Overview
- Provides an affirmative approach to feminism and film
- Explores case studies of films that are wilful to change the status quo, deconstructing the binary social distinctions created and reinforced by many films
- Uses a micro-analysis of four films to show how bodies and forms have the potential to revise women's current relations to space
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About this book
Fifty years of feminist thought have made the idea that women stay at home while men dominate the streets seem outdated; nevertheless, Ceuterick argues that theoretical considerations of gender, space, and power in film theory remain limited by binary models. Looking instead to more fluid models of spatial relations inspired by Sara Ahmed, Rosi Braidotti, and Doreen Massey, this book discovers wilful, affirmative, and imaginative activations of gender on screen. Through close, micro-analysis of historic European Messidor (Alain Tanner, 1979) and contemporary world cinema: Vendredi Soir (Claire Denis, 2002), Wadjda (Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2012), and Head-On (Fatih Akin, 2004), this book identifies affirmative aesthetics: light, texture, rhythm, movement and sound, all of which that participate in a rewriting of bodies and spaces. Ultimately, Ceuterick argues, affirmative aesthetics can challenge the gender categories and power structures that havebeen thought to determine our habitation of cars, homes, and city streets. Wilful women drive this book forward, through their movement and stillness, imagination and desire, performance and abjection.
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Keywords
Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women offers a genuinely original and sophisticated analysis of gendered space and cinematic (wilful) bodies. Ceuterick argues elegantly and persuasively that film can open up sites of contestation within which fixed, binary categories can be parsed and subverted as a form of ‘affirmative aesthetics’. This is a beautifully written monograph that combines radical intent with lucid thought; it will be a vital resource for feminist, gender and cinema scholars alike. Both timely and necessary, I, for one, welcome it wholeheartedly.”
— Anna Backman Rogers, University of Gothenburg
"This splendid and thoughtful book connects Rosi Braidotti's affirmative ethics and Sara Ahmed's concept of the willful subject to film in a way that many have been waiting for. Complementing feminist phenomenological approaches to film as well as Deleuze-inspired (feminist) theory and Eugenie Brinkema's work on affect, the extended and subtle discussion of both acclaimed (Claire Denis's Vendredi soir) and lesser-known (Alain Tanner's Messidor) films in Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women forges a newly affirmative mode of critique that will interest all scholars of film, gender and space."
- Kate Ince, University of Birmingham
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Maud Ceuterick is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. She has previously published on the ‘road movie’ genre, gender and domesticity in transnational cinema, and space tourism in film.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women
Book Subtitle: Gender, Space and Mobility in Contemporary Cinema
Authors: Maud Ceuterick
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37039-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-37038-1Published: 27 October 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-37041-1Published: 27 October 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-37039-8Published: 26 October 2020
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 186
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations, 38 illustrations in colour
Topics: Film Theory, Culture and Gender