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CFP – SCMS Annual Conference: Seattle, 19 – 23 March 2014

 

Panel: Female Suffering and Spectatorship Ethics

 

This panel builds upon the growing interest in the ethical relationship of the spectator to cinematic images of suffering and violence. In this panel, we would like to explore the ethical roles and responsibilities of the spectator when encountering the suffering female subject in film. 

 

Spectatorship ethics is intimately bound up with notions of consent, intersubjectivity and the encounter with the other. From the moment the spectator enters the screening, there is a contractual understanding about what they are about to see. These indirect agreements between director, subject and spectator produce ethical positions – especially regarding films containing images of violence and suffering. Such structures of relationality gesture towards the ethical resonances of film as a communicative medium. Communicative ethics understands intersubjective existence as motivated by a subject’s face-to-face interactions with others. The simultaneity of both subjectivities does not contest the recognition that each subject is also an individual partner to the communicative relationship; there remains a distinct dialogic relation of exchange between the performer and the spectator. Films that ask the spectator to engage in a dialogue on female suffering foreground and problematize the ethical and embodied dimensions of intersubjectivity.

  

This panel will look at ways in which filmmaking decisions regarding narrative content and formal design offer spectators the opportunity to watch films from ethical positions or perspectives. Drawing on examples from various geopolitical contexts, the intersubjective relations between subjects, filmmakers and spectators will be explored, and tools for an ethical spectatorship of female suffering will be elaborated.

 

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Rape and violation of the female body in contemporary European New Extremist, torture porn and body horror cinemas
• Female suffering in documentary film
• Cinematic depictions of female suffering in relation to feminist and queer theories on gender, sexual difference and female embodiment
• Phenomenological and affective dimensions of female suffering, violent cinematic aesthetics and spectatorship ethics
• Female suffering and spectatorship ethics in Francophone, Arab and African cinemas
• Female suffering, spectatorship ethics and postcolonial theory
• Female suffering in the work of female filmmakers
• Spectatorship ethics and female audiences
• Spectatorship and the ethical philosophies of Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy 

Please send a 300-word abstract and a short bio by August 5^th to Kathleen Scott ([log in to unmask]) and Stefanie Van De Peer ([log in to unmask]).  Notifications about acceptance or rejection of proposal will be sent by August 12^th (the deadline for conference proposals is August 30^th).