Screen Bodies

This issue of Screen Bodies begins with a group of three articles that examine the representation of women in recent horror cinema with an emphasis on the experience of female embodiment in late capitalist society. Megan Kenny's “All I Wanna Do Is Make a Meal of You: Feminist New Wave and the Rise of the Cannibal Woman” is a significant contribution to the growing scholarship on Barbara Creed's theory of the Feminist New Wave and its central figure, the monstrous-feminine. Kenny offers an incisive reading of three films—Trouble Every Day (Denis, 2001), In My Skin (de Van, 2002) and Raw (Ducournau, 2016)—that have also been associated with French Extremity, or what Tim Palmer calls “cinema of the body.” Each film focuses on the awakening of the female protagonist and uses cannibalism as a metaphor for women's transgressive desire, pleasure, and the exploration of identity. Creed argues that Feminist New Wave films feature a heroine's journey of confrontation, revolt, and self-transformation. Kenny shows how these films diversely deploy the figure of cannibalism to represent the lived experience of womanhood in capitalist society and the characters’ revolt against it.

The Feminist New Wave refers to a movement defined by Creed as films directed primarily by women that explore central female characters in revolt against patriarchal values challenging what it means to be a woman under these conditions. Three films are explored in this article; Trouble Every Day (2001), Dans Ma Peau (2002), and Raw (2016), films that can also be classified under the French Extremity movement. All three films focus on a woman's cannibalistic awakening, using cannibalism as a metaphor to explore wider social concerns. This article explores how the cannibal trope is used to interrogate the experience of being a woman under capitalism, the impact of cannibalism on social bonds and the interconnection between sexuality and cannibalism.

In Coralie Fargeat's 2024 film, the titular “substance” is a seductive product that promises Elisabeth Sparkle, a fitness instructor and television icon played by Demi Moore, a “younger, better, more perfect” you. Fargeat's film is the first of its kind to use body horror as a powerful condemnation of the ever-accelerating commodification of women's appearance under late capitalism, and the violence inflicted on its constituents. This article explores a history of feminine expression of violence inscribed on the self through art and film, especially in the New French Extremity. Turning to a discussion of the abject and the monstrous-feminine using the work of Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed, this intervention shows how Fargeat's deployment of body horror graphically brings into sharp focus the violence of the ideal female commodified body, ending in an explosive confrontational indictment of what Laura Mulvey calls “to-be-looked-at-ness.” This article seeks to complicate and elaborate on the accelerated commodification of the female body as demonstrated by Fargeat's mobilization of the body horror genre.

As one of the most notorious franchises in horror history, Saw has been the subject of public discourse since its debut in 2004. While some ponder Jigsaw's morals and appreciate the movies’ emphasis on the necessity to be grateful for one's life, others dismiss the franchise as “torture porn,” simply created to satisfy the wants of a depraved, primarily male audience. Women's presence throughout the films brings up several questions about gender representation: Is the mutilation of women's bodies for the male gaze inherently harmful? How do female figures in the series both play into and subvert stereotypes and tropes in the genre? In what ways have the films influenced societal perception and successive works’ portrayal of women? The Saw movies walk a fine line between creating strong female representation in the horror space and playing into stereotypes and exploiting female suffering for profit, ultimately doing more harm than good.

Claire Denis's 2019 film High Life follows inmates on death row on an interstellar journey tasked with the mission of energy extraction from a black hole. The world of High Life lies at the end of the trajectory that Achille Mbembe might call “becoming Black of the world,” whereby logic of anti-Black dehumanization that manifests in the history of slavery to carceral politics reaches its end, and life itself becomes instrumentalized: every aspect of the prisoners’ life is under exhaustive control, as they head toward certain death with the sole purpose of exhausting another stellar phenomenon of its energy. This article offers a reading of High Life as a film that uses the director's characteristic emphasis on the body to counter the politics of exploitation and control that shapes its narrative. In particular, the article examines the black hole and the imagination of its explosion as facilitating a redistribution of sense and epistemological possibilities in a world becoming Black.

Comparatively analyzing the representation of bodies in atomic bomb films, Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023) and Women in the Mirror (Kagami no onnatachi, Yoshida Yoshishige, 2002), this article examines how the aesthetics of cinema can intensify the spectator's ethical experience. Yoshida argues that the ultimate ethics in cinematic aesthetics lies in how filmmakers formulate cinema as an open text. However, are open texts possible? Can images be autonomous? It is possible to leave an image's meaning undecided and ambiguous, but does that mean this image is open as a text? Can a viewer freely interpret the image? If a film is read beyond or irrelevant to its context, should such freedom be allowed? Even if open texts are possible, is such an action to make open texts ethical, especially when those texts are regarding atomic bombs? This article explores how to answer these questions.

In Black Mirror's episode “Be Right Back” (2013) and Spike Jonze's film Her (2013), protagonists Martha and Theodore suffer the loss of a romantic partner and are therefore prone to seek the company of advanced machines in order to work through their trauma and to alleviate their loneliness. Portraying human–robot relationships as an increasingly accessible, collective experience, “Be Right Back” and Her operate on a dialectic between embodied and digital space, in which performance is key. I demonstrate how this dialectic complicates the human–robot relationships once the machines no longer fulfill the humans’ desires and how both “Be Right Back” and Her use this supposed distinction between the embodied and the digital to self-reflexively discuss the immersive performative qualities of television and film.

Melodrama can be a productive genre for excavating and troubling social categories beholden to white heteropatriarchy, but the genre's disruptive power is not typically extended to trans films. Rather than utilizing melodrama's archetypal emotional spectacle to draw attention to genders’ incoherence, mainstream cinema relies on melodramatic tropes and sentimental pedagogy to engender pity for the preternaturally melancholic trans figure. Anxiety about the trans body, whether personal or cultural, therefore becomes the definitive mode for representing trans experiences on-screen. Given the genre's transnormative history, in particular its ambiguous treatment of trans femininity, how might filmmakers reclaim melodrama's critical social voice in service of a more radical trans agenda? And how might interventions by other spectacle-driven genres, like the musical, facilitate a more productive engagement with trans culture?

In survival horror games, the player is supposed to win by surviving but in Red Barrel's 2013 game Outlast, that is not the case. In building an argument from Frantz Fanon and queer gameplay studies, I propose that Outlast subverts typical gameplay mastery of winning to subject player embodiment to Black memory and Black suffering through playing wretched. I contend that with playing wretched, the player does not become Black but experiences the structural positioning of blackness through the game's restrictions of player agency and the abject violence the player-character undergoes. The game engulfs the player within a narrative that draws from painful histories in the United States, like the 1932 Tuskegee Study, to remake the player into a tool of decolonization. The game and its use of player embodiment upends what it truly means to survive after enduring trauma, after playing and being played as one of the wretched.

Scientia Sexualis Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, California, USA) 5 October 2024 to 2 March 2025

This is the tenth year of Screen Bodies’ publication and I am pleased to introduce a collection of articles that are worthy of this anniversary, as each is an exemplar of the kind of excellent scholarship we feature. The issue opens with a group of articles that examine representations of the self at the intersection of social media, literature, and performance. The first two essays consider social media poetics as a form of life writing that critically engages with concepts of the self—its limitations, possibilities, and social construction.

On social media sites, both digital bodies and user to user experiences continuously destabilize the binaries life/death (or living/dead). The slippage of life/death digital social media members experience is made particularly salient in Sally Wen Mao's poem “Live Feed.” In the poem, the unnamed speaker is a personified piece of uploaded information—a nonliving actant—circulating in a social network's live feed, the place where information is devoured. I define this experience as “zombie hunger” as it applies to digital social network use and develop better language to trace self-representation on Facebook and Instagram and the material, embodied, and laboring human/nonhuman forces that allow for this body of knowledge to be accessible.

This article examines some of the self-portraits that Inès Bouallou, a young, Moroccan autodidact, has posted to Instagram. Bouallou sometimes calls her posts “autopoetry,” arguably one of autotheory's related genres. Through the lens of autotheory, which couples autobiography with theory, this article analyzes three features of Bouallou's autopoetic practice. She often cites literature alongside her self-portraits, thereby creating a dialogue between others’ words and her own life. In addition, Bouallou's self-portraits stage performances that put the self's coherence and stability into question. Finally, her photographs depict provocative instances of self-care, moments when the artist takes care of another incarnation of herself. Ultimately, this article aspires to inform autotheorists and others in the Global North of a comparable practice in North Africa.

The spectacle of war in the US-Mexico border is ubiquitously projected onto the screens that mediate our daily life, so that the screen (and the process of screening) becomes part of the discourses and material conditions of colonial capitalism, structuring our relationships with our and Other bodies. Xandra Ibarra's video performance in La Corrida and Carmen Maria Machado's short story “Difficult at Parties” explore the possibilities opened up by glitches in the screen that expose the violence mediating our collective entanglement. In these stories, illegibility or “undocumenting” becomes a means toward refusing the logic of the border and its role in the production of (the spectacle of) war.

Experiment No. 27 and others are each multiscreen choreographic components of the installation Cinematic Experiments. Comprising projections, floating sculptural doors, frames and mirrors configuring architectural viewing portals, it spanned fourteen rooms in a shopping arcade pop-up. It was presented by The Substation at Altona Gate in Dance Massive, Naarm, Melbourne, Australia (2019). This article presents my research and insights on the process and outcomes of practice-based experiments. The creative practice integrates multiple disciplines, including media theory, film studies, dance studies, philosophy, and phenomenology.

This article explores Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff through Ursula K. Le Guin's The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction emphasizing its subversion of traditional Western genre conventions. Reichardt reimagines the pioneer journey as one of ambiguity and collective struggle, focusing on marginalized perspectives and everyday labor rather than heroic conquest. Employing a slow-cinema aesthetic, the film critiques settler-colonial narratives and amplifies the voices of women and the more-than-human world. Through an interdisciplinary lens, this study examines how Meek's Cutoff functions as a counter-history, interrogating the genre's nationalist and patriarchal underpinnings. The findings highlight the potential of cinematic form to foster feminist and ecological ethics, challenging dominant storytelling paradigms while offering space for alternative narratives and embodied experiences.

Although Westworld (2016–2022), HBO's television series, was from the start about infection and contagion, its approach changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article aims at determining the impact of the coronavirus crisis on the perception of the posthuman body in the fourth season of the show. Symbiosis between man and machine is made more horrifying by the post-COVID reactivation of fear triggered by zombie tropes and by the uncanny effect of machine vision, propelled by the coronavirus crisis. The use of flies even makes the posthuman body abject, its leakage is no longer bearable. As bodies become obsolete, however, the viewer does not feel the joy of transhumanists but is led to mourn the world of the past.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a condition that results in the slow deterioration of a person's memories and eventually their cognitive function. As this condition is so feared, there are several stigmas surrounding the disease. This article focuses on how neurogames, games that focus on neurological conditions where players play as either the patient themselves or alongside them and are developed for educational and entertainment purposes, may help address these stigmas and provide new means for expressing selfhood and consciousness. Before I Forget (2020) by 3-Fold Games, focuses on Sunita, a woman who has AD. The narrative of Before I Forget pushes back against AD stereotypes and re-centers the story to focus on Sunita and her relationships, rather than just her illness. Approaching neuorgames through the medium of hypertext emphasizes the gap-filling required by the player to understand the representation of AD symptoms and complicates the idea of selfhood with AD.

This article examines Timothy Crick's notion of the game body, thinking beyond the visuality that defines cinematic “film body,” an embodied subject–object that mediates the sensation of a film to the viewer. Examining Silent Hill 2, a game that resists legibility and indexicality, this article argues that the “game body” is mediated through substances. Silent Hill 2’s uncanny appeal to place memory demonstrates that there is an ontological distinction between the player's body and the game body, requiring a degree of translation to the experience of sensing virtual space. The player's contact with sensation is modulated according to factors like temporality, interactivity, and memory, all of which vary and alter the player's experience and can imbue the game body with motility. This article demonstrates that a more complex model of the game body is necessary to account for the dynamic created by embodiment games and the game body.

This exhibition review of Kara Walker's Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) interprets how Walker frames the Black body as a literal and figurative entry point to the cultural institutions that form American identity. The exhibition interrogates histories of epistemic violence that marginalize Black people within discourses of Western humanism, situating Black bodies in symbolic opposition to the Human, while simultaneously in conceptual resonance with other nonhuman entities, such as the machine and the automaton. Within her “Immortality Garden,” Walker envisions the possibility of the not-quite-human as a timeless and urgent provocation to reassess the value of the Black body and the uncanny ability to create spaces of freedom amid technologically enhanced and institutionally compromised environs.

Violet Lucca, David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2024). $50.

Welcome, readers, to the final installment of the ninth volume of Screen Bodies. We are pleased to present an issue that features such theoretically rich and diverse approaches to media studies. The first three articles in this issue focus on digital and internet culture, examining the social relations fostered by augmented reality and social media.

This article reimagines discourses around race and gender within collaborative cultural productions by investigating how trauma is computed via visual images and human-computer interactions. I argue the use of digital collaborative formations—particularly that of oppositional writing in socially mediated spaces—provokes modes of encounter that enact a shared distributed experience of different ways of printing new paths in and out of trauma. By analyzing the digital storytelling taking place in “Breonna's Garden,” an augmented reality application that tells the story of Breonna Taylor, I clarify how digital technologies serve as an avenue for transformative recoding of the mechanisms of racialization.

Twitter's 2015 change from the star to the heart button caused many participants to antagonistically respond. This modification was supposed to enable participants’ easy and frictionless engagements. Nevertheless, it caused friction, including journalists’ identification as dismissed super users who were contaminated by the heart's feminine references. I employ close reading to study news stories, posts, and Twitter's narratives about the buttons. I cite academic scholarship on friction, feelings, buttons, and gender scripts as a means of arguing that Twitter's heart button was sometimes understood as frictionless, but it was also refused because of negative connotations. While such scholars as Sebastián Lehuedé and José Medina argue that individuals can employ friction to intervene in intolerance, my humanities study underscores how gender and sexuality norms are reproduced.

This article interrogates how TikTok has become a voice of authority in the self-diagnosis of ADHD and builds on theories of social, cultural, and algorithmic authority, to offer a theoretical framework of “techno-cultural authority”. Through a digital ethnography and analysis of ADHD TikToks and the technological infrastructures and assemblages surrounding the TikTok app, I demonstrate how ADHD TikTok content creators adopt visual and discursive norms from other trending TikTok content and traditional visual media content to generate authority, and to ensure their videos are deemed viewable and relevant by viewers and the algorithm. Contrary to traditional understandings of medical authority, I find that authority on TikTok is not produced by individuals or institutions, but rather by content creators who engage, en masse, with the supporting technologies of the TikTok app to reproduce familiar trends and visual norms.

This article explores women's re-appropriation of the national discourse of history and heritage in contemporary China. Examining women artists’ recreation of Silk Road heritage objects, I demonstrate how they produce a new narrative of women's time that, in turn, generates an alternative form of agency. In remaking the figure of the feitian (apsaras) from the material heritage of the Silk Road, as represented in Dunhuang Buddhist art, Chinese female artists offer new ways to understand the position of women in Chinese historical cultures. The artists tell these stories not in a linear sequence, but rather via the thick surface assembled with objects—the materials of statues and cyborgs—and human flesh. Based on interviews with the artists, a visual analysis of three artworks in relation to critical race theories (Cheng), and queer theories of temporality (Freeman), this article discusses forms of femininity, agency, and time.

In the early 2020s, queer cannibalism rose in significant popularity with films such as Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All (2022). This article investigates this growing phenomenon of queer cannibalism in horror films as a mode of articulating queer desire and isolation. It poses the question, when queer stories are intertwined with cannibalistic tendencies, what does the consuming of human flesh determine about their existence? Through a queer and feminist theoretical lens, I outline the social, cultural, and political influences that construct particular narratives through an analysis of Bones and All (2022). As a result of this analysis, I locate the uses of queer cannibalism in horror media as a means of rejecting oppressive social and cultural constructions of desire as well as its operating as a method of articulating a desire for acceptance and, in many instances, love.

Anxieties generated from the challenges of sustainable and equitable societies and the hopes for transcending routes through uncertain times have often found their paths crossing within the motion sequence of the dystopian car chase on film. Each decade has met this crossing—of frightening futures and fleeting freedoms—with its own set of driving rules and transport-based dimensions. From Mad Max's original release in 1979 to the most recent Death Race installment, Beyond Anarchy, in 2018, the dystopian car chase on film represents vehicles of vision, in which races for the drivers’ survival, personal freedom, community, meaning, and humanization provide the chance to transcend, even if temporarily, the audiences’ existing fears of the future ramifications of their present societies.

This article examines the series Tiger King through a Marxist lens, challenging prevailing capitalist narratives. It explores how the show provides a metanarrative of the present, critiquing capitalist values and exposing their illusory nature. By dethroning the Tiger King and questioning the legitimacy of meritocracy, it reveals the underlying dynamics of capitalist social relations characterized by lies, deception, and savagery. While not immediately leading to class consciousness or Marxism, the show lays the groundwork for this framework. The article also contemplates the potential rise of authentic class consciousness beyond capitalist triumphalism, sparked by widespread dissatisfaction as reflected in social conflicts. Ultimately, it suggests that Tiger King serves as a microcosm of broader power struggles, hinting at the possibility of impending class consciousness and class struggle.

We are pleased to present an excellent collection of articles that represent the newest directions in what Barbara Stafford called “body criticism.” The authors in this issue of Screen Bodies work in diverse fields and employ a wide range of methods, but all share a concern with spectatorship and the ways that the effects of screen-based technology are mediated by the body. This research centers women and offers advancements in feminist film theory, posthumanism, and studies of the horror genre.

In recent years, many scholars of performing arts, cinema, and mass media have been focusing their studies on the body, examining the perception of the physical experience of projection and connecting bodily states with spiritual and ethical constructs. The purpose of this article is to present how cinema and performance can utilize the body in ways that enhance the audience's empathy. The role of cinema is to enable the viewer to liberate their body from its “individual ownership” and to rediscover its potential. Similarly, performances challenge the audience to respond with their bodies to the stimulation of certain emotions, experiencing a pure sensation through participation. However, experiencing empathy, a viewer can impose their ideas or reactions onto the experiences or emotions of others, believing that what they are experiencing is what others experienced.

Building on Paul Schrader's thesis in Transcendental Style in Film that immanence and transcendence clash, this article explores a departure from this binary in Jim Jarmusch's 2016 film, Paterson. Although Paterson follows the formula of transcendental cinema, it lacks Schrader's prerequisite “Decisive Moments” for transcendence. I contend that films can evoke transcendence without distinct release moments, as exemplified by Paterson. To support this, Paterson is contrasted with Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 masterpiece, Tokyo Story, identified by Schrader as quintessentially transcendental and a key influence on Jarmusch. Introducing the concept of “immanent transcendence” to describe Paterson's unique position, I argue that transcendence and immanence can coexist. I challenge traditional notions of transcendental cinema, shedding light on cinematic experiences that bridge immanence and transcendence.

This article examines the inter-subjective touch in Ildikó Enyedi's film On Body and Soul (2017), employing a phenomenological approach by analyzing the aspects of horror, pleasure, dreaming, and breath. This film recontextualizes horror and reaffirms pleasure through the inter-subjective touch. The binary setting between the dreaming world and the waking world, through the perception of touch, is used not to disdain the cruel reality but to arouse inter-subjectivity. The representation of breath illuminates another tactility regarding spatiality and inter-subjectivity. I argue that On Body and Soul constructs layers of tactility and inter-subjectivity between the film and the spectator; the two protagonists (Mária and Endre); human and non-human; dreaming and waking; and mind and body.

French film director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau's sophomore body horror film, Titane (2021), like its predecessors of the same genre, examines the malleability and fragility of human corporeality. The film can be categorized under the New French Extremity, a genre coined by art critic James Quandt, who disapprovingly expressed his concerns with the rampant depictions of blood and violence in film; however, this article contends that Ducournau's film offer much more than mere shock factor and spectacle of taboo objects. Featuring a protagonist who is a manifestation of Donna Haraway's radical cyborg, Titane can be situated alongside recent debates in posthuman concerns, but more importantly, in its intersection and close connection to feminist and queer discourse. Although many have utilized Julia Kristeva's abject/-ion to examine the horror film genre through a feminist lens, this article seeks to expand on such existing literature by pointing to its emancipatory powers and its potential for a more inclusive, posthuman queer mode of being and kinship beyond the symbolic order.

Posthumanism stands as a complex and interdisciplinary intellectual movement that challenges and broadens conventional notions of human identity and existence, particularly in light of advancements in science and technology. It emerged in response to the swift evolution of technology and its profound impact on our understanding of what it means to be human. Embarking on a posthumanist inquiry, this research delves into the rich fabric of Charles Stross’ Singularity Sky (2003), meticulously unraveling the complexities of human transcendence amidst advanced technology. The article's objective is to unveil the nuanced layers of the author's exploration of posthumanist ideas. The analysis explores the dynamic interplay among characters and their technological surroundings, emphasizing moments where the amalgamation of humanity and cutting-edge technology acts as a catalyst for transcendence.

This article looks at how the “anorexic condition” gained public awareness through popular culture, specifically in the United States and Hong Kong, and argues that the 1980s saw the beginning of anorexia awareness-raising in the American public, contributed by the untimely death of Karen Carpenter and the rapid expansion of consumerism. It uses racial, feminist, and disability theories to interrogate how their intersections defined and continued to shape anorexia. It examines the paradox that popular culture could be the very same agency that creates both such oppression and the “redemption” of its problematic consequences. This leads to a critical evaluation of the nature of popular culture, its influence on young people and their body image, and its prevailing influence on global society.

Asian women are often marginalized in global contexts, and they are often disembodied or presented in sexualized images in film and television productions. Even in the Asian region, Asian women have difficulty giving themselves a voice in popular culture. This essay has selected three films and tends to explore the gender connotation, body, and sexuality in the film works of East Asian female directors in recent decades, with the intent to explore the female sexual desire that is expressed and reflected in those female directors’ works.

The main object of study in this research is the cutting of the female body in cinema. In order to simplify and rationalize such a broad and diffuse concept, it is necessary to redesign a methodology of analysis valid for the object of study at hand, which will be called the Triple Cut. This will advance self-referentially, as if it were Russian dolls, from the cut of the real itself, passing through the cut of the plane (or between planes) or the absence of the same, until arriving at the cut of the flesh itself. This is where the bodies end up being dismembered live in front of the camera's lens, pouncing like pieces of meat on the—willing or unwilling—audience.

This issue of Screen Bodies features articles that contribute to a group of closely related critical concerns, namely, the existential and political significance of tacticity, feeling, and the representation of embodied experience. In her article, “Feeling Like Death,” Caitlin Wilson examines the aesthetic strategies Agnes Varda employs in two early films, La Pointe Courte (1955) and Le Bonheur (1965), that emphasize “textures and tactility” in the portrayal of mortality, death, and mourning. Wilson shows how Varda uses haptic imagery and calculated cinematic techniques to convey an experience of grief that is “palpable as well as visible.” Wilson persuasively argues that Varda depicts the embodied feeling of mortality to create a heightened sense of intimacy between the films’ characters. Similarly, in her timely article, “Gut Feelings,” Jennifer Jasmine White argues that Sheena Patel challenges the trend towards emotional indifference or “flatness” in the emerging genre of “internet novels.” In contrast to the affectless, numb, and apathetic heroine characteristic of novels like Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts (2021) and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Patel's I'm a Fan (2022) features a more realistically emotional protagonist. White argues that the novel functions as an intervention that opposes affective indifference and the political apathy it inspires. She writes that most examples of the so-called internet novel, that is, literature that focuses on social media, influencer culture, and characters who are chronically online, suggest highly mediated social experience leads to emotional and political malaise. Patel rejects this trend and instead centers “the feeling body,” the embodied experience of life online, and the political agency it fosters.

Agnès Varda's early narrative films are texturally rich meditations on love and mortality. Each film uses aesthetic strategies that lend a palpability to the heartbreak, grief, and loss explored therein. This article examines how Varda's use of hapticity makes the morbid enticing, luring the viewer closer to the films’ surface. I particularly examine how these films balance narrative storytelling alongside palpable images, investigating whether films are seen, felt, or both simultaneously.

This article reads Sheena Patel's 2022 I'm a Fan as a major intervention into literary representations of women online, particularly within the context of Patel's materialist rendering of the operations of race, gender, and class in platform economies. Patel writes against a tendency toward what this article terms an emergent “flatness” in representations of women online, manifested aesthetically, ideologically, and affectively. Patel's debut offers an alternatively “de-flattened” account of life on the internet, partly through a focus on the hungry body of its narrator: an insistence that the internet is for women in particular “not a still, flat, surface thing” is explored via its effects on the feeling body. This article considers how I'm a Fan employs questions of algorithmic desire, taste and aesthetics, and the concept of autofiction as a “masticated life,” rematerializing, and therefore repoliticizing, gendered encounters with the platform.

Online users devise different strategies and techniques to make up for the absence of physical bodies in online communications, one of which is using emojis. Emojis are a diverse set of small images, symbols, or icons, standardized by the Unicode Consortium for utilization in electronic communication platforms. Their primary role is to effectively convey the emotional attitude of the writer, succinctly provide information, and playfully communicate messages. This article posits that bodily emojis (emojis portraying a body gesture or facial expression) are a form of digital embodiment. Their usage, thus, creates a form of digital performance. Emojis appear as a screen body in a space that lacks the physical one. Furthermore, I suggest that this body could be described as aesthetically Baroque. My proposition is that emojis exhibit Baroque characteristics such as dynamic and exaggerated forms and decorate texts. Emojis share similarities with the appearance and function of the Baroque body both in Baroque visual art and Baroque dance.

Theorist Lauren Berlant defines inconvenience as an affect, one exerted by dominant forces onto subordinate populations. In the same way subordinate populations exert inconvenient affects as well, creating a dynamic of dominant and subordinate inconvenience through which social power relationships may be understood. Following this structure, this article charts the dominant and subordinate affects exerted by capitalism and trans* bodies, respectively, and how capitalist oppression responds to and shapes trans* embodiment. Through an autotheoretical lens, this relationship is here examined in the 2020 film Possessor and the 2015 film Tangerine, highlighting the points of interaction between trans*ness and capitalism's state structures of domination and oppression. Ultimately, I point to trans* joy as an affect that presents a danger to capitalism's domination, providing space for trans* persons to thrive.

The monster-as-queer trope in horror cinema historically implemented the binary of self-versus-other as heterosexual heroine versus queer monster/villain. With the rise of queer creators and spectators within horror, this trope was questioned so that the queer(ed) monster became multifaceted. From its birth, the horror anthology series American Horror Story has questioned this binary thinking, and the 2018 season Apocalypse exemplifies this best. Using camp, the show creates a queer basis that overthrows normative depictions of sexuality and queer bodies in television. In Apocalypse—in which the “normative” is represented as inherently queer—a subversive reimagining of typically “Othered” bodies overturns the regime of representation in horror cinema. By analyzing how the villain of Apocalypse, the Antichrist, is (re)presented with an ambiguously gendered body and sexuality, I argue that the toppling of heteropatriarchy challenges the position of the Othered villain/monster so that their “evil” is made ambiguous in contextualization with queer futurism.

Adventure Time is an animated series and bildungsroman, centered on the primary protagonist, Finn, and the normative prescriptions of identity as represented in his growth. The series evolves to offer nuanced and alternative representations of fluidity and the queer body, and the current research investigates queer potentiality in this speculative fiction/fantasy text. By weaving together extant understandings of bodies and animation with theories of the queer body, this analysis uses fluidity to examine queerness in Adventure Time. Further, it proposes that the body is one site—along with constructs of family, gender, and time—where fluidity may represent queerness.

Categorized by what Michel Foucault called the “biopolitics” of life, the modern human body is reborn into a defamiliarized incarnate social entity that embodies an ecology of different kinds of augmentations. How do the mechanisms of biopolitics create normalized bodies and identities, and what are the real stakes of this new biopolitical power? This article investigates a genealogy toward the contemporary definition of identity and how biopolitics induces and creates a modern milieu of dualities. It then proposes a concept of “fluid identities” as a disruptive, provocative, and whimsical design intervention. It recognizes fluidity to be a presumed agentic human condition and a widely acceptable social factor; it recognizes identities to be “fragmented yet authentic” and “incomplete but sufficient.”

Steffen Hven, Enacting the Worlds of Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). ISBN: 978-0-19-755510-1. pp. 216. $75.

Our summer issue begins with a three-part special section on phenomenologies of perception in screen media. These articles focus on novel technological means of representing embodied, lived experience, as well as ways that visual media can impact embodied spectatorship. Each examines media artworks that attempt to represent the seemingly intangible, such as loss, decay, and temporality. The authors in this section offer nuanced and ethically oriented phenomenologies of vision, motion, and time. In “Projecting the Colors of Vision,” Wendy Haslem discusses how artists working in animation, cinema, and virtual reality use visual media to represent the lived experience of sight loss. Haslem analyzes the “haptic optics” of Yoav Brill's Ishihara (2010), Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), and James Spinney and Peter Middleton's Notes on Blindness (2016) to show how these artists use technological tools and experiments with color to represent diverse, embodied experiences of visual disability, and to encourage “empathic awareness” in viewers. In his article, Yifei Sun critiques the analog-contingent theories of movement put forward by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Sun modifies aspects of Deleuze's Cinema 1: The Movement-Image to offer a theory that accommodates the qualities of digital film. Sun considers the possibilities for software art to produce what he calls “voyeuristic authorship” and applies his “ontology of decay” to Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin's The Battle of Algiers (2006). In “Aesthetics of Slowness, Aesthetics of Boredom,” Giulia Tronconi examines slow cinema's phenomenology of time. Tronconi offers an incisive reading of Tsai Ming-liang's films I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Days (2020) that reveals how the filmmaker uses “felt duration” as a strategy to cultivate “empathic contemplation” and “respectful observation” in viewers. The author engages with the work of Schopenhauer and Heidegger and with Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image to explain the political and ethical potential of delaying movement in film.

“Projecting the Colors of Vision” investigates the role of color in the depiction of changing visual dispositions across four screen texts and the technologies that create them. This article explores the role of color in the depiction of color blindness in the abstract cell animation, Ishihara, directed by Yoav Brill (2010). It examines the role of blue in Derek Jarman's experimental film Blue (1993), and it looks into the ways that both the feature film and the virtual reality version of Notes on Blindness (James Spinney and Peter Middleton, 2016) use color, rain, and sound to sculpt spaces. This article develops an intermedial comparison of each text, focusing on image and sound as dialectical forces that invite an embodied experience of distinct perspectives.

Following Henri Bergson's third thesis of movement in Creative Evolution, Gilles Deleuze devotes a large section of Cinema I to applying the concept of the mobile section and the open whole to the narrative of analog cinema. By adopting a material ontological perspective and taking the disciplines of art-making into consideration, this article criticizes Deleuze's approach and proposes to rethink Bergson's and Deleuze's theories of movement in both analog cinema and digital moving images. In response to its main question, can analog and digital moving images constitute the open whole, this article examines the material degradation of film in the analog, investigates the phenomenon of morphing in the digital, and pays special attention to the real-time creation as well as the voyeuristic authorship of digital artworks.

Within the contemporary discourse on slow cinema and independent arthouse filmmaking, emerges the figure of Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang. His works, situated at a crossing between different forms of expression—film and installation, narrative film and ethnography—have often been deemed tiresome, boring. The following article explores where and how boredom may be identified in his films, and questions whether the languid feeling can be considered an aesthetic achievement. In particular, the article offers close textual analysis of I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Days (2020). Leveraging on the personal quality of felt duration, these films attune the viewer to the possibility of wonder and encourage considerations of the embodied representation of profound emotions such as solitude, alienation, and melancholy.

“Identification and Contagion” asks the question of how film can address the body of its viewer in an ethical dimension. Because contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have insisted that being in public means always being a raced and sexed body, film's ability to address audiences as though they were perspectives divorced of corporeal matter must be considered an ethical problem. The 2016 film The Fits provides a model of how a film can formally and thematically address an embodied audience. At the level of form, characters stare out through the camera at the audience, returning their gaze. Through the use of staging that places the camera (and therefore viewers) between characters, the film's director Anna Rose Holmer suggests an equivalence between the characters which are under observation and the audience. Furthermore, the film's treatment of the theme of conversion disorders implies a form of transmission between bodies that does not require physical contact to take place. Freudian psychoanalysis describes how such symptoms can pass from person to person even through a medium such as film. A recent example of conversion disorder in New York demonstrates how even watching a video of a person suffering hysterical symptoms can cause a viewer thousands of miles away to contract the same symptoms. The Fits therefore provides a model for how film can formally and thematically address an audience ethically at the level of their presence as bodies in social space.

The media theorist Sandy Stone has referred to flattened and digitized modes of communication in terms of “tokens,” using this framework specifically to address the ways in which we employ technology to compress, send, and receive desire. In taking up this thread, this article examines how tokens of desire are compressed and passed through the specific video game genre of dating simulators. While addressing a number of popular titles, the article highlights one offering in particular, the 2017 release Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator. The scope of this analysis extends beyond the game itself to consider the physical responses of its players—as made visible in game tutorials and walkthroughs distributed online. This exploration of the relationship between players and the game highlights how gameplay facilitates desires, how elements like agency and fictionality encourage certain responses from players, and how the genre ultimately functions alongside earlier, predigital objects of affection.

This article examines how continuity is dealt with in fictional feminist texts that depict gender or sexuate transition, via surgical intervention or transmogrification, in terms of naming and pronoun use, self-image, and perceived image. The texts here examined—literary and filmic works by cis artists Angela Carter, Sally Potter, and Octavia Butler, principally—all pastiche the familiar narratological mode of transsexual autobiography, aping the convention of internal focalization, though each elides the wrong-body formula that frequently accompanies such narratives to justify access to medical treatment and care. I situate each alongside scholarly engagements with transsexual embodiment, surgery, and lived experience, with particular focus on flesh as that which both contains and determines gendered and sexed readings, to ground these fictive accounts of becoming.

Implicitly or explicitly, society constantly gives us the imperative never to age, to keep our bodies and minds young in order to be valuable—this is particularly the case for women. However, the ageing body tells a valuable story that is worth tracing and analyzing in more depth. In this article, I explore two groups of films in which the ageing bodies of the characters and actors contribute to understanding the narrative of what I call the time-critical sequel. These are sequels produced several years or even decades since their original story was released, in which the years between one film and the other are incorporated into the narrative. First, I will define the time-critical sequel and how it interacts with its parent film. Following, I will develop how the duality of the ageing body of the character/actor, along with their corporeality and embodiment, becomes the means through which a story is told on our screens. I will do this by analyzing Richard Linklater's Before trilogy (1995–2013) and Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996), and T2 Trainspotting (2017).

This article examines a 2010s wave of US primetime television shows centered around the experiences of mad or distressed characters. Drawing upon research in critical disability and mad studies, the article identifies positive trends in US media surrounding mental disability, distress, and medication. Although the portrayals of madness in the shows discussed are complex and not without issue, this article argues that these series make space for alternative narratives of madness in popular culture that do not rely wholly on stereotypes of crime, genius, or violence.

Steinbock, Eliza. Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 248 pp. Cloth, $102.95; Paperback, $26.95.