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.