Screen Bodies

This issue of Screen Bodies features articles that contribute to a group of closely related critical concerns, namely, the existential and political significance of tacticity, feeling, and the representation of embodied experience. In her article, “Feeling Like Death,” Caitlin Wilson examines the aesthetic strategies Agnes Varda employs in two early films, La Pointe Courte (1955) and Le Bonheur (1965), that emphasize “textures and tactility” in the portrayal of mortality, death, and mourning. Wilson shows how Varda uses haptic imagery and calculated cinematic techniques to convey an experience of grief that is “palpable as well as visible.” Wilson persuasively argues that Varda depicts the embodied feeling of mortality to create a heightened sense of intimacy between the films’ characters. Similarly, in her timely article, “Gut Feelings,” Jennifer Jasmine White argues that Sheena Patel challenges the trend towards emotional indifference or “flatness” in the emerging genre of “internet novels.” In contrast to the affectless, numb, and apathetic heroine characteristic of novels like Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts (2021) and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Patel's I'm a Fan (2022) features a more realistically emotional protagonist. White argues that the novel functions as an intervention that opposes affective indifference and the political apathy it inspires. She writes that most examples of the so-called internet novel, that is, literature that focuses on social media, influencer culture, and characters who are chronically online, suggest highly mediated social experience leads to emotional and political malaise. Patel rejects this trend and instead centers “the feeling body,” the embodied experience of life online, and the political agency it fosters.

Agnès Varda's early narrative films are texturally rich meditations on love and mortality. Each film uses aesthetic strategies that lend a palpability to the heartbreak, grief, and loss explored therein. This article examines how Varda's use of hapticity makes the morbid enticing, luring the viewer closer to the films’ surface. I particularly examine how these films balance narrative storytelling alongside palpable images, investigating whether films are seen, felt, or both simultaneously.

This article reads Sheena Patel's 2022 I'm a Fan as a major intervention into literary representations of women online, particularly within the context of Patel's materialist rendering of the operations of race, gender, and class in platform economies. Patel writes against a tendency toward what this article terms an emergent “flatness” in representations of women online, manifested aesthetically, ideologically, and affectively. Patel's debut offers an alternatively “de-flattened” account of life on the internet, partly through a focus on the hungry body of its narrator: an insistence that the internet is for women in particular “not a still, flat, surface thing” is explored via its effects on the feeling body. This article considers how I'm a Fan employs questions of algorithmic desire, taste and aesthetics, and the concept of autofiction as a “masticated life,” rematerializing, and therefore repoliticizing, gendered encounters with the platform.

Online users devise different strategies and techniques to make up for the absence of physical bodies in online communications, one of which is using emojis. Emojis are a diverse set of small images, symbols, or icons, standardized by the Unicode Consortium for utilization in electronic communication platforms. Their primary role is to effectively convey the emotional attitude of the writer, succinctly provide information, and playfully communicate messages. This article posits that bodily emojis (emojis portraying a body gesture or facial expression) are a form of digital embodiment. Their usage, thus, creates a form of digital performance. Emojis appear as a screen body in a space that lacks the physical one. Furthermore, I suggest that this body could be described as aesthetically Baroque. My proposition is that emojis exhibit Baroque characteristics such as dynamic and exaggerated forms and decorate texts. Emojis share similarities with the appearance and function of the Baroque body both in Baroque visual art and Baroque dance.

Theorist Lauren Berlant defines inconvenience as an affect, one exerted by dominant forces onto subordinate populations. In the same way subordinate populations exert inconvenient affects as well, creating a dynamic of dominant and subordinate inconvenience through which social power relationships may be understood. Following this structure, this article charts the dominant and subordinate affects exerted by capitalism and trans* bodies, respectively, and how capitalist oppression responds to and shapes trans* embodiment. Through an autotheoretical lens, this relationship is here examined in the 2020 film Possessor and the 2015 film Tangerine, highlighting the points of interaction between trans*ness and capitalism's state structures of domination and oppression. Ultimately, I point to trans* joy as an affect that presents a danger to capitalism's domination, providing space for trans* persons to thrive.

The monster-as-queer trope in horror cinema historically implemented the binary of self-versus-other as heterosexual heroine versus queer monster/villain. With the rise of queer creators and spectators within horror, this trope was questioned so that the queer(ed) monster became multifaceted. From its birth, the horror anthology series American Horror Story has questioned this binary thinking, and the 2018 season Apocalypse exemplifies this best. Using camp, the show creates a queer basis that overthrows normative depictions of sexuality and queer bodies in television. In Apocalypse—in which the “normative” is represented as inherently queer—a subversive reimagining of typically “Othered” bodies overturns the regime of representation in horror cinema. By analyzing how the villain of Apocalypse, the Antichrist, is (re)presented with an ambiguously gendered body and sexuality, I argue that the toppling of heteropatriarchy challenges the position of the Othered villain/monster so that their “evil” is made ambiguous in contextualization with queer futurism.

Adventure Time is an animated series and bildungsroman, centered on the primary protagonist, Finn, and the normative prescriptions of identity as represented in his growth. The series evolves to offer nuanced and alternative representations of fluidity and the queer body, and the current research investigates queer potentiality in this speculative fiction/fantasy text. By weaving together extant understandings of bodies and animation with theories of the queer body, this analysis uses fluidity to examine queerness in Adventure Time. Further, it proposes that the body is one site—along with constructs of family, gender, and time—where fluidity may represent queerness.

Categorized by what Michel Foucault called the “biopolitics” of life, the modern human body is reborn into a defamiliarized incarnate social entity that embodies an ecology of different kinds of augmentations. How do the mechanisms of biopolitics create normalized bodies and identities, and what are the real stakes of this new biopolitical power? This article investigates a genealogy toward the contemporary definition of identity and how biopolitics induces and creates a modern milieu of dualities. It then proposes a concept of “fluid identities” as a disruptive, provocative, and whimsical design intervention. It recognizes fluidity to be a presumed agentic human condition and a widely acceptable social factor; it recognizes identities to be “fragmented yet authentic” and “incomplete but sufficient.”

Steffen Hven, Enacting the Worlds of Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). ISBN: 978-0-19-755510-1. pp. 216. $75.