Reflections, Distortions, and the Homoerotic Aesthetics: Looking to Caribbean Female Filmmakers
Location
University at Albany, Humanities 290
Start Date
6-10-2017 10:15 AM
End Date
6-10-2017 10:45 AM
Description
Cinema has been taken by feminists to be a cultural practice opposing myths about women and femininity. Recent Caribbean cinema has shown the desire to expose the once considered “fixed” and endlessly repeated images of women as passive objects of the male gaze. Moving away from a binary understanding of sexual difference to multiple perspectives, identities and spectatorships, Caribbean cinema opens up the lens to new questions of ethnicity, masculinity and sexualities. Dólares de arena [Sand Dollars] (2014), La película de Ana (2012), Memorias de un corazón penitente [Memories of a Penitent Heart] (2016), and Vestido de novia [Wedding Dress] (2016), offer a visual machinery suitable for dismantling the dominant male gaze and innovative ways to imagine and look at eroticism, sexuality, and performativity to propose politicized reinterpretations of female subjectivity. This paper discusses the political implications of the distortion and disruption of the cinematic gaze by eluding the objectification of female bodies. I argue that through different techniques of distortion, these Caribbean films link visual pleasure to woman’s control of the image on the screen. Even though voyeurism presupposes distance, Caribbean filmmakers have deflected and confused the male gaze claiming a subversive edge to adjust gender representations and identifications. Moreover, the erotic visual pleasure raised in these films brings forth ambivalent and complex images of subjectivity, which go beyond the reifying gaze. I conclude that Caribbean cinema connects the spectator’s desire for images of femininity with the quest for truth and justice.
Reflections, Distortions, and the Homoerotic Aesthetics: Looking to Caribbean Female Filmmakers
University at Albany, Humanities 290
Cinema has been taken by feminists to be a cultural practice opposing myths about women and femininity. Recent Caribbean cinema has shown the desire to expose the once considered “fixed” and endlessly repeated images of women as passive objects of the male gaze. Moving away from a binary understanding of sexual difference to multiple perspectives, identities and spectatorships, Caribbean cinema opens up the lens to new questions of ethnicity, masculinity and sexualities. Dólares de arena [Sand Dollars] (2014), La película de Ana (2012), Memorias de un corazón penitente [Memories of a Penitent Heart] (2016), and Vestido de novia [Wedding Dress] (2016), offer a visual machinery suitable for dismantling the dominant male gaze and innovative ways to imagine and look at eroticism, sexuality, and performativity to propose politicized reinterpretations of female subjectivity. This paper discusses the political implications of the distortion and disruption of the cinematic gaze by eluding the objectification of female bodies. I argue that through different techniques of distortion, these Caribbean films link visual pleasure to woman’s control of the image on the screen. Even though voyeurism presupposes distance, Caribbean filmmakers have deflected and confused the male gaze claiming a subversive edge to adjust gender representations and identifications. Moreover, the erotic visual pleasure raised in these films brings forth ambivalent and complex images of subjectivity, which go beyond the reifying gaze. I conclude that Caribbean cinema connects the spectator’s desire for images of femininity with the quest for truth and justice.
Speaker Information
María Alejandra Aguilar-Dornelles is an Assistant Professor at the University at Albany-SUNY. She has published articles on Caribbean narrative and poetry in Confluence, Latin American Literary Review, and Meridional among others and has collaborated in the volume Cantos y poemas: antología crítica de autoras afro-descendientes de América Latina (ed. M. M. Jaramillo and B. Osorio.) She has been awarded The Harold Eugene Davis Prize by the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies (MACLAS) for the best article published in 2016 and a Wadysaw Maryan Froelich Research Grant, also from MACLAS, in support of her research project “Chasing Freedom: Black Criminalization, Leadership, and Writing in Colombia, Brazil, and Cuba.” She is currently working on a book-length project entitled Herederos de la libertad: criminalización, heroicidad y escritura de afro-descendientes en Colombia, Brasil y Cuba.