Attenberg: Of (Dis-)Orientation

Abstract

Chapter 5 conducts a phenomenological study of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010), which, drawing on Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), explores the way the body’s queer meanderings across a hostile and unproductive familial and national space ultimately expose it as discursive rather than ‘natural’. At the same time, the chapter examines Tsangari’s alternative attempts at registering and editing the body in the film and the body of the film through close analysis of the film’s subversive form and the way it challenges and critiques monolithic and essentialist cinematic representations of the human body/self as always already sexual, productive and sociable.