Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) are films about women directed by men. Both films unorthodoxly chart women artists’ struggle with the discipline imposed on them by the arts and by their live-in mothers. By portraying mothers as their daughters’ oppressors, both films disturb the naïve “women = victims and men = perpetrators” binary. Simultaneously, they deploy audiovisual violence to exhibit the violence of society’s gender and sexuality policy norms and use gender-coded romance narratives to subvert the same gender codes from within this gender discourse. Using Judith Butler’s and Michael Foucault’s theories, we argue that Haneke and Aronofsky “do” feminism unconventionally by exposing the nexus of women’s complicity with omnipresent societal power structures that safeguard gender norms. These films showcase women concurrently as victim-products and complicit partisans of socially constructed gender ideology to emphasize that this ideology can be destabilized only when women “do” their gender and sexuality differently through acts of subversion.
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“Undoing” Gender
Nexus of Complicity and Acts of Subversion in The Piano Teacher and Black Swan
Neha Arora and Stephan Resch
Questions of Authorship
Some Comments on David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film
Paisley Livingston
is fundamentally wrong ( Foucault 1969 ; Love 2002 ; Rose 1993 ; Saunders 1992 ; Woodmansee 1984 , Woodmansee and Jaszi 1994 ). As one Foucault-inspired philosopher put this prevalent thesis, “all authorship is constructed, assigned, and
Pain and the Cinesthetic Subject in Black Swan
Steen Ledet Christiansen
problematic to separate the two bodies; our lived experience of being-in-the-world is always shaped by Foucauldian biopower. Foucault defines biopower as the “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies” (2012: 140). These
“Banal Apocalypse”
An Interview with Author Ta-wei Chi on the New Translation of The Membranes
Jane Chi Hyun Park and Ta-wei Chi
“science fiction written in jargon.” Honestly, even in the 2010s most of the books by Julia Kristeva, Foucault, and Judith Butler remain untranslated in Chinese or remain inaccurately translated and unreadable in Chinese. I believe my students might tend
The Politics of Revenge (Pornography)
Emma Celeste Bedor
Internet sties is not the classical male gaze but a post–third wave feminist punishing gaze because revenge pornography is not about sex but about revenge and humiliation. As a result, revenge pornography fits neither Foucault’s (1978) framework of a
Groped and Gutted
Hollywood's Hegemonic Reimagining of Counterculture
Samantha Eddy
structure ( Foucault 1989 ; Sawicki 1991 ). Dangerously, women and men who conform to these ideals see their identities validated in mainstream media, experiencing legitimization through representation ( O'barr 2011 ). For example, the most coveted
Sade for Sade's Sake
Inside Paul Chan's Transmedial Laboratory
Olivier Delers
fascism. And Chan does not forget Michel Foucault's (1998) pronouncement that Sade is a “sergeant of sex,” the creator of regimented, repetitive, and ultimately boring sexual imagery. It is by teasing out elements from different intellectual approaches
Redefining Representation
Black Trans and Queer Women’s Digital Media Production
Moya Bailey
conceptions. The system, while ardent in expressing a need for cultural competency in medicine, still fundamentally understands and measures the body in terms of a set point of normal cy, which it then uses to discipline and treat all bodies (Foucault 1977
Reviews
Linda Howell, Ryan Bell, Laura Helen Marks, Jennifer L. Lieberman, and Joseph Christopher Schaub
became disciplinary in Michel Foucault’s sense of the term. Building on the careful framework that he established in Part One, he argues that “when the history of networks articulates an imagined material form that crosses technology, biology, finance
Bodies with Objects in Space through Screens
Casual Virtuality and the Self-Mediation of Laura Paolini's Constraining Aesthetics
Jakub Zdebik
( Foucault 1983 ). Figure 1. Laura Paolini, Sitting in a Chair (2019) (courtesy of the artist) Figure 2. Laura Paolini, Getting Out of Bed (film still, 2019) (courtesy of the artist) But perhaps what the furniture pieces represent is