[ecrea] Postgraduate Symposium at Northumbria University

*‘Girls on film’: Visualising femininities in contemporary culture.*

**

A postgraduate symposium, as part of the Gendered Subjects Postgraduate
Network and in collaboration with the Gendered Subjects Research Hub,
Northumbria University.

*May 23rd 2016, Northumbria University.*

*Keynote speakers:**Dr. Helen Wheatley* (University of Warwick) and
*Dr.* *Christina Scharff* (King’s College London)

　

/The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is
no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body,
stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the
direct recipient of the spectator's look./(Laura Mulvey, /Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, /1975)

This year marked the 40^th anniversary of Laura Mulvey’s seminal text
/Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. /Exploring the way in which
cinema constructs an interface between active/male and passive/female,
Mulvey suggests that the cinematic female body is ‘raw material’:
fragmented, constructed and deconstructed, perpetually stylised and
ultimately immersed in the eroticism of visual pleasure. Thus, the
female is open to be styled accordingly by the (male) spectator’s gaze.

Much scholarship has worked to expand the position and portrayal of the
female body within media (Watson and Smith, 2002) and, most recently,
Helen Wheatley argued that/‘/Mulvey's account of the intensity of the
spectorial engagement with the filmic image needs to be adapted, not
abandoned, when it comes to thinking about our erotic engagement with
televisual spectacle’.(Helen Wheatley, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Television’, 2015)

Both examples explore the ways in which the contemporary female works to
manipulate Mulvey’s initial conceptualisation of the female body as
framed by the notion of /to-be-looked-at-ness/ and furthermore, lessened
the control of the male gaze. Instead, the female’s relationship with
her body and subjectivity has become diverse and self-reflexive. As
Watson and Smith argue, contemporary ‘women artists working in multiple
media have used the bits and pieces, the excesses and debris […] in
order to materialise self-referential displays’. In this sense, the
female appears in various positions and in a constant process of
construction and (re)construction through multi-faceted mediums.

This symposium seeks to explore the portrayal of the female (over an
interdisciplinary terrain - be it art, screen, or page) as makers of her
own self-display in a way that transforms the spectorial gaze and
disrupts the notion of the female as a standardised or ‘perfect’
product. Instead, the utilisation of ‘bits’ and ‘pieces’ of media
disrupts how femininities are visualised. Moreover, the focus will be on
the way in which the female is both /manipulated/ and /manipulates/ the
media landscape so as to force the modern spectator to (re)imagine
femininities in contemporary culture.

　

*Topics may include yet are not limited to the thematic list below: *

  * Visualising and (re)imagining femininities in contemporary
    literature, fine art, performance, and on screen.

  * Female manipulation of space through new technological mediums.

  * Grrrls and g[urls]: subverting girlhood in new forms of social media.

  * Non-normative femininities.

  * Ageing femininities and visualising nostalgia.

  * Adaptations.

　

　

　

A 250-word abstract for 20-minute papers and poster presentations,
including a brief autobiographical statement, should be submitted to
*(girlsonfilm.unn /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(girlsonfilm.unn /at/ gmail.com)>* by
February 28th 2016.

*__*

*_Event Organisers_*

Megan Sormus

Rachel Robson

Anamarija Horvat

*__*

*_Social Media_*

Twitter: @GirlsonfilmUnn

Blog: girlsonfilmsite.wordpress.com

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Girls-on-Film-A-Symposium

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