In Shimmering Images Eliza Steinbock traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change. Drawing on Barthes's idea of the “shimmer” and Foucault's notion of sex as a mirage, the author shows how sex and gender can appear mirage-like on film, an effect they label shimmering.
Steinbock applies the concept of shimmering-which delineates change in its emergent form as well as the qualities of transforming bodies, images, and affects-to analyses of films that span time and genre. These include examinations of the fantastic and phantasmagorical shimmerings of sex change in Georges MÉliÈs's nineteenth-century trick films and Lili Elbe's 1931 autobiographical writings and photomontage in Man into Woman.
Steinbock also explores more recent documentaries, science fiction, and pornographic and experimental films. Presenting a cinematic philosophy of transgender embodiment that demonstrates how shimmering images mediate transitioning, Steinbock not only offers a corrective to the gender binary orientation of feminist film theory; they open up new means to understand trans ontologies and epistemologies as emergent, affective, and processual.
| Format |
Häftad |
| Omfång |
277 sidor |
| Språk |
Engelska |
| Förlag |
Duke University Press |
| Utgivningsdatum |
2019-03-01 |
| ISBN |
9781478003885 |
