Form for All

Dados Bibliográficos

ID7166111
AutoresTess Takahashi (autor correspondente)
Ano2025
Volume34
Fascículo1
Páginas41-67
Data de publicação2025-06-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoQui Parle (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1041-8385 • E-ISSN: 1938-8020
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/10418385-11700942
OpenAlexW4411636217
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas25

Using Emma Hart’s Skin Film (UK, 16mm, black-and-white, 11 min, 2005–7), as a point of departure, this essay considers how authorial identity has circumscribed critical readings of film in ways that impose premature form on the instability of the abstract image. Skin Film’s abstraction invites us to consider how the human body, the gendered and racialized body in particular, has been made to signify as an already-known epistemological endpoint within our culture. The essay challenges the critical conjoinment of cinematic materiality, authorship, and embodiment that too often provides easy meaning to a perplexingly formless image. The essay argues that instead of rushing to assign meaning to either image or body, we should consider the skin’s dual status as both materially specific and as an unfixed text, both formed and formless, discursively overdetermined yet uncertain in its meaning. The essay puts Skin Film into dialogue with the discourses of feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory, all fields invested in the positioning of vulnerable bodies that have been seen as both materially irreducible and dangerously unstable. Rather, the critical act of refusing to rush to meaning, and instead dwelling on the form of what might be construed as formless, constitutes a political act that embraces difficulty, multiplicity, and uncertainty

Art, Politics, and Modernism · Computer Science