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Abstract

This article explores the innovative use of virtual reality (VR) technology in nonfiction documentary film formats by animal-advocacy organizations. I examine the potential of the VR medium to communicate the living and dying environments of factory-farmed animals, and to generate viewer empathy with the animal subjects in their short, commodified lives from birth to slaughterhouse. I present a case study of the iAnimal short film series produced by Animal Equality, which made its public debut at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Employing a critical animal studies framework, I engage Kathryn Gillespie's work on witnessing of the nonhuman condition as a method of academic research, and apply to it the embodied experience of virtual witnessing through virtual realty.

Abstract

This article embarks from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's embodied understanding of metaphor in linguistic contexts and proceeds beyond merely an extended notion of “visual” metaphor toward an operational understanding of the term “allegory” in the cinematic context. Specifically, a pattern of Sisyphean landscape allegory in a global array of postwar narrative cinema is identified and explored, in which a psychologically conflicted protagonist struggles against a resistant natural landscape, connoting varying degrees of existential “futility.” The recurrent experiential configuration of this modernist allegory on screen, especially in terms of its haptic dimensions, is explored for its ability to “invoke” social critique—as felt, visceral content.

Abstract

The nineteenth-century science of “optography” was based on the idea that an image of the last thing seen at the moment of death would be imprinted on the retina. This idea was inspired by the invention of photography, which reinforced the mechanistic notion of the eye as a camera, and it was frequently criticized in nineteenth-century literary texts, in which eyes more often record images generated from within the mind. Belief in optography began to wane at roughly the same time that cinema became a popular form of entertainment, but it continued to appear in several films in which severed eyes function as cameras or optical implants are used to record visual impressions that can be viewed after the death of the subject. This article examines how these optographic narratives continued to reinforce the mechanistic notion of visual perception on which film technology was thought to depend.

Erin Y. Huang. Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 288 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0809-5 / 978-1-4780-0679-4; (paperback, $26.95; hardback, $99.05)

Abstract

This article discusses John Rechy's 1963 novel City of Night and the metaphorical function of the “City.” The sprawling City includes street corners, bars, beaches, movie theaters, and parks. These spaces are public and private, queer and straight. I argue that Rechy's City functions metaphorically—it is the “sexual underground,” with illicit acts conspiratorially narrated by an anonymous hustler—yet, at the same time, the City is also composed of spaces that are inhabited by so-called “average Americans.” Just as his City sprawls beyond officially recognized boundary lines, the novel also illustrates how efforts to demarcate sexuality as either “gay” or “straight” is futile, as are police efforts to differentiate between “legal” and “illegal” activity.

Abstract

Andrew McMillan's poetics dissects the physical minutiae of love and desire, enacting ex post facto a sexual and sexualized innocent pleasure. The scenes play out places such as classrooms, trains, locker-rooms, phone booths, and attic bedrooms, and often reference liquids. Tears, sweat, rain, rivers, blood, and sperm are associated with loss and mourning, a wet erotic (childhood) innocence remembered from a dry(er) perspective of experience and awareness of masculinity. In a post-Thatcher neoliberal framework, McMillan explores scenes of masculinity. Playtime is divided into two parts; if these two parts can be provisionally labeled “before” and “after”—a facile distinction between innocence and experience—McMillan's style and form break down this narrative and open up to fluidity, questioning the possibilities of pleasure (in)formed by neoliberal ideals.

Abstract

The intersection of sexuality, masculinity, and intellectual disability remains underresearched and only partially theorized. What has been studied identifies that, for these men and boys, the expression and embodiment of their male gendered identity is controlled, to a varying extent, by others. This article unpacks key issues related to identity and intellectual disability, and then describes two ideas. First, the concept of the “conditionally masculine” will be explored. This concept proposes that greater degrees of intellectual disability can change one's perceived or actual gendered identity. Second, the theoretical model entitled “doing intellectual disability boys to men” explores how boys with intellectual disability aspire to be like other boys, yet this embodiment and the hopes and dreams they build are sometimes realized vicariously.

Abstract

This article aims to explore the connections between bodybuilding, (hyper)masculinity, sexuality, and the construction of subcultural and sexual spaces among Swedish male fitness dopers. Analytically, the article employs the perspectives of hardcore masculinities—and the potential harms to relationships and health involved in the use of doping—as well as more legitimate and hegemonic masculinity configurations. The results show that there is a delicate balance between masculinity-connoted sexual and other bodily urges and desires, on the one hand, and the loss of control, on the other. Living in a pornographic imaginary can also result in a loss of reasonable contact with the world outside the subculture of bodybuilding. Upholding this lifestyle thus involves an ambivalent construction of masculinity found at the intersection between marginality and hegemony, which sometimes leads to loneliness and a lack of intimate relationships.