Sumários
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.
Maeve Brennan / Harding
2 Outubro 2024, 15:30 • Chiara Nifosi
Today we discussed Maeve Brennan's short story, "The Bride", to assess the idea of women's disconnection and/or alienation as a transversal tool that is reflected in both literary and theoretical discourses. We then switched to Harding's text and highlighted the following aspects of her analysis of feminist methods of inquiry: the necessary distinction between method, methodology, and epistemology; the limits of epistemologies that only revolve around the human as a general category, thus erasing differences in men's and women's experiences of reality; the limits of the "adding women" strategy as a false or limited integration of women's voices into academic and scientific discourse; the distorting perception of victimology, which we also explored through an excerpt from bell hooks' text "Marginality as a site of resistance".