Sumários
Woolf, A Room of One's Own/2
18 Outubro 2024, 15:30 • Chiara Nifosi
Today we completed our discussion on Woolf's essay. After framing the work through some general remarks about the formal aspects of the text (i.e., the idea of fictional truth, imaginary first-person narrator, the blend of fictional and essay writing), we went through all the main topics for each chapter, namely: the underdevelopment of women's education system, which is less invested upon; the historical obstacles to women's accumulation of capital; the thought experiment of imagining the life of Shakespeare's sister; material vs. immaterial obstacles to women's imagination (man's hostility); the idea of writing with your sex in mind / sex consciousness; the revolutionary prose of Mary Carmichael as finally free from the mental constraints created by sex; the androgynous writer.
Woolf, A Room of One's Own/1
16 Outubro 2024, 15:30 • Chiara Nifosi
After closing the conversation started last time about paranoid vs. reparative reading, we had a plenary discussion about Woolf's text based on the comments left by the students on the Moodle platform. We focused in particular on the issues raised in Woolf's text that are also connected with first-wave feminism, namely the mention to the suffragettes movement and the right to vote, access to education, and women's right to own property. We started discussing symbolic/metaphorical language contained in the text (the Manx cat, the spider's web).
Linda Williams/2
11 Outubro 2024, 15:30 • Chiara Nifosi
Today we finished to clarify some key aspects of Linda Williams' article, namely the potential that body genres hold to subvert psychoanalytical patterns and promote more fluid gender dynamics, as well as the way they address what Williams considers important problems connected with sexual identity (the enigma of sexual desire; the trauma of castration and the discovery of sexual difference; the mystery of the origins of the self) by giving voice to gender fantasies. After that, we read some quotes through which we explored some further developments of film theory, in connection with psychoanalysis and beyond (Kristeva, De Lauretis, Kaplan, Doty). We closed our discussion by reflecting on how queer studies, for instance, have helped promote the collaboration between paranoid and reparative practices of reading, concepts introduced by Eve Sedgwick and drawn from Melanie Klein's psychoanalytical theory.
Linda Williams/1
9 Outubro 2024, 15:30 • Chiara Nifosi
Today we discussed Linda Williams' article on body genres, i.e., cinematographic genres generally considered as low and whose main characteristic is to induce in the spectator an immediate bodily reaction (pornography, horror, melodrama). We discussed ideas of gratuitousness and excess in relation to sex, violence, and pain, especially in their connection with pleasure from a psychoanalytical point of view; the case of pornography also through some quotes drawn from Virginie Despentes' "King Kong Theory"; the idea of a "natural" female masochism; the idea of a problematic continuum between the cinematic experience of body genres and real life. We also underlined continuity and rupture between Mulvey's text and this one, especially in relation to their use of psychoanalytical theory.
Haraway / Mulvey
4 Outubro 2024, 15:30 • Chiara Nifosi
We closed the discussion on Harding's text on feminist methods of inquiry by underlining the need to dismantle the myth of the objectivity of scientific discourse, a theme that we also explored through some passages drawn from Haraway's article on situated knowledge, where she redefines objectivity as being inherently partial and dependent on the subject's degree of involvement with and access to the phenomenon at stake.