Genital impacts Genital impacts

Abstract

I propose to analyze three images of genitalia from three different films that do not have sex as their central subject: (1) Lígia’s (Leona Cavalli’s) vulva in Claudio Assis’s Amarelo Manga (Brazil, 2002), (2) Stoffer’s (Jens Albinus’s) erect penis in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (Denmark, 1998), and (3) transsexual Dil’s (Jaye Davidson’s) penis in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (USA, 1992). All three images are explicit and surprising enough to provoke impact, both in diegetic and extra-diagetic spaces. intend to compare the three images and investigate the nature of their impacts, not directly in terms of morality, but in their relation with two theoretical assumptions: (1) the intense way in which, according to Linda Nicholson (1999), so many cultures insist in interpreting bodies and genitalia as still capable of defining gender characters, and (2) the notion of image, not as representation, but as image itself, as “what it is”, or as “the place of every transformation in the universe”, as suggested first by Bergson (2005), and then by Deleuze (1983-5), Rancière (2001) and Agamben (1995). The Deleuzean retard may indicate the way in which genitalia, as image, turn into enigma, in the very passage from nature to culture. The three shots give back to those clear images of genitalia the property they have always had: their character of central pieces in the game of such passage. The contrast between such simple and clear images and all those complex games corresponds to the nature of the impact I want to investigate. film; genitalia; narrative. I propose to analyze three images of genitalia from three different films that do not have sex as their central subject: (1) Lígia’s (Leona Cavalli’s) vulva in Claudio Assis’s Amarelo Manga (Brazil, 2002), (2) Stoffer’s (Jens Albinus’s) erect penis in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (Denmark, 1998), and (3) transsexual Dil’s (Jaye Davidson’s) penis in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (USA, 1992). All three images are explicit and surprising enough to provoke impact, both in diegetic and extra-diagetic spaces. intend to compare the three images and investigate the nature of their impacts, not directly in terms of morality, but in their relation with two theoretical assumptions: (1) the intense way in which, according to Linda Nicholson (1999), so many cultures insist in interpreting bodies and genitalia as still capable of defining gender characters, and (2) the notion of image, not as representation, but as image itself, as “what it is”, or as “the place of every transformation in the universe”, as suggested first by Bergson (2005), and then by Deleuze (1983-5), Rancière (2001) and Agamben (1995). The Deleuzean retard may indicate the way in which genitalia, as image, turn into enigma, in the very passage from nature to culture. The three shots give back to those clear images of genitalia the property they have always had: their character of central pieces in the game of such passage. The contrast between such simple and clear images and all those complex games corresponds to the nature of the impact I want to investigate. film; genitalia; narrative.