of the town have to go up to the mountaintop to bring the water from a well. Sometimes they fall, sometimes they have miscarriages. The elder Vieux Fusil (meaning “old flintlock”) steps into the light. Her husband is dead, and she has seven adult children. This gives her some valid authority among women. She reminds them of their children who died near the well. Leïla is only one of the women who lost their babies there. After the miscarriage she cannot have children anymore. There are many shades to this conflict. Women do not have many possessions of their own; they have no property rights or any basic education. Even their children can be taken away from them at their husbands’ whim. Their bodies do not belong to them as well: marital rape, violence, and daily exploitation are common happenings in their culture. Leïla’s husband, Sami, supports the revolution. He is a village teacher, urging parents to let the girls come to his school. He taught Leïla how to read and write, unaware that she would spread her newly acquired knowledge further. His good intentions come to a strain when his father begs him to take one more wife to bring the rebellion and gossips to heel. There would be even a larger strain when a man, calling himself a journalist, comes to the village. He used to be Leïla’s fiancé and her first man. He is still in love with her, hoping to win her heart once again. “We always try to support our women,” the men of the village tell the visitors. And the women will just smile at their husbands when they come to the fountain in front of the coffee-­bar to fetch some water for dinner. The film has several plots. There are many appeals to nature; a lot of analysis, like for instance the centrality of water in the opening scene. Leïla sings a song about the water that kills but also gives life, and there are also overlapping analogies between water and women. This can also be deduced from the title. She is metaphorically speaking about the women as the smallest creatures who have actually made an impact. Marriage is an important thread in the movie, and it is presented in all its forms. So we have forced marriage, consensual and romantic marriage, marriage based on fantasy, arranged marriage because most women were married at a young age and against their consent. There is this possessiveness that accompanies their marital life. It is obvious in many scenes where we see the brother of Sami beating his wife. You can see a structure of patriarchy which is also fragmented in a sense.

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Transcription of the Class Discussion on La Source des Femmes

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Soukaina:

I have a Power Point presentation but we can discuss the movie without it. Soukaina: Well, it’s just an introduction. It’s a nice movie. It’s a miniature of other problems like Islamic problems. There might be too much condensed material that is displayed in the movie which makes it, at least from a technical esthetic point of view, shallow, but I think it really displays a wide range of problems that are prevalent in the Arab/Islamic world and which I identify with, even though the spatial framework is not my typical framework. Soukaina: Yes, this is a village. Now, just let me give you some information about the movie. It was produced in 2011, directed by Bulgarian-­born French director called, and I think this is important, Radu Mihăileanu. The financing was 64 percent from France, 14 percent from Belgium, 12 percent from Italy, and 10 percent from others. This is important. Also the majority of the cast is French. Most of them are French-­born but of Algerian or Moroccan descent. I think this is a pivotal point in analyzing the movie independently from the events that actually happen in the movie. There’s also some sort of politics put in the movie. Nadia: Does French affect the speech? I mean the pronunciation. Soukaina: Yes. It’s not authentically like Moroccan dialect. Coincidentally, the characters that are played by Moroccan actors are also the most regressive and most patriarchal characters. First of all, I will start with the title. The title is La Source des Femmes which is “the source of women.” The official English title is The Source but there is also translation like The Women’s Fountain. There’s also a play of words here as well: source could be the source of water but also source as an origin. In French, source means both the body of water but also the origin. The story is also not authentic. This is an adaptation of similar stories: women going on love strike against men in rural areas have been adapted in Brazilian cinema and Latin America a lot. So it’s not a new story. The opening line of the movie starts with “is this a fairy tale or reality?” A fairy tale of course, but is there anything real on Earth? This is happening in a small village in Maghreb or the Arabic peninsula or elsewhere where there is a source of water. This opening quote tries to uproot the movie from a specific context. It mentions Morocco, Algeria etc., but it could also be elsewhere, which is an attempt to universalize this problem and not to make its context specific. But I think it fails to do so. OK, now a plot summary. A group of women decides to go on a love strike to force the men in their village to. . . Nadia: Why is it called a love strike? Andrea: It was also my question because it’s a sex strike actually. Soukaina: Yes, it’s a sex strike. The translation in the subtitles says “love strike” but in the Moroccan dialect they use, they call it “strike on sleeping”

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Filming Difference   99 and sleeping means having sex. It also communicates like a certain idea of conservatism that is deployed in the language of the movie. Even the women make sexual jokes that are very conservative. It’s hindered under a lot of metaphors to avoid explicit sexual context. I will briefly present the characters. We have Leïla who is a literate, progressive foreigner, and lives in the village, and she is a free-­spirited character. We have Loubna/Esmeralda who watches Mexican soap operas, Fatima who’s learning to read and write and is deeply involved in romantic fantasies. She is a feminist and she decides to leave the village and pursue her own freedom. There is also an old wise woman. The fact that she doesn’t have a husband allows her the authority to act on her own behalf and to have some authority over the community of women. We have Fatima who is the mother-­in-law of Leïla. She is traditional, submissive, and she is depicted as malicious, but she is also a key character in identifying the complexity of violence towards women. And there’s Sami who is educated, progressive, and who is in love. And there is a cheikh. Maria: What’s the difference between cheikh written this way and sheik written this way? Soukaina: This is how you write it in French. Nadia: Is this marital rape prosecuted anywhere? Soukaina: I think in the U.S. it is. Discussions about domestic violence in Lebanon, and generally in the Arab world, are nothing new. There is also the theme of womanhood which was portrayed in many different ways, and a frequent association of women with witchcraft, which is actually not surprising given the fact that the stereotype of women in Morocco is that they are actually witches. This theme is strategically placed in the movie. The other theme that is explored in the movie is a swing between feminist solidarity and women’s violence. A quote from the movie is indicative of this: when the wife of Imam asks him “Did you discipline those witches?” and he says “Sometimes I wonder if you are a woman. If you are a woman why do you always defend men?” This exposes the patriarchal structure that is embedded in the mentality of women who are supposed to liberate themselves. Even the Imam himself, who is very conservative and who is absorbed in a conservative religious discourse, was able to see a bit of logic in this whole progressive idea of Leïla. There are also instances of feminist solidarity like the advice from the wise woman who places a central role in encouraging and inspiring those women to go on a strike and also supporting them afterwards like arranging the meeting between Leïla and the journalist. Nadia: Why did they do it, in the first place, because it’s a heavy job to carry the water from the mountains? Soukaina: The fact that they were complaining about men sitting in coffee places and drinking is a literal problem. It’s not just a casual event in the movie to make it more interesting, but it’s a real phenomenon. Men refuse to work and women find themselves like sponsoring the families but also

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100   Playful Transformations completely submitted to the masculine discourse. It really exposes some of the central issues that exist in a conservative context. In Morocco there are public hammams or baths and these are considered very important places to which women are allowed to go. It’s a social place actually. It’s not a place for hygiene. There have been a lot of anthropological studies how the bath plays a big role in the social life of women. It’s an equivalent of a hairdresser salon. It provides a spatial framework for these women to meet and talk freely, and also naked. It’s very significant. Soukaina: Yes, Caramel, It’s a nice movie. It’s very interesting because it also grounds these women in a world of fantasy. This is interesting because this is also oriental, like in the case of Loubna who calls herself Esmeralda and clearly identifies with the romantic character. These women are capable of developing a sense of identity. The construction of masculinity is also very important. There is like a celebration of boyhood: boys and men. When a boy is born they say this is a man of the village in a very celebratory way. Masculinity is also constructed through domestic violence, which is very obvious in the movie, like wife beating, terrorizing kids, etc. It’s a form of masculinity. Leïla is with the women and they are discussing a step forward in the revolution which is followed by scenes with her husband saying that she has the right to fight, she has to be prepared. Andrea: Also when he found out that she wasn’t a virgin. Soukaina: Exactly. The construction of The West in the movie is also very critical. The first instance of mentioning of The West is . . . I think one of the men says “this is what you get when women start watching TV.” This is an implicit reference to the Western world and foreign influence. Tourists are portrayed as people who bring money, and they are also engaged in this sort of theatrical play when they bring money and then the whole village is like performing dances etc. and spending money on the projects for common good which never happens. There are also references to colonialism, which is very interesting. Colonialism was mentioned twice and this is a frequent discourse. This is the most prevalent discourse in North Africa and the Middle East, this is about colonialism. In the first meeting among men about what is happening in the village, the cheikh says it all started from colonialism. He doesn’t really give any logical arguments for this, but it’s a usual thing that people keep perpetuating this colonial discourse. Also when the patriarch of the family tries to convince Leïla to give up her ideas. He also alludes to colonialism. Colonialism is very important because it plays a big role in political motivation to do anything. And you can use it to justify anything without giving logical explanation. And also the role of religion which is obvious in the movie. The way it is portrayed is susceptible to interpretation and there are even implicit comments about how religion has always been interpreted by men and never women. It can be manipulated. It’s a platform for social and economic

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Filming Difference   101 negotiations and this is very obvious, for instance with the Islamists who come to the village and try to corrupt the Imam. It’s also a kind of negotiation and liberation. On the one hand, men want to push women to wear scarfs to extend their control. And the women take it to the extreme and see it as a masquerade which allows them to go the harvest season and expose what is happening in the village. This is also very obvious in the scene with Imam in which there is this dialogue between him and Leïla about what’s in the Koran and what is not. And in fact, it is written in the Koran “hit a woman if she disobeys you” but there are also other verses which say that women are equal to men. Nadia: I had a feeling that the women were portrayed not as warriors who were fighting just because that was their nature. Ironically, they had to fight to protect their most conservative, most tender, basic “female” longings: their desire to give birth, to be protected, and to love freely, without fear. They cherished their husbands and children, right? But the violence against them somehow blocked their love. And that terrible errand they had to run on a daily basis was the cause of the numerous miscarriages. . . Soukaina: There is the idea of love. The movie is an atrocious defense of the idea of love and it focuses on the romantic love but also on love in general. When I was contemplating this, I remember there was an article in 2012 by Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian journalist, who wrote the article in Foreign Policy which sparked the huge controversy and was called “Why Do They Hate Us?” It’s like an outcry against all the violation against women in the Islamic world. So the idea of love that is suggested here, even though I perceive it as shallow and superficial, it is also very interesting. It does communicate a certain message, and I want to show quotes from the Egyptian’s journalist’s article: “Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet’s rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women” (Foreign Policy, April 23, 2012). Then she says: “they don’t hate us because of our freedom, as the tired, post-­9/11 American cliché had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us.” So the idea of love and mis­ ogyny in the Arab/Islamic world is very central. I thought it was well placed. It doesn’t appeal to me as a person but I thought it was well placed. With this I end my presentation and I hope we can have a discussion now. Andrea: Well, this is a bit alien to my context. Why don’t they just go and get the water? Why can’t the guys bring the water? Nobody was benefiting from this but it was more from an outsider perspective. For me it makes sense they should bring water. Maria: Well, a pregnant woman shouldn’t. Andrea: At least. Soukaina: Well, throughout the movie there was always the comment “it’s tradition, why do you want to change tradition?” I think it goes beyond just bringing water, it is also a ritualistic practice which enforces their right to this tradition.

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Andrea:

This lack of logic or arguments for me didn’t come exclusively from men but also women because it could easily be seen that they couldn’t explain that women have miscarriages. They don’t justify anything; just tell them to bring the water. Andrea: Yes, and it’s very shallow. Nadia: And extremely risky. They could, actually, lose everything. So you might say that there are. . . Soukaina: Yes, there are conditions like this. My university existed in a small town, and it is surrounded by rural areas and there are women bringing wood for heating. It’s a common thing, these problems. Well, about this silence when a man is beating his wife. Five or six years ago, I witnessed a brutal man hitting his wife, everybody was watching it, but we couldn’t do anything. The man said she was his wife. I was there myself; it was in an urban area. Communal bonds are also based on such contractual agreements like “don’t intervene.” There’s actually not much you can do in such situations. It’s like part of a contract that we stay silent. For me it’s a normal scene that we don’t intervene when a man is beating his wife or sister. Nadia: And in my country as well. People usually don’t intervene, and most women who suffer from such violence would hate it if someone even tried to cut in. Soukaina: For me it’s a normal scene. The movie is a patchwork; it’s very shallow in terms of the plot and consistency of the narrative but it’s a very interesting patchwork because it patches all the problems and issues which are reality in Morocco. From this point of view, the substance of the themes that the movie handles, it’s really important. Who would make a movie about the situation of women in Islamic countries? Soukaina: Who would do that? So you come up with stupid stories and you bring all the issues and put them on the table. The movie was praised by a lot of people but it was also criticized. Nadia: For what? Soukaina: Well, we had two projections of the movie at my university. The first one was in class, the people were mostly Moroccan and they were saying it was a perpetuation of stereotypes. But also a lot of my friends didn’t see it as such. These problems are real. The second time was with American students and they liked the movie. Andrea: Well, this is annoying. Why don’t they speak of the situation of the French women? Well, the rural areas in France are another story. Soukaina: And this why I brought up the nationality of the founders in the beginning because it plays the role there. Also the cast, the actors and actresses are predominantly French. Andrea: It’s like an attempt to discredit men in Morocco. Well, perhaps they are like this but. . . Nadia: Discredit them in what eyes? Andrea: Of the Western men.

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Maria:

OK, so the question is if such a movie is possible with the Moroccan author or director? Soukaina: I think it is. Artistically or visually speaking it wouldn’t be that good but it would be possible. I mean the explicit scene like nudity would not be possible, but I can completely visualize a Moroccan director making this movie. Some of the scenes were actually used in a documentary about rape. There is some orientalism going on but the political intention, I think, was to expose all those problems in the form of a narrative.

Notes   1 It seems essential to pay attention to the general postbellum mood of the public towards leftist orientation in the U.S. and especially to the fact that due to the political activity of bodies such as the HUAC, everything that was associated with the left was suspected of collaboration with the Soviet communists.   2 The fact that George’s desire is sexually “deviant” and discriminated (even criminalized) in the U.S. society of the 1960s points to the fact that he suffers multiple alienations: being a British gay man in the U.S., a brilliant scholar in English literature, stuck in a mediocre college. These intersections bring him not only to loneliness in suffering, but they also shape him as a stranger whose sexuality is singled out from the “norm.”   3 It is interesting to notice that in the entire house he has no photo of Jim. The only picture of his beloved lover, whom he deeply mourns for almost a year, is kept in the bank safe. Symptomatically, on the day when he wants to commit suicide, he takes the photo out and brings it home. Thus, this action can be seen as George’s attempt to reconcile with the loss by bringing the photo of his lover, as an open wound, to his house of cold designer furniture.   4 In this way, spatial metaphors in the movie indicate his status of being “closeted gay” in a hostile environment.   5 I also see a symbolic parallel between her going back to the South and her ending up in the wheelchair. Going down to the South, after the accident, it also brings for May-­ Alice significant symbolism. Not only does she go back to her childhood environment, but by geographically going down, she symbolically depicts the fact that disabled persons are always below the rest of mainstream society.   6 By this I mean: a sovereign, socially accepted, well accommodated, fully integrated, willing, strong, unified, monolithic, and “healthy” entity which has been praised in Western culture.   7 There is a sense of pleasure when May-­Alice asks Chantelle if the agency warned her that she was a “bitch.”   8 I intentionally point out these two sessions of physical therapy as contrasted scenes although they are not structurally essential to the diegesis of the movie. I trust these scenes to be meaningful because they are contrasted before and after the first glimpses of protagonists’ vulnerabilities and, additionally, they happen in the hospital, an institution for vulnerability. Therefore, I interpret them as the significant points of May-­ Alice’s self-­development.   9 I deliberately use this word in its double meaning: forge means both create, but also falsify, since Nichole is telling lies about the accident. 10 Actually, I think that one of the greatest effects of the film is precisely its ability to depict and transmit certain atmosphere without explicitly telling us the exact details. Although we do not have access to complete stories of neither of the characters, we can easily feel the heaviness and complicated emotional relationships they are embedded in. We do not have to know the story of a married couple who lost their child in

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the accident to realize that they are constantly fighting with each other. This detail is marvelously depicted in the scene where they quarrel in the background about who is considered to be a respected citizen of the community, while the lawyer is talking to Zoe on the phone. Family dysfunctions come to light more effectively than they would if we knew all the explicit details about characters’ pasts. 11 In psychoanalytic terms, the knife can be also interpreted as a castration tool, a necessary gadget for entering the symbolic order.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Eltahawy, Mona. 2012. “Why Do They Hate Us? The Real War on Women Is in the Middle East.” Foreign Policy April  23, http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/04/23/why-dothey-hate-us/ (accessed April 2016). Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 3–30. Huxley, Aldous. 1954. The Doors of Perception. New York: Harper & Brothers. Jaehne, Karen. 1996. “Antonia’s Line review [untitled].” In Film Quarterly 50, no 1: 27–30. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Screen 16, no. 3: 6–18. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984–1988. Time and Narrative. Volumes 1–3. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Spencer, Liese. 1996. “Antonia’s Line.” Sight and Sound 6, no. 9: 34–35.

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4 Personalizing Narrativity

In the final chapter, I cede full voice to my students. While the previous chapter included transcripts of previously recorded class discussions, one for each of the seven films that eventually found their way into this book, this chapter presents students’ personal narratives. Their personal accounts narrate very different forms of exclusion and inclusion. In their essays, they challenge prevailing discourses that construct and stigmatize individuals in relation to the intersections they embody. Here, I return to my primary goal of this study, which is to demonstrate how students as spectators can be empowered through performative audiencing. In my courses, performative audiencing takes the form of personal narratives, that is, written statements in the scheme of essays of 1500–2000 words on one selected film, which was watched and discussed in the class, that was especially appealing to them, and with which students could identify in some way. I have briefly described the nature of this assignment earlier. The naturalness with which most of them approached the task at hand first struck me, then delighted me. Some graduate and postgraduate students had been used to traditional styles of teaching and learning. A few of them quibbled over the proposed format but eventually, when it was over, they cherished the experience. For most of them it was the first such assignment in their careers as students, in which they opened up and put down on paper, at times very intimate, reminiscences of their personal experiences, which were stimulated by the films they were writing about. In this chapter I present a choice of personal accounts of lived experience that draws on the films discussed in class. As mentioned above, an average length of the personal narrative oscillates between 1500–2000 words but presenting them in their full length would take too much space in this book; therefore I decided to present excerpts from each selected essay, long enough to demonstrate the flow of thought and argumentation present in them. Another way of going about this was, I suppose, presenting a critical account of what students were writing about. However, if I followed that path something important would be lost, namely the authenticity of students’ personal narratives. For better or worse, it seems much more interesting to read authentic personal statements, however truncated, of necessity, they might be, if they are intended to be informative of the connection between a film and the lived experience of the spectator.

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Intersectional Classroom: Personal Narratives In what follows, I present a choice of personal accounts of students’ lived experience that draw on the films discussed during the semester of teaching. Thematically, students’ personal narratives that I eventually decided to include in the book, can be placed under three rubrics: disability, sexuality, and ethnicity. Each of these is then linked with one of the films, which takes up the problematics of disability, sexuality, or ethnicity. The written English of the selected excerpts of personal narratives presented below is original. I did not interfere with occasional stylistic inadequacies of students’ essays, despite the fact that for the overwhelming majority of my students English is a second language. More importantly, correcting and having students revise their essays, a common practice in composition courses, would negatively affect the nature of these essays. After all, they are supposed to be personal, authentic statements, and not an exercise in writing. All visual material included in this chapter is my responsibility, not the students’. I begin with disability in an interview with my former Assistant, Sara Kowalska. During the academic year 1993–1994, she worked in the Women’s Studies Center which I founded in 1992 at the University of Łódź as the first such center in Poland and one of the first in Eastern Europe. The interview was performed via telephone in English, recorded, and then transcribed. I decided to include the interview because both Sara and Fareed, in different ways share a similar predicament; they are disabled physically but both of them excel in intellectual capacity and determination to achieve their goals. They never give up. This, I think, deserves recognition and admiration. Also, importantly, was my intention to confront my classroom experience with real life and include in the book an interview with someone who is not taking a course for a university degree but someone who, day after day, has to live and struggle with her disability. Since I have known Sara for a long time, I knew that she would agree to talk openly with me about her impairment.

Interview with Sara Sara is fluent in English. She holds an M.A. degree in English from the Institute of English Studies at the University of Łódź. She agreed for our talk to be recorded and transcribed in order to be included in the book. Sara is disabled; she suffers from Cerebral Palsy. Elżbieta:

What’s your disability? Have you been disabled since birth? I suffer from Cerebral Palsy, which basically is a neurological disease that might result in various impairments, depending on the area of the brain that is affected. Mine resulted in motor impairments and eyesight problems. As it is a consequence of negligence during birth, it has been with me always. Elżbieta: I’ve sent you an article “Unspeakable Conversations” (The New York Times, February 16, 2003), in which Harriet McBryde Johnson carries out a Sara:

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Personalizing Narrativity   107 lengthy interview with philosopher Peter Singer. Can you comment on the article, if you’ve read it, of course? Sara: Yes, I’ve read the article. The confrontation of these two strong-­willed individuals, where Ms. McBryde is a living contradiction to Mr. Singer’s views is electrifying in itself. In the dispute, she and Singer represent, as if, two different cultures, where understanding may be achieved only on reaching some kind of intercultural awareness. Singer’s arguments are “ethno-­ centric,” representative of the “healthy.” McBryde seems to know this very well, and maybe this is why she has so much patience with her opponent. She is aware that Singer’s views were shaped in different times, and to me she resembles an understanding teacher in this difficult situation. She is the one on the “intercultural” level, with all the knowledge. Personally, I would also be the one to contradict her in this regard, just as her friends did. My own life has also taught me that if someone does you harm out of insufficient information, it does not make it any less harmful. Yes, I can UNDERSTAND Singer. I cannot JUSTIFY him, though and give him credit, intellectual authority as he is. To put a blunt example: if famous authorities of the 1980s commanded my life, I would be locked in an institution, on medicine I should never be taking, no use to society, no happiness, no life. Would they be right? No. Would they be good-­willed? I bet they would. Is ignorance, even unintentional, objectively allowed where human life is at stake? And yet everybody knows suffering is subjective. Elżbieta: Please, describe your childhood and adolescence in Poland. Was there any infrastructure for disabled people then? How about now? Sara: I would be diplomatic calling it very contrastive. On the one hand, my parents have been informed by all specialists I would not be communicative and should be institutionalized for my own good. Once they have managed to prove this is far from true, I was still denied regular state education, despite the fact that psychologists were thrilled with my IQ. What surprises me at this point is that most of my family and friends of my parents would also say that sending me to school is a bad, bad idea, despite knowing me. I guess I owe the win in this matter to my mother’s determination. On the other hand though, I always had many friends privately, who seemed to ignore the fact that I actually couldn’t or shouldn’t take part in most of their childhood games. Children tend to be cruel towards one another, but it never happened to me. Looking back, this was surprising, given that in Communist Poland every difference from the average was so highly stigmatized. As regards the infrastructure, there was none at all. There was also poverty, and I remember some neighbor stole my wheelchair wheels. I never learned who it was. Now, the situation has slightly improved in this matter, but I regret to say there has been much more fuss about it for a long time now than there actually is improvement, and this regards all levels: schooling, social inclusion, architecture. In social terms, there is a lot of “us and them” talk, which does not contribute, because if someone is just “tolerated”

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108   Playful Transformations and not really “included,” their social development is impaired and no wonder they have less to offer afterwards. Elżbieta: You’ve lived most of your life in Łódź, right? Why did you move to another city in Poland, to Wrocław? Sara: Mostly for financial reasons. The very Western part of Poland is overall richer in opportunities. I stayed in Łódź very long, as I loved it, and wanted to make a change; still, living there was quite tough financially, even if colorful. I might be back if my income would finance my rehabilitation and housing, as it does here. Elżbieta: Could you please describe your professional profile. Sara: I am, essentially, a certified translator, with a few years of experience in international affairs and cross-­cultural communication. Nowadays, for financial reasons, I am servicing Enterprise Resource Planning applications, as the Information Technology for the business sector is growing strong in Poland. However, I still happily do two or three books a year, and would more than gladly go back to diplomacy-­related work, if my income was sufficient for independence. The reason I resigned was the salary of about 400 EUR gross: an average of what the government sector could offer a month. No way this would refund my treatment, which is not covered by medical insurance. I have also had an interesting opportunity to interview disabled university students for an EU-­financed research program, which actually opened my eyes to the importance of the issue in social terms. Elżbieta: As you know, I would like to include this interview with you in a Routledge book. How can I refer to you in the book: Sara or Sara Kowalska? Sara: Please, feel free to use my full name. Elżbieta: Have you ever contemplated migration to the West? Sara: I had been invited to Brussels and London, but back then family reasons prevented it. Now I would not hesitate for a second try, if opportunity came. I think that Poles are precious people, but the state left me very disappointed. I was never the one to complain and ever hardworking. I got absolutely nothing in return. Elżbieta: How have people reacted to your disability over time? Sara: I think it has always been the same. People would often not notice my disability, despite obvious motoric impairment. They often ask me if I had a ski accident. I think this might be related to the fact that living your usual life and looking like anybody else does not fit the Polish image of a “disabled person.” On the other hand, there are single instances where people are shocked and assume I am mentally challenged, unemployed or single (why these three, I will never guess). They happen to be rude, but mostly these are very funny moments. Elżbieta: If you travel in Poland, do you see infrastructure for disabled people? Sara: What surprises me continuously is that even though modern civil engineering allows for cost-­effective solutions in this regard, newly erected buildings often still lack this kind of thing, which might be, after all, beneficial to the elderly as well as to young mothers and small children, not

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Personalizing Narrativity   109 only people with impairments. Improvement is noticeable especially over the last ten years, but as I said: there is a lot of fuss about it in the first place, given how it corresponds to action. It tends to be annoying. Elżbieta: If you travel abroad, do you see such infrastructure? Sara: Sweden is a nice example of a country where things are not done “especially for someone.” They are simply designed to be as comfortable as can be and everybody can access everywhere. Also, I have always had this nice feeling there of being invisible, neutral in a way; it gives you the nice differentiation between tolerance and acceptance. Germany would be second to mention, but there, one still stands out. Elżbieta: Thank you, Sara. Sara: I thank you too, good luck with your book.

Personal Narratives In this section a selection of personal narratives authored by my students is presented, one or more for each film. Information about each student precedes the narrative. When I met Fareed Ben-­Youssef in 2011, he was a graduate student at Berkeley, where I spent three months on a research grant and taught the “Intersectionality and Audience Analysis in the Feminist Classroom” course to a small group of students. Fareed received a B.A. in English Literature with a Film Concentration from Princeton. Now he is a doctoral student in the Department of Film and Media at Berkeley. Fareed’s personal narrative carries a title On Disempowerment and Empowerment of the Wheelchair and is based on two films: Passion Fish and The Sweet Hereafter.

Fareed Ben-­Youssef ’s Personal Narrative: Passion Fish The circumstance of my birth is the stuff of movies. Just a day after my mother had a routine ultrasound confirming that the new baby was going to be a girl, she went into labor. Amid pus and blood, I was born on March 6, 1987—a boy, it turned out, and three and a half months premature. I weighed a deathly two pounds, and my prognosis was not good. In between moments where my heart stopped, the doctors informed my parents to prepare for the worst. There was no way, they thought, that under such conditions, a child could live. Well, my body had other ideas, and I pushed through. The celebration of survival was quickly tainted, however, by the harsh reality of my mental disability. I had Cerebral Palsy and over 40 percent of my brain was not just underdeveloped, but absent entirely. If I were to live, which seemed increasingly likely, I would be burdened mentally as well as physically. Would I be a vegetable? If I spoke at all, would I be able to form complex ideas? It could be years before my family understood the depths of my paralysis. The odds were decidedly against me, but like any good underdog story, I  proved the numbers deliciously wrong. From high school valedictorian

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to  Princeton University undergrad to Berkeley graduate student, I left the incubator and death’s touch far behind, and have reveled in language, delighted in ideas, and relied most firmly on my mind, unimpeded by the physical limitations I was born with. Next, Fareed comments on the scene in Passion Fish, in which Sayles skillfully introduces the viewer to the gothic atmosphere of the old mansion, evocative of such classic images of the South as the thriller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), in which one of the characters is disabled. Fareed writes: After being invited to come enjoy the movie, Chantelle enters the living room and casually sits on May-­Alice’s wheelchair. Law concerning the rights of disabled people often emphasizes a person’s sovereignty over his wheelchair, framing it not only as an assistance device but as an extension of his body. It is not to be touched or manipulated without the express permission of its owner; anything less is akin to assault. As a disabled viewer, I was shocked when without asking, Chantelle took her place on May-­Alice’s wheelchair. Amplifying this takeover of May-­Alice’s personal territory, Chantelle holds onto the invalid’s “umbilical cord,” the remote control. The scene thus presents May-­Alice’s tacit subordination to fully mobile individuals like Chantelle. As an injury-­free actress, she was in complete control of her stage and her audience. Disabled, she must relinquish all, even her wheelchair, to the able-­bodied. That her eventual soulmate so effortlessly commits such an invasion clearly illustrated to me how the body of a disabled person can be broken and taken over on a whim. Below, Fareed shifts from Sayles’s film to Atom’s Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter.

Figure 4.1 Chantelle and May-Alice (Passion Fish, John Sayles, 1992).

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Figure 4.2 Chantelle Sits in May-Alice’s Wheelchair (Passion Fish, John Sayles, 1992).

Figure 4.3 May-Alice, Chantelle, and Rennie in a Boat (Passion Fish, John Sayles, 1992).

Fareed Ben-­Youssef ’s Personal Narrative: The Sweet Hereafter At the very moment where [Nichole] challenges her father for his objectification of her able-­bodied self, she refers to herself as “wheelchair girl.” She recognizes how she outwardly appears, but this does not prevent the girl from declaring her personal strength in front of the man who left her so broken. If anything, the fact pushes Nichole to grow ever more intellectually savvy in her progression into a person in total control of who she is.

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Figure 4.4 Nichole and Her Father in the Barn (The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan, 1997).

She inverts a supposed conceptual and physical limitation into a source of liberation. This empowering gesture is ultimately what we remember of the fiercely willed Nichole. In that sublime moment of the cross examination [at the deposition], where her eyes never break away from her abuser’s, we forget her wheelchair. How she so establishes that strength of her singular identity pinpoints how my disability motivates my personal drive. Although Chantelle’s co-­option of May-­Alice’s wheelchair reminds me of how I might be perceived as purely handicapped, Nichole’s astonishing transformation in court cinematically frames my intention to prove that my dis­ ability remains but a part of who I am. These heroines reveal how the medium can effortlessly frame an identity faced with a domineering intersection, and the possibility that an arm brace and a not-­so-subtle limp can be rendered invisible.

Figure 4.5 Nichole Gives Her Deposition (The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan, 1997).

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Personalizing Narrativity   113 At this point I must disrupt the flow of the narrative and briefly return to the discussion on pedagogical autobiography. In Susan Gabel’s (2002) article, referred to previously, she records a conversation over the phone with a social worker and, subsequently, with her (Gabel’s) disabled daughter, Tiffany. Afterwards, Gabel attempts to establish why her daughter, who suffers from spina bifida, which limits her movements, her ability to read and count, and affects her speech, and who answers positively to her mother’s question: “Is it OK that they [her mother and other children] have disabilities?” does not see herself as a disabled person. In the end, the mother reluctantly admits: “OK, Tiffy. I will have to agree. You are not disabled” (2002, 180). Even though, as Gabel later explains, she adhered to the view that social and cultural construction of disability resulted from discrimination against people with impairment/s rather than an “innate individual deficit,” (2002, 181) her reaction to her daughter’s revelation exposed her “tacit conceptual dissonance” (2002, 181). Disability may signify a self-­selected identity or set of meanings. But disability is also a status of oppression, a cultural and social aversion to people with unique embodiments and not an innate deficit. As Gabel aptly points out, “ability diversity should be considered among other diversities, e.g. race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, culture, etc.” (2002, 183). Such was the case of my French student, M, whose personal narrative on Antonia’s Line is presented below. M was a very special and gifted student. I was hoping that she would become a writer. She was an epileptic but above all she was a prodigy, a genius, and that was her “disability,” as can be read about in her personal narrative. Her personal narrative is an excellent example of how the performative audiencing as a method of teaching film triggers memories and reflections upon one’s life, which might not have surfaced, if not for the discussions and film viewing. That’s what lived experience with regard to film analysis is all about. Three years after she had completed her GEMMA study program at Łódź University, M died.

M’s Personal Narrative: Antonia’s Line First day of high school. As a long repeated choreography, students go around, looking for their class, meeting their friends, talking, laughing . . . the usual. I am among them, without being really part of it, looking around, curious. How is it going to be this year? Finally, the teacher arrives, takes this new group of children to their class. I follow. We enter the class. I sit alone. The traditional welcoming discourse. And the dreaded moment: the list. Checking information, each student answering the call. A, B, C . . . M arrives. First language. Second language. “24th of November 1991.” I raise my hand. ’91? There must be a mistake.” Twenty-­eight pairs of eyes look at me. I blush. My tiny voice breaks the silence: “Euuuhh, no. No, it’s correct.” Frowning. I have to explain, to justify my presence here. “I skipped three classes.” Whispering. If my new classmates had not found some topic to talk about yet, they have now.

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114   Playful Transformations Just like that I became “the girl who skipped three classes.” I hate this girl. Of course, she did not arrive out of nowhere, she had evolved. She had skipped one class, first, a second later, and now the third. But this third one made my status as a “prodigy” official. All year long, I was an outsider within. A white, middle-­class girl, from a small city in France. At the age of nine, though, my parents made me take an IQ test. And then it became official. My whole life started to make sense. I had an explanation. An abnormally high IQ. When I learned the result, I felt like finally I understood, I did fit in a category after all. . . All too common to overcome the prodigy. What does it mean anyway? I had never felt like a “prodigy,” a “genius” or any of these labels people stuck on me. I had a good memory and I learned easily. I felt like an impostor. Teachers treated me with special care. It only reinforced the idea that I was different. M continues by drawing an analogy between her own life and Thérèse’s from Antonia’s Line: From her infancy, people repeated to her that she was different, that she needed a special treatment. She was “a prodigy.” At first, I was angry to see such a depiction of “intelligence.” Her will to study, her philosophical

Figure 4.6 Thérèse, a Child Prodigy. “Who Taught You?” “—. . . Crooked Finger Helped a Bit.” (Antonia’s Line, Marleen Gorris, 1995).

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aspirations, her gift for mathematics, her difference. . . . Thérèse is what people expected me to be. I was angry because such a depiction comes to strengthen stereotypes. As I grow older, the age difference matters less and less, but I still feel like I need to compensate for it. In my case, my IQ played the role of the ability/ disability category, I received special care and attention while I just wanted to be “normal.” M continues: Epilepsy crises and two months of starvation punctuated the first year. But failure is unacceptable when you were continuously told that you could do whatever you want. So, I restarted. In the end, I found myself alone and isolated for two years. Depressed. I went back to my parents. Like Thérèse, my first confrontation with the outside world turned out to be deceptive, and I went back to my family. This is why I had mixed feelings about the character of Thérèse in Antonia’s Line. From her infancy, people repeated to her that she was different, that she needed a special treatment. She was “a prodigy.” At first, I was angry to see such a depiction of “intelligence.” Her will to study, her philosophical aspirations, her gift for mathematics, her difference. Thérèse is what people expected me to be. I was angry because such a depiction comes to strengthen stereotypes. In this film where the characters escape all categorization, Thérèse is the only one who is labeled. She is the prodigy. I studied there for a year and a half, but it was not fully satisfying. I needed more. So what to do? Starting from scratch? Going abroad, to Poland for instance? Being a stranger among strangers. Rua is a GEMMA student from Syria. Before she came to study at Łódź University and took the “Intersectionality and Audience Analysis in the Feminist Classroom” course with me she participated in the Revolution of 2011 there. Before her personal narrative is presented, it is interesting, I think, to read her introductory remarks in which we find out her life story. She writes: Getting all my stuff in my bag ten minutes ahead the end of the school day so that I can hurry up to get out of the class to the school gate, didn’t work out well, neither saved me. They were always there, waiting. The attack was inevitable. Again, I take the side of the school wall and walk back home while receiving the punches and the kicks in silence. They shout: “tomboy,” “the daughter of the infidels,” “the blind.” That is what the children at my school believed I am. They needed no reason to cut my bag and steal my eye-­glasses during the sport class, to steal my books throughout the year, or to wait for me outside the school to give me the punishment they thought I deserve for not being enough of a “normal girl,” whatever “normal” means. . . . Every day, when I went to sleep, I wished that time would be frozen or that I will get up twenty years older.

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116   Playful Transformations In 2011, The Revolution in Syria brought me hope to finish my search for identity. For the first time, I felt part of the community, with an invaluable spirit, energy, courage, enthusiasm to break up the chain and leave the cage of oppression. The times of submission and subjugation were gone. It was the time for creation. And yet, unfortunately, shortly after the movement started [the revolution], the whole country entered a dark tunnel of the civil war that has turned, later on, into a conflict with international dimensions. With bullets flying in all directions, many of the nonviolent movement’s activists were left behind searching eagerly for the light at the end of the tunnel. Eventually, the punishment for speaking up against injustice and oppression was the exile. Henceforward, Rua was forced to constantly change places of living, which meant changing friends and communities. It also meant for her starting over from scratch again and again. She continues: My journey included living in ten cities and attending four different schools in Syria; visiting and living in fourteen countries: from Arab states to Europe, to Central Asia, and Russia. No matter how different the contexts were, people always seemed more confident than I am. They had roots and certainty, even when illusive, about who they are. The strange common thing between all communities was the fact that I was always perceived and treated as “the other:” an outsider. For Kurds, I was the Arab. For Arabs, I was Syrian, but for Syrians, I was not Syrian enough. For Muslims, I was the Christian or the Atheist. For Christians, I was the Muslim. For Arab guys, I was the wild. For Western guys, I was the sexually oppressed. Rua then passes to The Sweet Hereafter and concentrates on two main characters: Nichole and Zoe.

Rua’s Personal Narrative: The Sweet Hereafter I found both Nichole and Zoe representatives of the disability produced by society, in spite of the significant difference of the nature of their experiences, as well as the way each dealt with it. The bus accident was an awakening point in Nichole’s life who had the chance to survive and change. The strong contradiction made about the body disability vis-­à-vis new ability, a self-­realization of her own body borders, was a clear message that sometimes, the most part of disability doesn’t necessarily have a tangible reflection on our bodies or minds. Sometimes, it turns visible and takes a physical or mental manifestation, yet other times it stays invisible, hidden and even within the acceptable average “standards” of abilities. I think everyone has that disabled side which influences their mental, physical, and emotional performance at some point. For some people, that might last for some time, and for others it may last forever. That is the most dangerous type of disability. A disability produced by people.

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Figure 4.7 Nichole Performing on Stage (The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan, 1997).

I have never really found a place that I can call home. However, I have got to know people who are home to me. They offered me love and support to overcome the frustration I have been through and this is exactly what I want to be; a source of love and support for those who do not belong. Of all the films which constituted the filmography of the course, A Single Man garnered most attention as the background material for students’ personal narratives. Several of them felt an affinity with the movie because of its rendition of sexuality and fear. George Falconer talks about fear when he lectures to his students on his personal rendition of Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939). He gives a nuanced and personal account of the politics of fear, which has been triggered by the daily news on the Cuban missile crisis. He discusses the theory of invisible people (like himself ), the fear of the Jews, and the Communist scare. Z-­13 is from Serbia, a GEMMA student in Łódź and a certified medical doctor, with a few years of practice as a physician. In his questionnaire Z-­13’s response to the question: “How would you prefer to be quoted in the book?” his choice is “anonymous (coded).” He begins his personal narrative with a description of the situation of gay people in Serbia, particularly in his native city. However, he is not prolific about himself.

Z-­13’s Personal Narrative: A Single Man I reached Łódź on the day when Serbian authorities banned the Gay Pride in Belgrade. After last year’s Pride with huge clashes with several thousand far-­rightists in the streets of Belgrade destroying the city and attacking the people in the streets, this year the State declared a complete capitulation to the politics of fear and inequality. They simply banned the manifestation. . . . We heard a million explanations in the media. From the politicians, across the variety of the experts, celebrities, activists, to the ordinary people,

118   Playful Transformations nobody gave any explanation about the situation, about who LGBT persons are and what their claims are. Not a single word of education addressing the nation. Homosexuality is the same as pedophilia.

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Z-­13 continues with a fragment on the situation of gay people in Zagreb’s nightclubs and cafés. They are all there seeking the sexual partner(s). No matter which party, organizations, background, preferences, Serbian, Croats, Roma: actors, doctors, rent-­boys, low-­class or middle, or rich impersonators with BMW, transgender, lesbian or gay, they are all there. Of course, last but not least, a group of HIV-­positive gay people among them. Not a very large group, but very much stigmatized. This particular intersection is completely silenced! Those persons are surrounded with silence by the majority in Serbian society. They are dying alone. Now he turns his attention to the film, reflecting on George Falconer’s loss and his relationship with his partner. Whenever I watch A Single Man by Tom Ford, I’m haunted by the question of loss and loneliness in it. I remember the scene when Professor Falconer, played by Colin Firth, hears about his partner’s death. Silence and loss, at the same time, sublime with the questions of love, life, and memory. I’m particularly surprised by the fact that Prof. Falconer was forbidden to mourn his lover. The cruelty of the lover’s family was immensurable. And the reason for this was that gay sexuality and gay relationship they didn’t approve? Who has the right to forbid the mourning of one person in this world? And is it possible? I don’t think so. No matter how terrible the loss is, we mourn our loved ones in our own way. My thinking in that moment goes to my coping with the question of loss. I’m trying to figure out, if something like this that happened to Prof.

Figure 4.8 George Finds Out about His Partner’s death (A Single Man, Tom Ford, 2009).

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Figure 4.9 George’s Reaction to the News (A Single Man, Tom Ford, 2009).

Falconer, is going to happen to me, how I am going to deal with it. Then I’m thinking about my partner and how wonderful relationship we have. The happiness in life is somehow unexpected. As death is! A Single Man shows how both could be unexpected. The experience with the student of Prof. Falconer for sure provides for the Professor some delay in his decision to die, some nice time, some forgetting of the loss for a while. Unfortunately, it did not postpone his death. No matter how aware of death we are, it always hits us with the highest intensity. I’m thinking about HIV-­positive gay men, dying of AIDS, usually alone, how they cope with their partners in those moments of loss? And if they are not approved by the society and families, how harder is it going to be? Clara is an Austrian student who came to study at the University of Łódź as an Erasmus exchange student. Her personal narrative also deals with A Single Man. Unlike other personal narratives presented above, we do not learn much about Clara’s life, however the “biographical” part of her essay is reflective and interesting, especially the fragment in which she writes about an imagined camera, with which she looks at the world around her.

Clara’s Personal Narrative: A Single Man There are moments when I feel somehow lost or too small for this world, maybe stranded, helpless, or without any ideas and inspiration. What helps me out of these thoughts is the attempt of seeing everything through the viewfinder of an imagined camera. I do not even need the camera, just the  imagination is enough to gain some distance to these moments, and this  distance at the end makes you feel closer to all those things that seemed lost before. For me this metaphor of the camera shows the importance of a self-­aware view onto one’s life. As I can choose what I really

120   Playful Transformations want to face, trying to choose the significant pictures between the abundance of meaningless pictures, I manage to feel more comfortable with my life.

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Clara’s personal narrative now addresses A Single Man. Clara writes: A Single Man is all about being aware of one’s own existence, about developing one’s own ideas, knowing who we are and what we want, about watching ourselves playing roles that we want to be, and about feeling like an insignificant minority but still seeing why, as an individual, we are important to society and what we can achieve with our ideas. George needs some time every morning to become George. Time to adjust to what is expected of him. He dresses very carefully and prepares himself for the day and finally, he says, he then knows fully what part he is supposed to play. The very first words spoken in A Single Man are about saying am and now, and recognizing oneself as this subject that is here and now. What the film A Single Man does is depict interiority. George Falconer is an English teacher at a university in California. And George is gay. On November 30th 1962 he decides to commit suicide. Eight months have passed since the accident in which his partner, Jim, died, and George has not been happy for these last eight months as he could not get back his zest for life. Without Jim he feels empty and insignificant, because Jim was part of him. In a class at the university he lectures on the minorities because a student asks about the reason for the persecution of the Jews as a minority. Obviously George feels like a minority because of his homosexuality. But, as nobody knows this, what we can call one intersection of his subjectivity, he must not speak about it frankly. His last sentence in class is: “Minorities are just people. People like us.” In this class he truly speaks of himself, but without letting his students know explicitly.

Figure 4.10 George Lectures on Minorities (A Single Man, Tom Ford, 2009).

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Clara wraps up her narrative: George starts his day with the plan to end up his life in the evening. Just one last day. However, his view on life changes during the day, unconsciously and slowly, as this change is visualized in the slow motion scenes and pale pictures. When he gets excited or nervous or simply emotionally touched, the colors sometimes become more vivid. My favorite scene is the one with Julianne Moore when they are dancing in her living room. Suddenly, we see George feeling conscious about himself for the first time. George’s suicidal thoughts collide with emotion he has not felt since Jim’s death. It is a film about love and loss. About someone who is not sure if he wants to stay, but decides to, even if it is just for a moment. Clara’s rendition of A Single Man resembles George Falconer’s contemplations about his own life: A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few, brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think. Things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them. But like everything, they fade. I’ve lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present. And I realize that everything is exactly the way it’s meant to be. These words resonated for a Dutch student, Annemȳn who came to study at Łódź University as an Erasmus student. They triggered memories of a vacation in Spain with her girlfriend and of her childhood. Annemȳn realizes that one common feature that she shares with George Falconer is the latter’s meditating spirit and his sensitivity towards the world around him. The film makes her recollect her childhood and difficulties with falling asleep.

Annemȳn’s Personal Narrative: A Single Man When George Falconer in A Single Man speaks these words at the end of the film, I realize that I have experienced moments like that several times in my life. And that they are special moments, moments that stay with you. I’ve always had trouble with silence. Not necessarily with being silent in the sense of not speaking. But because it is hardly ever silent in my head. As a child I had trouble getting to sleep. My mother would come and read to me every night, and then if I hadn’t calmed down after that we would do a meditating exercise. . . . And then I would be able to fall asleep. I think that is what the film really was about. [It] gained significance for me personally in that I realized the importance of circumstance but, more importantly, of other people as an intersection. . . . They are the encountering moments with others when I intersect with them rather than meet them. And

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Figure 4.11 George Has a Heart Attack (A Single Man, Tom Ford, 2009).

Figure 4.12 George Dies (A Single Man, Tom Ford, 2009).

the world really does look different, more colorful, more alive, more beautiful, more in movement than it does in other moments. I think that is the reason why the moment on the top of the hill in Spain came to me when I was thinking about A Single Man, because even though in that moment I became aware of the insignificance of my life to the world, my life does have significance for the people around me. And as a matter of fact, the love of my life was standing behind me looking at the same view. And she most of the time makes my world turn from gray to colorful. In A Single Man, George is confronted with his own insignificance and that of his partner. Because life goes on even though George loses the one person he loves the most. It seems as if George thinks the only way he can show just how significant the love of his life is to him is by killing himself, in a way rendering himself equally insignificant to the world.

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She concludes her personal narrative in a nostalgic mood. George Falconer says that he’s lived his life in those moments, that they pull him back to the present. Even though they fade. I think it is inevitable that they fade, because as I turned around on the hilltop in Spain I could see the cars passing by with people in them. And it wasn’t the world anymore, but the cars that were moving. And rather than both me and the world moving and becoming as I was walking back to the car, it felt like the earth was solid and standing still again and I was the center of my universe again. For a split second, as I am writing this, I think: it would not be so bad to die like George, in a moment when the silence drowns out the noise and everything is exactly the way it’s meant to be. Zuzanna, a GEMMA student from Germany, was born from Polish parents who left Poland in the 1980s and live now in Germany. When Zuzanna completed the GEMMA Program and received her M.A. degree in Gender Studies, she did not return to Germany but stayed in Łódź and worked as a translator. She is fluent in Polish, German, and English, this I know for a fact, and probably in other languages. Then, she was accepted to a very prestigious and competitive Ph.D. Program in Gender Studies, which is sponsored by the European Commission, and is now writing her Ph.D. Dissertation under my supervision. Zuzanna turned to Fremde Haut (in English translation: stranger’s skin) for inspiration and a motif of her personal narrative. First she offers her introductory remarks.

Zuzanna’s Personal Narrative: Fremde Haut The direction of my most decisive journey took place without my consent. It wasn’t from Iran to Germany, it wasn’t for political persecution. My parents left Poland for better living conditions and the hosting country welcomed them enthusiastically. Now, twenty-­three years later, I can assert that what eventually improved are my living conditions, my future perspective, whereas I perceive the life of my parents as a constant struggle, invisible in the larger category of a marginal precariousness. Keep calm and carry on. All my life, Poland was foremost a language to me. A language I had learned in exile, a language detached from its land, cut out with its roots like a plant, like my mother that can continue to live in another place, but not grow. I was raised in a Poland that was like pickles: conserved in the memories of my parents, becoming more and more sour, losing taste and color, before finally dissolving in the transparent jar. Zuzanna also offers an interpretation of the title of the film Fremde Haut in terms of the symbolism it entails. Skin is critically assessed as a place that Fariba cannot leave, even if it becomes foreign to the self, unbearable. . . . Skin is ambivalently permeable.

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124   Playful Transformations We can understand it literally as organ, or conceptually, as barrier and point of transaction. Skin can be a metaphor for societies’ rules of permissiveness or a physical border constituting strangeness—for it is attached to the body but supersedes it. The element of strangeness is inherent to the skin concept as well as to the skin organ; it opens its surface to various interpretations, inviting misunderstanding as well as creative redefinitions. However, strangeness as social phenomenon is not a problem of isolation, but of mutual contact. Coming back to Poland, the country that for over twenty years was more a phantasmatic than a real land, is my ultimate challenge. I fostered the fear that here I would be a stranger as soon as I open my mouth. I fostered the hope that here, I would solve the riddle of substance. Well, this experience still continues. Zuzanna’s experience of coming to Poland, the motherland of her parents, was her own decision which was not forced on her by any external circumstances, unlike Fariba’s peregrinations from Iran to Germany and back to Iran, imposed on her by political authorities (and also religious, in Iran’s case) which would not tolerate, let alone accept, her sexual orientation. Despite this essential difference, Zuzanna has a special feel for Fariba’s transient personality, which she refers to in her essay as “the riddle of substance,” when writing about how she perceives herself in Poland. I fostered the fear, that here [in Poland] I would be “unveiled”—that everybody would realize that I am here, but that I am not from here, as soon as I open my mouth. I fostered the hope that here, I would solve the riddle of substance. This experience still continues, there is so much of intriguing distance and desirable closeness that makes me want to stay. I am incredibly happy; sometimes I get too excited about being where I am, about doing what I do. Also interesting is Zuzanna’s interpretation of the film, which she performs against the background of her own experience of being someone who voluntarily changed her physical and cultural, as well as linguistic whereabouts. What makes Zuzanna’s personal narrative exceptionally fitting into the framework of performative audiencing, in the case of my project one of the main tools of its classroom execution, that is, a personal narrative, are her frequent, comparative statements in which she draws parallels, or a lack of them, between the heroine’s situation and her own. Fariba is an illegal immigrant [in Germany], not a cosmopolite stranger. Spatial self-­confidence of being, let alone coming and going, is denied to her. Back in Iran she had to veil her lesbian sexuality; in Germany the masquerade continues inside the strange skin of a male identity. For a lack of either acceptance or authenticity in the two cultures, the disguise becomes permanent. Yet, the spectator perhaps fosters the hope that “underneath” the

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Figure 4.13 Fariba on a Plane to Germany (Fremde Haut [Unveiled], Angelina Maccarone, 2005).

stranger’s skin or that “behind” the veil, there is a true self. But a true self that cannot emerge from its secret ambush equals no self at all! So there is no romantic hope to foster! This is where I spot the movie’s feminist, political aspect: a critique towards states whose design of citizenship expels certain subject positions into self-­secrecy and anxious censorship. And she continues: Fariba’s revelation of her “true” identity is met with violence and leads to the final scene of her deportation. The movie’s final shots show how the cultural imposition and the institutionalized enforcement of identity categories can be completely inconsistent with one’s subjectivity to the point of lethal danger. My ambivalence does not effectuate a comparable threat. Once I reveal my secret of ambivalent ethnic and linguistic loyalties, people often back out a bit as if they wanted to make up for their initial inattention with some delayed suspiciousness. . . . Fariba’s denial to foreswear her lesbian sexuality symbolizes this refusal of belonging, as the identity proposed equals a betrayal of her very self. I experience similar unease when faced with the question “So, where are you from?” Whereas Fariba is successful in creating an unquestioned vital substance of “male sex” (supported by her seemingly heterosexual desire towards Anne) she cannot overcome the forces of racism (illegal migrant) that continue to marginalize and threaten her. But what about me? I can tell after the first minutes of conversation whether we are going to exchange phone numbers at the end of the evening

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Figure 4.14 Fariba Changes Her Appearance in the Plane’s Lavatory (Fremde Haut [Unveiled], Angelina Maccarone, 2005).

or not. Like in Fariba’s case, the cross-­sexual strategy works easier, because heterosexual attraction can compensate for categorical rejection, but homosocial bonds are all the more difficult to establish with a stranger. . . . I wonder about what is echoing in the heads of people who shy back from me? Dina, a GEMMA student from Serbia, starts her essay on The Joy Luck Club with calling to mind a kitchen in a small Serbian town, where she comes from, and this in turn, leads her to memories of her period of anorexia.

Dina’s Personal Narrative: The Joy Luck Club Kitchen table is a splendid place where intersections of gender, class (not everybody can afford every kind of food in Serbia), race, religion (since pork is what distinguished the Orthodox us from Muslim them during the war) come alive. I believe that this kind of ideological framing of feeding culture and family community has led me to the painful one-­year episode of anorexia. Not only that anorexia is a highly gendered disease, but being a little girl in a small Serbian town, this eating disorder brought to light many other layers of repressed emotions that I am still trying to figure out. Dina then reflects on the auto-­destructive asceticism: This was a result of my repressed anger towards my whole community, towards my grandmother, and towards my mother herself, since I felt a

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Figure 4.15 Mothers and daughters. June Stands Alone After Her Mother’s Death (The Joy Luck Club, Wayne Wang, 1993).

typical frustration of a child who is enraged for being left alone. I redirected the anger towards myself destroying the body which was ideologically always programmed to become somebody else’s mother in the future. Dina then comments on the film and on how her own life resembles that of June, who tries to “. . . fill in a missing puzzle.” Like daughters from The Joy Luck Club, I have also retroactively learned their untold stories, in order to make a jigsaw of their own lives, which would help me understand missing pieces in my own puzzle. The feeling of not belonging has become a powerful feeling of not conforming. Living in the intersections, not being able to choose the path, having passed from Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro to just Serbia, studying in Italy and Poland made me realize the fruitful position of hybridity, in which I do not belong anywhere. But I do cross, tend to go back and forward, just like June in the movie. She goes back to her mother’s homeland, tries to decipher her origins, but basically, she goes forth, not only filling in the missing puzzle in her life, but also creating a space for new jigsaws, yet to come. I hope that I am on my way there. This personal narrative is also one of the steps. S-­2, a GEMMA student from North Africa (that’s how she defines her belonging to a cultural and geographical region) prefers to remain anonymous. She reminiscences on her experiences in her homeland, Marocco, which are stimulated by the film La Source des Femmes. More importantly though, the film and discussions about it in class make her voice a dramatic call on behalf of women in that region.

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S-­2’s Personal Narrative: La Source des Femmes When protests broke in Morocco in 2011, it was a moment of overwhelming excitement. I remember my early conversations with friends and activists about the situation in Morocco. And for those of us who wanted a change, the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions provided us with the glimpse of hope needed to go to the streets and demand change. The exhilaration that accompanied the first day of protests was a long awaited scream against injustice and inequity. But even with its progressive character and democratic aspirations, the movement failed me as a woman. It was during many conversations that I had with my friends from Morocco. I was shocked how many progressive friends’ opinions were still traditional when it comes to the question of women. What to expect from the most liberal and progressive views when it comes to women? Basically the same as you would expect from a conservative Imam. In what follows below, S-­2 directly addresses the issue of how the class she participated in at the University of Łódź, and particularly this film, La Source des Femmes, brought to the surface her thinking about the place of women in the social structure of the region she comes from. This is perhaps why, among the movies we watched for the class, La Source des Femmes, provided me with moments of connection and instances of identification about the meaning of being a woman. La Source des Femmes is set in a rural area, pretty much structured by the rule of patriarchy. The main heroine, Leïla had to negotiate with this latter and even occasionally collaborate with it. I find this contrast between being completely autonomous from patriarchy and systems of sexism and being forced to actually negotiate and bargain with it, interesting. In La Source des Femmes, we can clearly see that whatever subjectivity was endowed in the women in there, it was always a linked subjectivity, often linked being a synonym for submissive, too. I believe that the movie in a sense tried to respect the cultural structure of the place it was portraying and with this argument at hand; it did a good job in maintaining an accurate portrayal of the patriarchal structure. What is interesting, however, is how the subjectivity of women was always linked/subordinate to that of men. Leïla would not have been able to read and write without her husband; Esmeralda would not have been an interesting character if it wasn’t for her romantic involvement with Slim, and the other women, except perhaps for Bouhebba, were also defined in terms of whatever relation they had with the men in their lives. Then S-­2 turns to a very dark side of social reality vis-­à-vis women’s place in the Arab/Islamic world and explains how memories of women being beaten by their husbands were evoked in her through the film she is writing about.

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Figure 4.16 A Short Recess Before the Return to the Village (La Source des Femmes, Radu Mihăileanu, 2011).

. . . I remember the wife-­beating man from La Source des Femmes. Domestic violence is perhaps one of those stereotypes that are often repeated in the Arab/Islamic world, except that it is really not a stereotype, but reality. There were two cases of domestic violence that took place on the street and that probably initiated me into feminism. Both were very similar and horrifying. So, without going into details, the thought of seeing men beating women in the streets is not what is disturbing. What is really shocking is the total indifference by which such incidents are usually approached. Indeed, it is enough for the man to make the declaration that she is his wife in order for everyone to turn their eyes, shut their mouths, and walk away. This is precisely what we see in La Source des Femmes: when Sami talks to his father about his brother beating his wife, the father answers with pointing out that she is his wife and that there is nothing he can do about it. Throughout the movie, we only see the sad face of Leïla as a protest to the beating; there was no intervention all along, not even a condemnation. I witnessed violence against women on the street in public and not being able to do anything about it, because, “she is his wife.” I was young back then, and for all I remember, I felt sad about those women. Now, I cannot help but feel the rage from head to toe. And this is probably fueled by the feminist texts that became so essential to my reaction to such events. In the final section of her personal narrative S-­2 once again directs her attention to the linkage between her life experience and the film, and wraps up her essay with a call for action on the part of oppressed women.

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130   Playful Transformations . . . watching La Source des Femmes helped me absorb the message it was conveying. The narrative of the movie functions in an allegorical way. Women demand rights in real life which is symbolized by demanding that men fetch water from the source in the movie. Their success is a reality that we must all hope for, imagine, and reimagine constantly. I recognize the tremendous inspirational impact of such movies, and these kinds of movies are somehow necessary to maintain a certain hopeful connection to the world outside. We have to bring La Source des Femmes to everyday politics and to the quotidian life. How can this be done? This question should be answered by whoever is concerned: it should be answered by women who want to change their situation. Nadia, a student from Ukraine, took the “Political Cinema” course with me as a participant of the European Union educational program Erasmus. As will shortly be read about, her account of La Source des Femmes is quite different from that of S-­2. I have included it here to show how personal experiences and different cultural backgrounds play a role in the perception of film. After all, this is what lived experience is all about when it comes to audiencing. Nadia begins her narrative with an emotional statement:

Nadia’s Personal Narrative: La Source des Femmes While the beautiful tale of a heartfelt music and pristine beauty unfolds before our eyes, we seem to enjoy the smiles and landscapes, and dancing, and the graciousness of the performers. We are like the western idle observers who come to the village in search of entertainment; in a way, we are among them.

Figure 4.17 A Woman of the Village Carrying Water (La Source des Femmes, Radu Mihăileanu, 2011).

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To save the remnants of obsolete traditions, and the pride of the men, the women of the village pay a great price. They go to the distant well, high on the rocky hills, to fetch the water, occasionally losing their precious, unborn children on the way. Some stay barren for the rest of their lives, pushing their longing and grief deep inside as they walk the path of death every day with the heavy burdens on their slender shoulders. Then Nadia contemplates her own life story via-­à-vis the film: I remember feeling guilty for wanting to have it all, without the need to choose just a small piece of the cake. It was possible, I knew it. And when, at the age of eighteen (and in my second year at the university), I got married and started working as a freelancer in a publishing house, I faced not only a big pressure, but also severe criticism from the society: “You are not going to finish your studies,” “You will not manage to be a good wife,” “What a mother will you be?” That’s what Leïla, the main character in La Source des Femmes, used to hear. Leïla didn’t need to go to a different place (or to have a different man, different life) to be happy. She wanted her husband, that village, that life . . . and she was ready to fight for them. She was ready to make them better. Refusing to choose just one slice of a cake, she became more vulnerable, but somehow stronger at the same time. She asked others to join her; she explained, negotiated, and persuaded them. She read and tried to understand. She refused to look back, she refused to give up, she refused to fear. Nadia’s final paragraphs of her personal narrative are too, markedly different in tone from S-­2’s concluding part, although it is worth stressing, both essays were stimulated by watching and discussing in class about the same film.

Figure 4.18 Women Hang a Cloth With This Inscription: “Your Hearts Are as Dry and Thorny as This Well.” (La Source des Femmes, Radu Mihăileanu, 2011).

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132   Playful Transformations This is a beautiful tale made into a beautiful movie with a happy ending. The women’s argument prevailed. The men’s world was not ruined; instead it was enriched, not only with the water, but with laughter, love, and support of women who have won the battle for themselves and for the future generations. My story, too, is still unfolding, chapter by chapter. There are great parts in it, but there are some low points and trials as well. I have to change, even knowing that the change is always risky, that it’s always about being vulnerable, and even about gasping with embarrassment sometimes. It is time now for a brief comment on the personal narratives presented above. The entire fabric of the classes addressed interweaving normative categories. Despite their diversity in geographical proveniences, interests, topics, subtleness, the level of aggression, ethics, and esthetics, students intersected in their common attempt to arouse resistance against the application of ready-­made categories to humans. What is disability? What is desire? What is age? Who is illegal? The stash of questions that produce normative categories was exposed to its own bias, to its unsustainable practice of stigmatizing, blaming, and pushing aside subjects to insignificance and marginality. The threads of the movies fused in a shared commitment to a new sensibility on both, micro (“face to face,” human) and macro institutional levels. As I remarked earlier in this chapter, students’ personal accounts narrate very different forms of exclusion and inclusion. That trait is especially pronounced in reference to disability, but also to race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. Drawn on lived experience, the stories presented here are both personal and political. When pursuing his undergraduate study at Princeton and attending a philosophy course with Peter Singer, Fareed for the first time in his life was “forced

Figure 4.19 Men Destroy the Cloth (La Source des Femmes, Radu Mihăileanu, 2011).

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Personalizing Narrativity   133 to grapple with who he [was/is] and, more disquietingly, with [his] expendability.” Especially gifted M had to cope with loneliness and the spotlight that accompanies child prodigies. Rua had to leave Syria, which was the punishment for speaking up against injustice and oppression. Annemȳn thought that “it would not be so bad to die like George, in a moment when the silence drowns out the noise and everything is exactly the way it’s meant to be.” Clara watched A Single Man “through a viewfinder” of an imagined camera. Z-­13 could not think how he would deal with a loss like George’s if he had to go through it. Zuzanna has yet to solve “the riddle of substance.” Dina suffered a one-­year episode of anorexia as an auto-­destructive asceticism, which grossly affected her psyche. S joined the protests against oppression in Morocco in 2011 but remains disappointed with the situation of women in her region, and recognizes “. . . the tremendous inspirational impact of such movies . . .” Nadia remembers feeling guilty for wanting to have it all. Although diverse, these are laden political issues. It is well, I think, to close this chapter with an excerpt from J’s (she preferred to be quoted anonymously) personal narrative: Now add a narrative device, preferably with voice-­over, set in unlikely yet immediate future: I see myself in Nichole, in Chantelle, in Fariba. I see myself as a woman constantly interrogating her identity, subjectivity, sexuality. I see obstacles, difficulties, challenges, but I will change my views, stay clean and strong, stay put and hold my ground. I desire expression and creation. I aspire for strength and transformation. I crave moments of liberation. I am only myself yet so much more. Now freeze-­frame. Then slowly fade to black. Fin.

Bibliography Aldrich, Robert. 1962. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Warner Bros. Pictures. Egoyan, Atom. 1997. The Sweet Hereafter. Fine Line Features. Ford, Tom. 2009. A Single Man. The Weinstein Company. Gabel, Susan. 2002. “Some Conceptual Problems with Critical Pedagogy.” In Curriculum Inquiry 32, no. 2: 178–201. Gorris, Marleen. 1995. Antonia’s Line. Asmik Ace Entertainment. Huxley, Aldous. 1939. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. New York: Harper & Brothers. Johnson, McBryde Harriet. 2003. “Unspeakable Conversations.” The New York Times, February 16. Maccarone, Angelina. 2005. Fremde Haut (Unveiled). Media Luna New Films UG. Mihăileanu, Radu. 2011. La Source des Femmes. EuropaCorp Distribution. Sayles, John. 1992. Passion Fish. Miramax Films. Wang, Wayne. 1993. The Joy Luck Club. Buena Vista Pictures.

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Afterword

In the process of writing this book, I became acutely aware of the difficulties of bringing together the different goals that I had set for myself in terms of theory and methodology in the first place, and second, how to present my teaching practice, particularly the incorporation of students’ input into the pedagogical process. More precisely, my concern was about the ways the narrative research could be used in the analysis of film audiences, a topic that in fact has not received much attention. A plethora of publications on audience research, including research which is non-­narrative and grounded in “quantitative data and positivist assumptions about cause, effect and proof ” (Pinnegar and Daynes 2007, 3) is focused on the methodology and theory of conducting research, elicitation strategies of obtaining data for analysis, and practical issues involved in the interpretation of the results (e.g. De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012). And even when audience research does resort to narrative, it is often second-­hand, in the sense that it does not come from the audience but from the researcher, and is thus reflective not of the voice of the subject of pedagogy, i.e., the spectator/ student, but of the analyst/teacher who assumes the role of the informant about the audience’s reactions and attitudes. This poses an epistemological concern with the ethics of representation. Even if it is accepted that analysts/researchers are also spectators then still the question remains whose voice they represent other than their own. If this direction of audience analysis, from the work analyzed to the analyst is the dominant trend, then a legitimate concern can be voiced against bypassing the subject of analysis, that is, the audience. The vast literature on narrative research, Riessman (2008), Herman (2009), Herman, Jahn, Ryan (2010), Bold (2012) to mention just a few, does not directly address the issue of the relationship between the narrative research and film. Researchers who are interested in the relationship between the narrative and the visual either deal with an otherwise fascinating topic of how images are done with words, to paraphrase the title of Austin’s book, like the often quoted Meek (2009) does, or more frequently they focus on how the visual is narrated, in other words, how written language is used to describe the visual products, including film. I do not pretend to offer an exhaustive survey of approaches to the problems of narrative research but it is fair to say that, despite occasional references to

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Afterword   135 visual aspects of narrative research, as evidenced in the work of Riessman (2008) or Chase (2011), just two of the authors who deal with the methodological, epistemological, historical, as well as procedural issues of narrative research, the application of narratives in the analysis of film audiences has enjoyed as yet a limited attention among the narrative theorists’ circles.  A notable departure is Riessman’s (2008, 10) influential book in which she proposes a typology of narrative research. According to her, there are four categories of narrative: structural, thematic, dialogic/performance, and visual. In the context of my project, the last one, the visual category is most relevant. However, it is important to stress that Riessman’s visual category, which boils down in her account to the application of narratives in the analysis of visual products, does not include film but only paintings, photographs, video diaries, and collages. The first two types of visual products she calls found images and the latter two made images, by which she means self-­portraits and video diaries produced by the members of the audience who make these images during the process of research, or more precisely, for the sake of the process of research.  One could notice in passing, that given the fact that found images are also made by someone or a group of people, the distinction between found and made images, as reflected in the two names, is not very sharp. More importantly, what makes my approach different from Riessman’s and the majority of other research which utilizes narratives for the purposes of film audience analysis is its concentration on written personal narratives whose function is not for the visual to serve as a stimulus to produce a narrative which will be used subsequently for the purposes of further research, as is the case with the majority of narrative research. The narrative, in these approaches, is elicited in various ways to obtain material from the subjects so that the researcher can draw conclusions on the subject’s stance vis-­à-vis the object of research. My approach is different. I use personal narratives to make it possible for my students to relate their lived experience with the visual and the latter, in my research and teaching practice film, plays the role of a stimulus for self-­expression, rather than material on the basis of which I could make judgments about my audience’s, that is, my students’ opinions and attitudes toward various issues to be found in the films which are part of the course syllabus. Personal narratives are thus end-­products in the pedagogical process which begins with a preparatory theoretical stage at which students become acquainted with basic concepts of intersectionality, discuss the readings in class on the basis of suggested questions and topics, and write weekly journals individually or in teams in which they express their stance toward issues raised in each of the readings. The next stage involves film watching, followed by various forms of debates and panel discussions of the films, as well as reports by students which are based on readings, which, in the majority of cases, are published papers or book chapters, and film reviews devoted to each of the films.  Debates and discussions are recorded and then transcribed. A selection of these debates has been presented in Chapter 3. Transcription of spoken material elicited during the research is an issue in itself, as is stressed in some narrative research (Riessman 2008), because transcribed material, if done carelessly, can

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136   Afterword result in the loss of meaning. In the case of my project, this was not an issue because the transcribed in-­class discussions were not undergoing further analysis. They were used in order to document the interpretation of each film arrived at in class discussions and make it available to students, in case there was need for it.  The final stage of the whole pedagogical process demonstrates how students give structure and value to their lived experience of film watching through writing their personal narratives. Writing a personal narrative provides a reflexive realm where we “show ourselves to ourselves” as we engage in our own dramas (Myerhoff 1982, 104). The exercise of writing a personal narrative on a selected film, the one which each student best relates with in terms of her/his lived experience, is an intimate and at the same time a revealing experience, as some of the personal narratives have demonstrated. As M writes in her personal narrative, “intersectionality can be used in a positive way, not only as an ‘interlocking system of oppression’ but playing with categories and choosing new ones.” Ignacio ends his narrative on a positive note by appreciating the dynamics of these classes because films are a very good avenue to connect to people; music, images, and dialogues interact to make people identify with the characters. The fact of writing a personal narrative is also very enriching for the person itself, as it’s a social expansion of what you’ve been silencing for a long time. The narratives that the students wrote constituted, as some of their later feedback suggested, manifestos of the diverse cultural and societal conventions and idiosyncrasies, and the various nature of such features, that permeated their lives, which may not have been expressed otherwise. This was possible to achieve through the introduction of the personal narrative into the pedagogical process of film audience analysis. 

Bibliography Bold, Christine. 2012. Using Narrative in Research. London: Sage. Chase, Susan. 2011. “Narrative Inquire. Still a Field in the Making.” In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, 421–435. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. De Fina, Anna and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. 2012. Analyzing Narrative. Discourse and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press. Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Chichester: Wiley-­Blackwell. Herman, David, Manfred Jahn and Marie-­Laure Ryan, eds. 2010. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Meek, Richard. 2009. Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare. London: Routledge.  Myerhoff, Barbara. 1982. “Life History Among the Elderly: Performance, Visibility, and Re-­membering.” In A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, edited by Jay Ruby, 99–117. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pinnegar, Stefinee, and J. Gary Daynes. 2007. “Locating Narrative Inquiry Historically: Thematics in the Turn to Narrative.” In Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology, edited by D. Jean Clandinin, 3–34. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.  Riessman, Catherine, K. 2008. Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Index

Page numbers in bold denote figures. A Question of Silence (Gorris) 52 A Single Man (Ford) 14, 45, 47, 54–63, 117; compared with Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 57–8; compared with Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 69–71; compared with The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 85–9, 90, 94–5; diegesis 55–8; stills 118, 119, 120, 122; students’ accounts 117–23; synopsis 54–5; transcripts of discussions 59–63 abjection 23 access, to education 25 action-deferred action sequence 3 active participation 5 addiction 77 Adorno, Theodor 15–16n1 advertising 59, 60, 61, 62 “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)” 42 afterwardsness 1–5, 15, 44 agency: contextual 4–5, 17–19; disability and resistance 86–7; erasure of 88; levels of 88; re-active 87 Althusser, Louis 24–5 analogies, The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 95–7 Anderson, B. 66 anger, repression of 126–7 Annemȳn 121–3, 133 anorexia 126–7 anticategorical complexity 10 Antonia’s Line (Gorris): compared with A Single Man (Ford) 14, 49, 57–8, 104, 133; compared with The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 85, 91, 92; diegesis 50–1; still 114; students’ accounts 113–15; synopsis 50; transcripts of discussions 51–4

appearances, mixing up 69 aspirations 115, 128, 131 audience 3–5, 14, 16n4; active participation 5, 16n4; audience analysis 5, 12–13; contextual agency 4–5 audience research 31–2; ethnography 42; focus and scope 134; inadequacies 43; literary criticism model 41; methodological concerns 31–2 audiences, as observers 130 audience participation 35–6 audience(s)-performer(s) relationship 34–5 audiencing 3–5, 40–5, 105, 124 Austin, J.L. 5–6, 35 author: positionality 5–6; teaching practice 31 author experiences: film and memory 1–3; working with groups 11 auto-destructive asceticism 126–7 auto-destructive behavior 87 auto-translation 3, 44 Banks, Russell 84, 89 Barker, Martin 43 Barthes, Roland 4, 5 baths, as social centres 100 beauty 25, 70–1 Beauty is a Verb 28–9, 30–1 becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory 6 Belgrade, Gay Pride 117 Ben-Youssef, Fareed 109–12, 132–3 Benjamin, Walter 3, 15n1, 16n3 Berlin Stories 60 Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of Social Contract 22 Black, Sheila 28–9 blogs 9

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138   Index bodies: commodification 22–3, 25–30, 88; values of 88–9; valuing of 23 book: contribution of 12; difficulties of writing 134; perspective and scope 5–6; structure and overview 13–14; theoretical approach 3 breathing pedagogy 24 Breughel, Peter 58 Broken Mirrors (Gorris) 53 bullying 115 Butler, Judith 6, 23, 35, 56, 65, 89 Cabaret (Fosse) 60 camera, as imagination 119–20 “Capitalism and Disability” 22 Caramel (Labaki) 100 categories 6, 7 –8, 10–11, 17n8, 135–6; inclusion/exclusion 132 Cerebral Palsy 106, 109 change, visualization of 121 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Burton) 44 Chase, Susan 135 childhood, as innocence 87 children: attitudes to 81–2; powerlessness 91 China 80–1 cinematographic hypnosis 4–5 citizenship 17n8, 43; and audiencing 43 Clara 119–21, 133 class discussions 12–13, 49; Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 51–4; Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 66–71; The Joy Luck Club (Wang) 81–4; La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 98–103; Passion Fish (Sayles) 76–9; A Single Man (Ford) 59–63; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 89–96 codes of conduct, transgressing 64 cognitive–narrative strategy 80 Cold War discourse 16n2 Collins, Patricia Hill 10, 11 colonialism 100 commodification 75, 88 community 51; intersectionality 92; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 91 Confucianism 82–3 connection 91 consciousness, Passion Fish (Sayles) 73–4 constitutive outside 23, 26 contextual agency 4–5 crip consciousness 29 crip poetry 28–9

critical feminist perspective, Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 64–6 critical pedagogy 11, 25, 31–4; perspectives and limitations 21, 22 critical social fiction 65 culture, as process 15n1, 42 daddy’s little girl 88 Dancer in the Dark (von Trier) 44 Daynes, J. Gary 134 death: effects of 85; otherness of 57–8; responses to 57–8; views of 58 Debord, Guy 5 Deleuze, Gilles 6 desacralization, Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 57 detachment, The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 89–90 diegeses 49; Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 50–1; Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 64–6; The Joy Luck Club (Wang) 80; La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 96–7; Passion Fish (Sayles) 73–6; A Single Man (Ford) 55–8; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 85–9 difference 114–15 Dina 126–7, 133 disability 21–31; acceptance of 78; agency and resistance 86–7; Ben-Youssef, Fareed 109–10; commodification 75, 88; counter-representations 25–6; as empowering 85, 86–7, 92–3; financial costs 108; and identity 86–7, 112, 113; infrastructure for 108–9; interview with Sara 106–9; and language 28; left behind 84, 85, 91; Łódź murals 26–7, 27; marginalization 77; Passion Fish (Sayles) 71–9, 109–11; “The Pied Piper from Hamelin” 84, 85; as political issue 24; reactions to 108; and sexuality 30; social activism 24; social construction of 23–4, 113, 116; students’ accounts 109–12; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 84–96, 111–12, 116–17; as visual phenomenon 28; vulnerability and resistance 89 Disability Poetics Movement 29 disability poetry 28–9 (dis)identifications 5 disguise: Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 65–6; and identity 124–5 Disney Studios 25–6 Dolby-Stahl, Sandra 40 domestic violence 99, 102, 128–9 Dossa, Parin 21–2

Index   139

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“Dramatic monologue in speaker’s own voice” 29–30 dressing, for a part 120 DV8 Physical Theatre 26 Dyer, Richard 42 Eagleton, Terry 16n2 Edison, Debbie Tara 9 education, access to 25 educational inclusion 31 Eigner, Larry 30 elders, respect for 82–3 Eltahawy, Mona 101 emotion, Passion Fish (Sayles) 79 empowering, of spectators 105 Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies Program (GEMMA) 13, 32, 33–4 estheticized behavior 56–7 esthetics 70–1 ethics of representation 134 ethnography, for study of audiences 12, 42 exclusion/inclusion 132 exclusionary, language 10 expectations, betrayal of 75–6 failure 73–4 family names 83–4 father–daughter relationships: ambiguity 94–5; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 85–9, 90, 94–5 feeding culture 126 feminism: and Islam 53–4; Morocco 54; Philippines 54; secular 54; and women’s experience 9 feminist mantra 6 Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology, and Writing 11–12 Ferris, Jim 28, 29, 31 Fetterly, Judith 16–17n6 film studies, literary criticism model 41 filmic paralysis 4–5 films studied: Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 50–4; context and overview 49; Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 63–71; The Joy Luck Club (Wang) 79–84; La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 96–103; Passion Fish (Sayles) 71–9; A Single Man (Ford) 54–63; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 84–96 financing, La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 98 Fiske, John 42–3

flesh-back 56 Ford, Tom 59, 62; see also A Single Man (Ford) Foucault, Michel 6 found images 135 Fox, Jonathan 37 Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 45, 63–71; compared with A Single Man (Ford) 70; diegesis 64–6; stills 125, 126; students’ accounts 123–6; synopsis 63–4; transcripts of discussions 66–71; translation of title 67–8 French neo-classicism 58 Freud, Sigmund 3 friendship: Passion Fish (Sayles) 74; A Single Man (Ford) 59, 62 Gabel, Susan 22, 23, 24, 31, 113 Garland-Thompson, Rosemarie 22 gatekeeping, language 10 Gay Pride 117 Geertz, Clifford 65 gender and sex, Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 65–6 gender performativity 6, 35 German culture, Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 69 goggles 5 Gorris, M. 52; see also Antonia’s Line (Gorris) Greenaway, Peter 44 Gregoriou, Zelia 6 Grotowski, Jerzy 14, 35–6 Guattari, Felix 6 harm, from ignorance 107 hereafter 89 heteronormativity 55, 62, 67 higher education, massification of 21 Holm, Ian 93, 94–5 home, Passion Fish (Sayles) 77 homosexuality: Iranian culture 66–7; loss and mourning 117–19; private/public spheres 55; Serbia 117–18; see also A Single Man (Ford) hooks, bell 9, 31, 41 Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney) 25–6 Huxley, Aldous 55 hybridity 127 “I would rather be a cyborg than a Goddess” 7 identity: aspects of 92–3; and detachment 89–90; and disability 86–7, 112, 113;

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140   Index identity continued and disguise 124–5; and mobility 116; Passion Fish (Sayles) 76, 77–8; performance of 73; as prodigy 113–14; search for 115–16; as social construct 85 ideological concepts 24 “Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs) 24–5 Ignacio 136 images, found and made 135 imagination 119–20 imagined communities 16n1, 66 Improvisational Theatre 38n6 In Arcadia Sum 51, 58 incest 86, 90, 91, 93 inclusion/exclusion 132 inclusive schooling 21 inheritance 83 inter-subjective bonds 78 intercategorical complexity 10–11 intersectional subordination 21 intersectionality 6–13, 44; classroom 106; of community 92; in films studied 45; as heuristic 11; inclusive schooling 21; literature 12–13; methodological perspectives 10–11; and mobility 127; Passion Fish (Sayles) 76; production of other 7; students’ accounts 120, 121–2, 132; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 85; tripartite methodology 10; use of 136; use of concept 9 “Intersectionality and Audience Analysis in the Feminist Classroom” 32–3, 49, 109, 115 intersectionality circle 7 intersubjective bonds 91 intertextuality 4, 89 intracategorical complexity 10–11 Investigating Audiences 31–2 Iranian culture 66–7 Isherwood, Christopher 60 Islam: attitudes to homosexuality and transgender 66–7; attitudes to women 101, 128–9; and feminism 53–4 isolation 55, 57, 91 J 133 Jacobs, Marc 62 Jaehne, Karen 50, 58 justice 88 Kaier, Ann 29 Kowalska, Sara 106–9 Kwiatkowska, Barbara 1

La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 45, 96–103; diegesis 96–7; stills 129, 130, 131, 132; students’ accounts 127–32; synopsis 96; transcripts of discussions 98–103 Lacan, Jacques 87 language: access to 28; Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 53–4; and death 85; exclusionary 10; La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 98; as marker of humanity 28; and place 123 Laplanche, Jean 3 Lather, Patti 31 Lautrec syndrome 25 Law of the Father 87–8 lesbianism: Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 63–5; Iranian culture 66–7 Liasidou, Anastasia 21 Lichty, Lawrence 45n1 life choices 83 life, planning of 55–6 Livingstone, Sonia 43 location: Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 68–9; Passion Fish (Sayles) 73 Łódź, murals 26–7, 27 loss: and mourning 118–19; responses to 56–7, 61, 74, 80 loss of aura 16n3 lost innocence 87 love, representation of 101 Lusted, David 31 Lykke, Nina 10–12 Lynch, David 25 M 113–15, 133, 136 Maccarone, Angelina 65; see also Fremde Haut (Maccarone) made images 135 male gaze 41, 45, 65 male groups 69 Malhotra, Ravi 22 marginalization, disability 77 Marie Antoinette (Coppola) 50 marital rape 99 marriage, same sex 61–2 Married . . . with Children 42–3 masculinity: construction of 100; Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 68 mass higher education, effects of 21 McBryde Johnson, Harriet 106–7 McCall, Leslie 10 Meek, Allen 3 Meek, Richard 134 melancholy 56

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Index   141 Metacommunicative Performative Competence (MPC) 35 methodological concerns, audience research 31–2 middle class, representation of 59, 60 Miller, Vassar 29–30 minorities, status of 120 mobility, and identity 116 moments of clarity 61, 62–3 Morocco: feminism 54; protests 128 motivation, The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 95 mourning 118 multiculturalism 7 Mulvey, Laura 41–2, 45n2, 65 murals, Łódź 26–7, 27 Nachträglichkeit 3 Nadia 130–2, 133 names, significance of 83–4 narration: as cognitive matrix 80; Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 65 narrative research: problems of 134–5; use of 134 narratives: first person 40; see also students’ accounts Neale, Steve 41 neoliberal imperative 23 Newton, Deborah 35 Nom du Pere 87 Notes on Afterwardsness 3 Nussbaum, Martha 23 Oleksy, Elżbieta 9, 10–11, 91 oppression, as violence 83 Other 7 otherness, of Death 57–8 parent-child relationships 81–3 parenting, The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 94 Park-Fuller Linda 37 Passion Fish (Sayles) 45, 71–9, 91; compared with The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 93; diegesis 73–6; stills 110, 111; students’ accounts 109–11; synopsis 71–2; transcripts of discussions 76–9 patriarchy 83 pedagogical autobiography 22–4, 31, 113 pedagogy 31–4; author’s position 31; breathing 24; critical 21, 22, 25, 31–4 peeping tom 1–3 performance, of identity 73 Performance Studies. An Introduction 35

performative audiencing 34–7, 105, 113, 124 performative writing 14, 40–1 performativity 5–6, 35, 65 period setting, A Single Man (Ford) 61 personal associations, The Joy Luck Club (Wang) 81–3 personal experience stories 40 personal narratives see students’ accounts personality, transient 124 Phalen, Patricia 45n1 Philippines, feminism 54 Pinnegar, Stefinee 134 planning, of life 55–6 Playback Theatre 14, 36–7, 38n5 “Playing the Other” 37 Poland, attitudes to disability 107–9, 123–4 Polanski, Roman 1–3 politics, La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 98 Pollock, Della 40 poor theatre 14, 35–6 popular culture 15–16n1; challenging 72; ubiquity 74–5 positionality, of author 5–6 postmodernism, Passion Fish (Sayles) 71 Poussin, Nicolas 58 power relations, father–daughter relationships 65, 86–7 prodigy, identity as 113–14 propaganda 4, 16n2 protests, Morocco 128 psychoanalytic feminist film theory 41 psychoanalytic interpretation, The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 87–8 Puar, Jasbir 6, 7–8 punctum 5 qualitative approach to subject, in Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 65 queer theory 42 Rakolta, Terry 42–3 re-translation 3; of cinematic experience 3 real life, representation of 75 recollection 2 refugees, Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 63, 64, 65 relationship development, Passion Fish (Sayles) 73–4 relationships: father–daughter relationships 85–9; inter-subjective bonds 78; parentchild 81–3

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142   Index religion 17n8, 100–1 research study: courses taught 32–4; data collection 32; data elicitation 32–3, 44–5; difference from other research 135; focus 13; goal 105; methods 12–13; participants 12, 13, 32, 33; questionnaire 14–15; selection of films 14, 44–5; see also class discussions; diegeses; films studied; students’ accounts; synopses resistance: disability and agency 86–7; disability and vulnerability 89 resisting readers 16–17n6 respect, for elders 82–3 rich theatre 35–6 Ricoeur, Paul 80 Riessman, Catherine, K. 135 romance, Passion Fish (Sayles) 79 Rowe, Nick 36–7 Rua 115–17, 133 Ruddock, Andy 31–2 Russel, Marta 22–3, 24 S-2 127–30, 133 sadness 70–1 same sex marriage 61–2 satire, Passion Fish (Sayles) 71 Sayles, John 71, 73; see also Passion Fish (Sayles) Schechner, Mark 35 school system, social training 23 schooling, inclusive 21 secular feminism 54 self-image 133 Self, response to loss 56–7 Serbia 83; attitudes to homosexuality 117–18 sex and gender, Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 65–6 sexual objectification 41 sexual references, La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 98–9 sexuality, and disability 30 Singer, Peter 106–7 skin, as metaphor 123–4 social activism 24 social construction: of disability 23, 113, 116; of identity 85 social Darwinism 23 society of the spectacle 5 solidarity: La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 99; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 89 solitude 55, 72

songs of innocence and songs of experience 90 spectators, empowering 3–4, 35–6, 43–4, 105 spectatorship, determining subject positions 41–2 spectatorship theory 42 Stacey, Jackie 41, 42 stadium 5 standardized tests, access to education 25 stereotypes 5 storytelling 80 street art 26–7, 27 students’ accounts: Annemȳn 121–3, 133; Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 113–15; bullying 115; Clara 119–21; commentary and conclusions 132–3; context and overview 105; Dina 126–7; Fareed 109–12, 132–3; Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 123–6; Ignacio 136; intersectional classroom 106; J 133; The Joy Luck Club (Wang) 126–7; La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 127–32; M 113–15, 133, 136; Nadia 130–2, 133; Passion Fish (Sayles) 109–11; as pedagogy 136; Rua 115–17, 133; S-2 127–30, 133; A Single Man (Ford) 117–23; students’ reaction to task 105; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 111–12, 116–17; use of 135–6; Z-13 117–19, 133; Zuzanna 123–6, 133 subjectivities 5–6, 44, 128 suffering 70 suicide 60–1, 62 survivor’s guilt 92 Sutton, Paul 3, 4, 5, 43–4 symbolism, film titles 123–4 synopses: Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 50; Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 63–4; The Joy Luck Club (Wang) 79–80; La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 96; Passion Fish (Sayles) 71–2; A Single Man (Ford) 54–5; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 84–5 Tabatabai, Jasmine 64, 65 Taiwan 81 teaching, performative 6 technical aspects, Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 65 “The Complexity of Intersectionality” 10 The Cost of Living (DV8 Physical Theatre) 26 The Devotee 30

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Index   143 The Elephant Man (Lynch) 25 The Joy Luck Club (Wang) 45, 79–84; diegesis 80; stills 127; students’ accounts 126–7; synopsis 79–80; transcripts of discussions 81–4 “The Pied Piper from Hamelin” 84, 85, 90, 91 The Pillow Book (Greenaway) 44 The Promised Land [Ziemia obiecana] (Wajda) 24 The Question of Silence (Gorris) 53 The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 45, 84–96; compared with A Single Man (Ford) 90; compared with Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 91, 92; compared with Passion Fish (Sayles) 93; diegesis 85–9; stills 112, 117; students’ accounts 111–12, 116–17; synopsis 84–5; transcripts of discussions 89–96 theory of assemblage 6 theory of performativity 65 thick description 65 Toothy Smile [Uśmiech zębniczy] (Polanski) 1–3; stills 1, 2 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 25 “Towards a poor theater” 35–6 tradition 83, 101 transcription, loss of meaning 135–6 transcripts of discussions: Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 51–4; Fremde Haut (Maccarone) 66–71; The Joy Luck Club (Wang) 81–4; La Source des Femmes (Mihăileanu) 98–103; Passion Fish (Sayles) 76–9; A Single Man (Ford) 59–63; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 89–96 transgender, Iranian culture 66–7 transient personality 124 trauma: cognitive–narrative strategy 80; as crisis of representation 57 Trauma and Media Theories 3 trauma narratives, abuse of 5

trauma porn 5 traumatic images, effects of 4–5 tripartite intersectional methodology 10 “Unspeakable Conversations” 106–7 Unveiled (Maccarone): use of title 67–8; see also Fremde Haut (Maccarone) utopia: Antonia’s Line (Gorris) 50–1, 58; death 58; A Single Man (Ford) 57, 58 victim discourse 88–9 violence: oppression as 83; The Sweet Hereafter (Egoyan) 86 Virgil 50 visual media, as understanding and interpretation 5 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” 41, 42 void 80 vulnerability 74–5, 88; disability and resistance 89 Wajda, Andrzej 24 Webster, James 45n1 Weise, Jillian 30 West, construction of 100 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Aldrich) 72, 110 wheelchairs, as personal territory 110 white middle class, representation of 59, 60 “Why Do They Hate Us?” 101 women: oppression of 22, 129–30; status of 128–9 writing, performative 40–1 Yugoslavia 81 Z-13 117–19, 133 Zagreb, homosexuality 118 Zuzanna 123–6, 133

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