Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies
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"What he did note but strongly he desir'd?": Reading Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece as a Pornographic Possession
No full textRacialized Appetites in Four Girls at Cottage City, Malinda Russell's Domestic Cook Book, and Southern Soufflé
Full text linkEmma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins’ novel Four Girls at Cottage City (1898), Malinda Russell’s Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen (1866), and Erika Council’s food blog Southern Soufflé (2012-present) are texts that differ in form, genre, purpose, and period. Read together, these works, all three of which have received relatively little critical attention, however, help piece together a historical and cultural framework for contemporary views of Black women, food and professionalized labor, a subject which itself has received less attention, critically, than white women and the professionalism of their domestic labors. The three exemplary works that are the focus of this essay all resist an embodied racial logic that would categorize and value various forms of women’s domestic labor according to the bodies that perform it. Through their writing, Kelley-Hawkins, Russell, and Council engage questions of who consumes and who is consumed within the context of U.S. cultural history and its long-held, violently deployed misunderstanding of race
Thematic Fields, Transgressive Religion: Disembodiment and the Will to Nothingness in “Safe Haven”
Full text linkIn my article, I examine a segment of the 2013 horror anthology, V/H/S/ 2. Entitled „Safe Haven” and directed by young directors Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans, this segment stands out for its religious and metaphysical subject matter. Examining broader media theory concerns relating to the „found-footage horror” subgenre, I consider how, during the course of „Safe Haven”, the screen as frame is gradually supplanted by the increasingly unreal events portrayed in the segment. I seek to simultaneously engage with the question of realism in found footage films, while also utilizing Evan Calder-Williams’ notion of „horrible form” to illuminate the various aesthetic features of Tjahjanto and Evans’ intensive work. In addition, I hope to shed new light on the found footage genre through utilizing some aspects of Aron Gurwitsch’s neglected work in field psychology. Borrowing Gurwitsch’s concept of „thematic field”, I show how the various themes represented in „Safe Haven” gradually modify the viewer experience, while also deforming the fields portrayed in the film. From a realistic, almost documentary film-style aesthetic, Tjahjanto and Evans transport us to a realm of transgressive religion. Beneath the form of religious piety, we uncover a transgressive spirituality, organized around what Friedrich Nietzsche characterizes in his Geneaology of Morals as the „will to nothingness.” Beneath representation, the demonic lies in wait, eager to transcend the human element. Degrading everything it infects, the will to nothingness is born, tearing apart corporeality and, indeed, the realism of found footage as orphaned media. Both frame and body alike are torn to shreds. The key imperative of found-footage horror is the following: only the footage may remain intact
Listening to Label: Analyzing the Problematic Function of Origins in Historical Recording
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Revisionist Spectacle? Theatrical Remediation in Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman and Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight
No full textRevisionist Spectacle? Theatrical Remediation in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight
This article argues that the remediation of theatrical elements in film, i.e. the ample employment of non-systemic signs through the cinematic filter, facilitates a critical engagement with the medial properties of film. While theatrical production has expanded into the realm of film in recent years through mediatization and live broadcasting, a similar, yet inverse, development can be observed in film: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) are just two out of many examples showing cinema’s tendency of emulating live performance. The films’ illusions of liveness cannot be upheld, however, and are broken by the employment of cinematic signs. As such, theatrical films foreground their constructedness and negotiate the impossibility of recreating liveness on screen; they draw attention to their status as spectacles and in a society increasingly dependent on mediatization within a capitalist context. Taking into account the semiosis of theater and film, respectively, the article thus establishes that semiotic transitions, as described above, manifest themselves in genre transgressions: In ways reminiscent of Brechtian theater, The Hateful Eight and Birdman forge critical awareness towards their screened representations; theatricality, therefore, accentuates the perceived naturalization of generic conventions in film (in this case a western and an action/superhero film), and marks them as constructs precisely because the use of theatrical elements does not play into audience’s expectations. By extension, the article analyzes the political dimension of these films and asks whether spectacles, famously theorized by Guy Debord as inherently tautological and uncritical products of mediatized mass cultures, are able to comment on the system they emerge from and whether they can effectively revision the conventions of generic film