[Hi all, please see the new issue of Scope below. Some information on a
relevant article on cyberfeminism is also provided. John].
Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies
The new articles are now online and can be accessed via the link below.
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/film/journal
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http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/film/journal/articles/parallax-historiography.ht
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Parallax Historiography: The Flâneuse as Cyberfeminist
By Catherine Russell, Concordia University, Canada
"Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we
have explained our bodies and our tools to
ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful
infidel heteroglossia." Donna Haraway
Haraway's cyborg manifesto may seem an odd choice of theoretical paradigms
for developing insight into silent cinema; and yet
I would like to suggest that new media technologies have created new
theoretical "passages" back to the first decades of film
history. The flâneuse, an imaginary construction of female subjectivity who
is our guide in this journey, is herself a cyborg. She
figures the relationship between women and technology as a mobile, fluid and
productive means of, in Haraway's words,
"building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships,
spaces, stories" (1997: 482). Recent developments in
film historiography by feminist theorists have shifted the emphasis from
textual analysis of the woman onscreen to the invisible
history of the spectator-subject. As Patrice Petro puts it, "In contrast to
formalist film historians, who seek to recover what is
increasingly becoming a lost object, feminists have been primarily concerned
to unearth the history of the (found) female
subject" (1990: 11). This is a discovery that calls for discourse drawn from
the utopian genres of techno-feminism.
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