PAST PROJECT – Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship (2018-2021)
Narrative and Aesthetic Responses to Gender and Power
The project looked at affirmative narratives and aesthetics across post-cinematic arts (including gallery films, VR, AR, and locative videos) and their relations to gender, power and the status quo.
Summary:
The goal of the project is to determine how post-cinematic arts counteract and aim to change current gender norms through affirmative narratives and aesthetics.
By analysing post-cinematic critical engagements with issues of gender and power, I examine how post-cinema reframes gender norms in an affirmative manner. Rather than being ‘natural’ or neutral, gender is a social construct inflected with layers of meaning, affect and power. Gender manifests as norms that are ‘performed’ and reiterated (mostly unconsciously and on a daily basis) through the ways we dress, interact and behave in different spaces and social environments. As attempts to shift the power imbalance between genders, feminist films, television series and social campaigns have often opposed the binary associations between gender and space (men/women, public/domestic). While feminist narratives are often created through negation and opposition, this project takes affirmative narratives and aesthetics as starting point.
In contrast to narratives that lament women’s lack of (political, spatial, social) power compared to men, affirmative arts produce models of gender and power that are fluid and in constant transformation rather than embedded in dichotomies. Following philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s work on ‘affirmative ethics’ (2006), this project defines affirmative arts as using the limitations to our ‘freedom’ as a foundation for creating alternative futures, or in other words proposing solutions for enhancing our political, social, spatial freedom. Instead of presenting characters that are alienated by the negative effects of gender norms and power on their actions, affirmative films counteract gender and power through what Braidotti (2011) calls ‘micropolitical instances of activism’. As I demonstrated in my doctoral dissertation, these are visible both in the narrative (the characters are wilful to change their gendered and disempowered conditions) and in the aesthetic of the film (filmic forms such as camera work, editing and sound creating a world that affect the spectator positively by opening up possibilities of change and reconfiguration of gender and power).
2018-2021: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (Individual Fellowships Call: H2020-MSCA-IF-2017): grant number 800259
Publications
Video-essay:
Resilient Ageing Women: A Question of Performance, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 2023.
Monograph:
Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women: Gender, Space and Mobility in Contemporary Cinema, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
Peer-reviewed journal articles:
- An affirmative look at a domesticity in crisis: Women, Humour and Domestic Labour during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Feminist Media Studies, 2020
- Forms of Affirmative Aesthetics in Women without Men, Aniki: the Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, 2020
- Immersive Storytelling and Affective Ethnography in Virtual Reality, The Review of Communication, 2021. With co-author Chris Ingraham.
- Reported on by the National Communication Association: CAN WE SEE FROM ONE ANOTHER’S PERSPECTIVE USING VIRTUAL REALITY? 5 August 2021
- Queering Cultural Memory Through Technology: Transitional Spaces in AR and VR, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 2021
Other research activities and dissemination
Organisation of the Affirmative Feminism Seminar Series: Production, Representation, Curation in the Film Industry, Online, 2021
Small dataset of Affirmative post-cinema, 2021
Workshop in VR about VR, ELO Conference, 2020
Maud Ceuterick 