Imaginations (Journal)
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SUPERSTRUMPS: THE CARD GAME WITH A MISSION
Get PDFThe artist interview in this dossier is an example of collaborative work between an artist and a writer. It is a showcase of how popular culture can be re-appropriated. The interviewees are the co-creators of the card game Superstrumps developed to address the issue of stereotyping of women. In the interview, they recount the process of creating the game involving other women from their local community. This exemplifies how a strategy for resisting and reclaiming identities undermined by negative labelling is developed. Their views are strongly shaped by their feminist principles. The interview acknowledges the complex nature of identities, the challenge of media representation and the symbiotic relationship between media and audiences is revealed
HORROR AND THE BODY: UNDERSTANDING THE REWORKING OF THE GENRE IN MARINA DE VAN’S DANS MA PEAU/IN MY SKIN (2001)
Get PDFThis article explores how Marina de Van’s confrontational representation of the human body, in her film Dans ma peau/In my Skin (2001), should be understood as a reinterpretation of certain major themes in the horror genre. More specifically, I examine how de Van’s mise-en-scène borrows from the genre of horror , both on a visual and a technical level, to deconstruct the meanings initially attached to the representation of the body in pain found in horror’s narratives. I argue that a close analysis of the textural properties of the image allows for a reappraisal of the onscreen presence of the wounded body, this body departing from horror’s straightforward visual regimen, to open up a space for the character’s subjectivity to emerge. I also posit that the use of the close-up on images of blood and scars, while being reminiscent of horror’s treatment of the body, becomes a vehicle for the unleashing of the character’s unmediated drives to explore her own flesh and to reach a new level of self-awareness
FROM SOAP OPERA TO REALITY PROGRAMMING: EXAMINING MOTHERHOOD, MOTHERWORK AND THE MATERNAL ROLE ON POPULAR TELEVISION
Get PDFRepresentations of motherhood dominate the television landscape in a variety of popular genre texts, and as such it is important that we consider the ways in which these women are being constructed and circulated on the small screen. Indeed, although much work has been done to investigate the depiction of women on television, little research exists to account for the portrayal of mothering, motherhood, and the maternal role. With this in mind, this article introduces extant literature concerning the representation of motherhood in the media and then examines ways in which this research might be understood in relation to the depiction of mothers in soap opera, situation comedy, teen drama, dramedy and reality television. It considers the ways in which popular television texts form a consensus as they negotiate the idealized image of the ‘good’ mother in favour of a more attainable depiction of ‘good enough’ mothering which stands apart from the romanticized image of the ideal mother that dominates the broader entertainment arena
BEAUTIFUL JUNKIES: IMAGES OF DEGRADATION IN REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
Get PDFIn Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 film, Requiem for a Dream, based on Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel, he depicts extreme close-up images of heroin as it cooks, boils, enters a vein, and then passes into the body at the cellular level. The cells sizzle as heroin numbs them. The close-ups and sizzling sounds repeat themselves more and more frequently as our four main characters disintegrate through the process of becoming junkies. These images and others provide vivid, horrific, and exquisite visual renderings of the addiction process, while simultaneously providing stark evidence of heroin’s take-over of the body, mind, and ethical capabilities. The images of heroin’s allencompassing control of the body at its foundational level do not glorify heroin’s power in Aronofsky’s film; these images serve as documents of pure horror. The degradation is devastating, thorough, real, and scarring. Aronofsky describes his film as a monster movie, a modern horror film. And, it is not the type of film in which redemption occurs. The stark and individual solitude of each character at the end of the film cannot be easily penetrated by sobriety or love anytime in the foreseeable future
THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE IN FILM, AND A SUNDAY IN KIGALI: WATCHING WITH A PIERCED EYE
Get PDFSusan Sontag reminds us that film and photography have an extremely democratic heuristic poetics, and are quasi-universally accessible for signification, though at the same time, it almost always implies a prime target audience. The many films that have come out on the Rwandan genocide (1994) are no exception. Film has been a prime access source to this bloody event and dominates, particularly in the West, our remembrance and understanding of one of the most intense and grueling political conflicts in African history. All these films struggle with a compulsive need for structured narration, whether it is in their fable, or in the visual representation itself, while the historical events were certainly not experienced as part of a linear structure. At the same time, the films aim for historical credibility, or truthfulness, which is rendered through a variety of filmic approaches. The article discusses the fictionalization of genocide through film, and problematizes the quasi-unavoidable documentary effect of filmic iteration. Robert Favreau’s Un Dimanche à Kigali is analyzed in greater detail, as it offers specific strategies to the problem of filmic representation of genocidal violence
THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH
Get PDF“The Valley of the Shadow of Death” is a brief meditation on the refraction of sunsets over desolated landscapes, photography of war, and the viewer’s relationship to the death of the sublime. The essay references the Museum of Fine Arts Houston exhibition “WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath” (2012-13) citing one of Roger Fenton’s famous manipulated pictures from the Crimean war (1856) showing an empty landscape with cannonballs
ADULT FEAR AND CONTROL: AMBIVALENCE AND DUALITY IN CLIVE BARKER’S THE THIEF OF ALWAYS
Get PDFThis article considers the relationship between the text and accompanying illustrations in Clive Barker’s children’s novel The Thief of Always: A Fable. This tale of abduction was published in the social background of fear around the child predator of the early 1990s and incorporates ideas of monstrous villainy, loss of childhood innocence, and insatiable desires. As a fable, Thief is a cautionary tale that not only teaches that childhood years are precious and are not to be wished away or squandered in idle leisure, but also of the dangers that some adults pose to children. Problematically, an honest and frank discussion of adult sexual desires toward children would despoil the very innocence that is trying to be protected; thus, a lesson such as this must be sublimated within the story. Yet, it is the illustrations, and more specifically the way in which the illustrations corroborate and contradict the plot of this story that reveals an underlying ambivalence toward the figure of the child and an echoing duality present in both the child and the child predator
TEA WITH MOTHER: SARAH PALIN AND THE DISCOURSE OF MOTHERHOOD AS A POLITICAL IDEAL
Get PDFSeldom has someone emerged so unexpectedly and sensationally on to the American political scene as Sarah Palin. With Palin came what had rarely, if ever, been seen before on a presidential trail: hockey moms, Caribou-hunting, pitbulls in lipstick parcelled as political weaponry. And let’s not forget those five children, including Track 19, set to deploy to Iraq, Bristol, and her unplanned pregnancy at 17, and Trig, a six-month-old infant with Down’s syndrome. Never before had motherhood been so finely balanced with US presidential politics. Biological vigour translated into political energy, motherhood transformed into an intoxicating political ideal. This article focuses on Sarah Palin and how her brand of “rugged Alaskan motherhood” (PunditMom 2008) became central to her media image, as well as what this representation has to tell us about the relationship between mothering as a political ideal, US politics, and the media