Feminist Disability Theory: Domestic Violence Against Women with a Disability

Women with a disability continue to experience social oppression and domestic violence as a consequence of gender and disability dimensions. Current explanations of domestic violence and disability inadequately explain several features that lead women who have a disability to experience violent situations. This article incorporates both disability and material feminist theory as an alternative explanation to the dominant approaches (psychological and sociological traditions) of conceptualising domestic violence. This paper is informed by a study which was concerned with examining the nature and perceptions of violence against women with a physical impairment. The emerging analytical framework integrating material feminist interpretations and disability theory provided a basis for exploring gender and disability dimensions. Insight was also provided by the women who identified as having a disability in the study and who explained domestic violence in terms of a gendered and disabling experience. The article argues that material feminist interpretations and disability theory, with their emphasis on gender relations, disablism and poverty, should be used as an alternative tool for exploring the nature and consequences of violence against women with a disability.

International acclaim : the role(s) of the international film festival in supporting emerging women’s cinema

International Film Festivals act as important sites for the exhibition of contemporary world cinema. Film festivals represent an increasingly transnational film culture, where audiences, filmmakers, distributors, press, critics and academics come together from all over the world to discover new films, network with one another and debate about the past, present and future of cinema. This research project investigates the role that international film festivals play within the wider international film industry, with a specific focus on emerging women filmmakers. It therefore explores the arena of contemporary women.s cinema at its intersection with the international film festival industry. The significance and original contribution of the research is its intervention in the growing field of film festival studies through a specific investigation of how international film festivals support emerging women filmmakers. The positioning of the research at the intersection of feminist film theory and festival research within the broader context of transnational cinema allows the examination of each festival, the attending filmmakers and their films to be addressed within a more refined and nuanced lens. A core method for the thesis is the close textual analysis of particular emerging women filmmakers. films which are screened at the respective festivals. The research also utilises the qualitative research strategies of the case study and the interview to ¡°seek to understand the context or setting of the participants through visiting this context and gathering information personally¡± (Creswell 2003, 9). The textual analysis is used in dialogue with the interviews and the participant observational data gathering to provide a related context for understanding these films and their cultural meanings, both personally for the filmmaker and transnationally across the festival circuit. The focus of the case studies is the Brisbane International Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Toronto International Film Festival. These three festivals were chosen for their distinct geographical locations in the Asia Pacific, Europe and North America, as well as for their varying size and influence on the international film festival circuit. Specifically, I investigate the reasons behind why the organisers of a particular festival have chosen a certain woman.s film, how it is then packaged or displayed within the programme, and how all of this impacts on the filmmaker herself. The focus of my research is to investigate film festivals and their .real-life. applications and benefits for the filmmakers being supported, both through the exhibition of their films and through their attendance as festival guests. The research finds that the current generation of emerging women filmmakers has varying levels of experience and success at negotiating the international film festival circuit. Each of the three festivals examined include and promote the films of emerging women filmmakers through a range of strategies, such as specific programming strands dedicated to showcasing emerging talent, financial support through festival funds, providing visibility within the programme, exposure to international audiences and networking opportunities with industry professionals and other filmmakers. Furthermore, the films produced by the emerging women filmmakers revealed a strong focus on women.s perspectives and experiences, which were explored through the interweaving of particular aesthetic and cinematographic conventions.

To see and be seen : cinematic constructions of gender and spectatorship in contemporary screen-based art

To See and Be Seen: Cinematic Constructions of Gender and Spectatorship in Contemporary Screen-Based Art addresses how gendered representation can be structured within visual art practice through a series of creative moving-image works. Using the aesthetic language of French New Wave cinema as its primary point of departure, this research project investigates how gendered representations are constructed by cinematic language. In doing this, it proposes latent possibilities present within the dominant gaze created by patriarchal relations of power. This project, in a series of creative works, demonstrates how the 'masculine' authorial gaze is learnt culturally, and by examining the gendered syntax of film, reveals how this can be recontextualised by the female artist.

across the sea

'Across the sea' is a multi-channel screen-based installation that explores the part that the landscape and narration play in cinematic constructions of gendered identity. The work is informed by new wave cinema, feminist film theory and emergent ideas of a female gaze. across the sea considers both the role of the artist, as well as the auteur in cinema, to question how the outcomes differ when a female rather than a male gaze is writing, directing and filming the imagery. The screen-based installation of 'across the sea' seeks to further examine the ways in which our experience as a viewer of cinematic imagery can be both constructed and expanded within a gallery context. across the sea investigates the spaces that exist between the gallery and the cinema, in an effort to consider notions of femininity that exist between and throughout the varied spaces of film and art.

Violence, sexualité et double : les représentations féminines dans Perfect Blue et Paprika de Kon Satoshi

Le présent mémoire consiste en une analyse thématique des représentations féminines dans l’œuvre de Satoshi Kon, de Perfect Blue à Paprika. L’objectif de ce travail est de démontrer que ces images de la femme reflètent la place des femmes dans la société japonaise contemporaine. À cet effet, nous avons examiné les films du réalisateur selon l’approche des études féministes du cinéma. Nous avons divisé notre analyse en trois thèmes : la violence, la sexualité et le double. Il apparaît que les représentations féminines des longs-métrages de Kon possèdent effectivement des parallèles au sein la société nippone actuelle. Le réalisateur emploie des figures et des motifs narratifs communs au Japon et l’anime afin de produire et reproduire les stéréotypes de genre. Par ailleurs, il utilise les éléments filmiques et les particularités du médium de l’anime pour appuyer ces définitions des rôles sexuels. Cette étude est originale par son angle d’approche féministe et psychanalytique qui est rarement adopté par les théoriciens de l’anime. Les études portant sur ce médium sont d’ailleurs récentes et s’intéressent généralement à l’esthétique de l’anime ou à la formation d’une identité nationale japonaise plutôt qu’à la construction du genre dans un média de culture populaire.

Knights moves

This essay examines how the found footage films of Martin Arnold (Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy, 1998) and Peter Tscherkassky (Outer Space, 1999 and Dream Work, 2002) can be read as a belated response to Peter Wollen’s 1970s splitting of the avant-garde. Wollen’s tactical move, his article The Two Avant-gardes (Wollen, 1975 and revised in 1982) marked a historic moment when both critics and artists gained easy access to the film editing-machine for both film analysis and reflexive film production respectively. Wollen’s text asserted differences between a political and formalist avant-garde, opening up a space between structuralist/materialist film and feminist film theory and its counter-cinema. This move enabled Laura Mulvey and other Cine-Feminists to eschew formalism in favor of a political feminist counter–cinema and further, as part of its move into the academy, to develop and enlist Textual Analysis as a tool for uncovering the patriarchal ideologies at the heart of Hollywood melodrama.

‘Close as a kiss’: Gyn/Affection in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

Margaret Atwood’s novella The Penelopiad (2005) seemingly celebrates Penelope’s agency in opposition to Homer’s myth in The Odyssey. However, the twelve murdered maids steal the book to suggest the possibility of what Janice Raymond calls gyn/affection, a female bonding based on the logic of emotion that, in Atwood’s revision, verges on Kristevan abjection, the sinister and the fantastic, and serves a cathartic effect not only in the maids but also in the reader. This essay aims to question the generally accepted empowerment of Atwood’s Penelope and celebrates the murdered maids as the locus of emotion, where marginal aspects of gender and class merge to weave a powerful metaphorical tapestry of popular and traditionally feminized literary genres that, in plunging into and embracing the semiotic realm, ultimately solidify into an eclectic but compact alternative tradition of women’s writing and myth-making.

Using film as a source

This book is a hands-on study skills guide that explores how film and moving image can be used as sources. It is aimed at those who want to use film and moving image as the basis for research and offers advice on research methods, theory and methodology, archival work and film-based analysis. It draws on the disciplines of film and history to offer advice for students and researchers in these fields.

The book includes sections on working with different kinds of moving images, how to explore visual sources, how to undertake film-related research and how to use film theory. In addition to providing detailed case studies, the guide also offers advice on research, writing and studying, creating a methodology, visiting archives, accessing material and exploring films from a historical perspective. The guide's focus is on good research practice, whether it be conducting an interview, visiting an archive, undertaking textual analysis or defining a research question.

A Classification of Feminist Theories

In this paper I criticize Alison Jaggar’s descriptions of feminist political theories. I propose an alternative classification of feminist theories that I think more accurately reflects the multiplication of feminist theories and philosophies. There are two main categories, “street theory” and academic theories, each with two sub-divisions, political spectrum and “differences” under street theory, and directly and indirectly political analyses under academic theories. My view explains why there are no radical feminists outside of North America and why there are so few socialist feminists inside North America. I argue, controversially, that radical feminism is a radical version of liberalism. I argue that “difference” feminist theories – theory by and about feminists of colour, queer feminists, feminists with disabilities and so on – belong in a separate sub-category of street theory, because they’ve had profound effects on feminist activism not tracked by traditional left-to-right classifications. Finally, I argue that, while academic feminist theories such as feminist existentialism or feminist sociological theory are generally unconnected to movement activism, they provide important feminist insights that may become importanby showing the advantages of my classification over Jaggar’s views.

Poetics of the uncanny : Jean Painlevé, documentary display, and documentary theory

In Grierson's theory of documentary, films of the so-called cinema of attractions were relegated to the position of 'lower forms' in contrast to his description of documentary as a form of civic pedagogy. The modes and forms of a cinema of attractions, which form what is here referred to as the practice of documentary display, did not disappear with the ascendency of Griersonian documentary; instead such approaches continued to inform avant-garde film. This paper examines the connections between nonfiction documentations and avant-garde film- and the resultant implications of this meeting for documentary film theory- through an analysis of the film and critical writings of Jean Painlevé (1902-1989). Painlevé, whom, according to Bazin, 'occupies a singular and privileged place in French cinema', informed his understandings of documentary through contact with, among others, Buñuel, Man Ray, Bataille, Eisenstein, and Grierson. The analysis of Painlevé's surrealist documentary display and his extensive body of critical literature on documentary foregrounds overlooked documentary works and constructs, or resurrects, ignored perspectives on documentary film as a way of extending and revising documentary film theory and the documentary canon.

Fathoming the fathers in environmental education : a feminist poststructuralist analysis

The purpose of this study is to provide a feminist poststructuralist analysis of the dominant international discourses in environmental education, and how these have been realised in Australian national statements and in state policies over the past two decades, in terms of their implicit views about science, the environment, epistemology and education. The methodology of the study presents an argument for a 'politics of method' in the form of a research approach which reflects the ideology and intent of the study, i.e. an argument toward feminist poststructuralism as a methodology, but with elements of critical feminist research. Part of this methodology involves consideration of the gendered nature of language and discourses, particularly in the sciences. The argument is for the reconstituting of knowledge through feminist standpoint theory and the adoption of standards of 'strong objectivity'. In the spirit of its poststructuralist methodology the study presents three different stories (archaeologies) about environmental education: one told in terms of people, events and their outcomes; one told in terms of the changing views of education and how these were interpreted in environmental education; and the third told in terms of the emergence of ecofeminism as a parallel movement to environmental education and the emerging relationship between these two movements. These stories serve two purposes: to review the relevant literature in these three areas, and to provide the 'data' for later chapters. The discourses of environmental education, particularly those of the 'founders' and UNESCO documents, are then analysed from a poststructuralist perspective, followed by a feminist reconstruction of environmental education which argues for thinking from women's and other marginalized lives as a preferred strategy for environmental education, and develops research principles to explore this possibility. The conclusion reflects on the philosophical and theoretical issues engaged, and the methodological issues addressed, in the study.