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Call for proposals to participant in the workshop:
Regarding the Pleasure of Others
Entertainment and the Popular in World Cinemas
Leeds Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds
24 March 2016
Organizers:
Shoba Ghosh (Professor and Head of English, Uni. of Mumbai)
Alan O’Leary (Associate Professor, Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, Uni. of Leeds)
Popular films are deeply pleasurable artefacts. Despite pioneering work by writers
as different as Richard Dyer and Henry Jenkins a pathologizing account of pleasure continues to preside. Thus Art-house cinema will often disavow pleasure
(for example, in the form of slow cinema or the ‘feel-bad’ film) in the name of ethics, a move typically validated by critics. Pleasure tends to be understood as the means by which dubious ideologies are imparted, by which inequality is naturalized, and by
which the individual is interpellated as an oppressed subject. When pleasure is not assumed to be perforce politically or ethically negative, it tends to be perceived as supplementary to the real matter, or is presented as facile (as in Barthes’ hierarchical
opposition between plaisir and jouissance). In the opinion of the workshop organizers,
the pathologizing or ‘diminishing’ account of pleasure is
inadequate to the diversity and complexity of the pleasurable relationships with
popular cinema in different historical, cultural, economic and geographical contexts.
The workshop
Regarding the Pleasure of Others is designed to begin an essential and sympathetic reconceptualization
of the pleasures of popular film. It will do so in terms of a ‘glocal’ rethinking of pleasure, where the distinctiveness of the entertainment provided by regional and national film cultures
is recognized even as the transnational character of film aesthetics, production and consumption is borne in mind. (We are concerned to avoid ‘unthinking Eurocentrism’ and an excessive focus on Hollywood.)
The workshop will be an intimate event, taking place over a single day. Each session will feature a number of short position papers
or informal presentations dealing with a particular theme, context, methodological question etc., with a respondent and plenty of time for debate. A closing roundtable will include discussion of publication plans of the proceedings.
Proposals for participation are invited that address any of the following topics in relation to popular cinema, though the list
is not intended to be exhaustive:
·
Methodologies for the study of pleasure, including pleasure in the past
· The forms of pleasure in different contexts and cultures
·
Pleasure and questions of identity, gender, age (including children’s pleasure) etc.
·
Queer pleasures
·
Individual and communal experiences of pleasure
·
Pleasure and cultural capital, including cinephilia, fan, cult and ‘guilty’ pleasures
·
Pleasure and the erotic or pornographic
·
Critiques of the status of pleasure in discourse
Please write with proposals for position papers to
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with ‘Pleasure workshop’ in the subject line and include a CV, title/theme and abstract of no more than 300 words.
Deadline for proposals: 30 October 2015
Proposals will be considered after this date and participants invited by end-November.