Queering the Family: fantasy and the performance of sexuality and gay relations in French cinema 1995-2000

This paper looks in detail at the representation of sexuality in the family in three films of the mid to late 1990s, Balasko’s Gazon maudit, Berliner’s Ma Vie en rose, and Giusti’s Pourquoi pas moi? Its double focus is the changing structure of the French family at the end of the twentieth century, considered against key political developments such as the pacte civil de solidarité (PaCS) of November 1999, and the cinematic fantasies in which these structural changes are envisioned. Fable, fantasy or anti-realism mark the endings of Gazon maudit and Pourquoi pas moi?, while sequences of childhood fantasy punctuate the entire length of Ma Vie en rose. No particular theoretical approach to fantasy is preferred, but the conclusion of the paper is that cinema may be a privileged cultural vehicle for politically enabling fantasy, and that the three films discussed demonstrate this where the French family is concerned.

Francois Ozon's cinema of desire

This essay offers readings informed by gender and queer theory of most of Ozon's films up to 5 x 2 (2004), and proposes that Ozon should be regarded as France's first mainstream queer filmmaker.

Bringing Bodies Back In: For a Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Film Criticism of Embodied Cultural Identity

This article reassesses the concept of identification in line with the increased importance phenomenology has taken on in film-philosophy of the 1990s and 2000s. In the 1970s and 1980s, a Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of identification dominated film theory and criticism, and spectatorial engagement with elements of films was understood as what psychoanalysis calls secondary identification – the identification with stable subject-positions (characters) in the film-text. But non-Lacanian psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology offer film-philosophy a very different understanding of identification as a non image-based, ‘blind’, bodily affective tie that is established between spectators and what Vivian Sobchack describes as ‘the sense and sensibility of materiality itself’ (Sobchack 2004, 65). By first exploring how this more bodily (for psychoanalysis, primary) identification is theorized by psychoanalysts (Freud, Paul Schilder, Henri Wallon) and by film theorists (Kaja Silverman), the article proposes that film criticism make greater use of it in order to engage more meaningfully with the visible cultural specificities – size, skin colour, age, sex – of the images of bodies viewed on cinema screens. It is not just ‘the’ body that needs bringing back into thinking about film spectatorship, but culturally differentiated bodies, both on the screen and in the auditorium. A psychoanalytic and phenomenological film criticism of embodied cultural identity, one that attends to the materiality of the film and of the body-images and objects on the screen, may be the most culturally and politically useful successor to ‘screen’ theory of the 1970s and 1980s.

From 'minor' to 'major' cinema: women's and feminist film-making in France in the 2000s

An overview of developments in women's filmmaking in France from 2000 to 2007 that also offers some sustained consideration of Catherine Breillat's contribution to this field.

Questions to Luce Irigaray

A set of questions to Irigaray (she didn't answer) about the critique of Emmanuel Levinas included in her book Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984).

This essay finds Irigaray's and Levinas's philosophies to have more in common on an ethics of sexual difference than Irigaray acknowledges, and suggests that she could find support for her arguments in his notions of the feminine and of voluptuosity.