Books by So Mayer
Feminist filmmakers are hitting the headlines. The last decade has witnessed: the first Best Dire... more Feminist filmmakers are hitting the headlines. The last decade has witnessed: the first Best Director Academy Award won by a woman; female filmmakers reviving, or starting, careers via analogue and digital television; women filmmakers emerging from Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Pakistan, South Korea, Paraguay, Peru, Burkina Faso, Kenya and The Cree Nation; a bold emergent trans cinema; feminist porn screened at public festivals; Sweden's A-Markt for films that pass the Bechdel Test; and Pussy Riot's online videos sending shockwaves around the world. A new generation of feminist filmmakers, curators and critics is not only influencing contemporary debates on gender and sexuality, but starting to change cinema itself, calling for a film world that is intersectional, sustainable, family-friendly and far-reaching. Political Animals argues that, forty years since Laura Mulvey's seminal essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' identified the urgent need for a feminist counter-cinema, this promise seems to be on the point of fulfilment.
Forty years of a transnational, trans-generational cinema has given rise to conversations between the work of now well-established filmmakers such as Abigail Child, Sally Potter and Agnes Varda, twenty-first century auteurs including Kelly Reichardt and Lucretia Martel, and emerging directors such as Sandrine Bonnaire, Shonali Bose, Zeina Daccache, and Hana Makhmalbaf. A new and diverse generation of British independent filmmakers such as Franny Armstrong, Andrea Arnold, Amma Asante, Clio Barnard, Tina Gharavi, Sally El Hoseini, Carol Morley, Samantha Morton, Penny Woolcock, and Campbell X join a worldwide dialogue between filmmakers and viewers hungry for a new and informed point of view. Lovely, vigorous and brave, the new feminist cinema is a political animal that refuses to be domesticated by the persistence of everyday sexism, striking out boldly to claim the public sphere as its own.
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Sophie Mayer's fourth published poetry collection, (O), is a bittersweet lovesong to zombies, tat... more Sophie Mayer's fourth published poetry collection, (O), is a bittersweet lovesong to zombies, tattoos, lovers and sisters, Katniss and Pussy Riot, Artemis and suffragists. In three parts - I DO, I UNDO, I REDO - the poet undoes herself and all around her in a cycle that takes her back to the start as it comes to an end. Spirited, politicised, contemporary and Classical, these poems bring a poetic voice to the women that have lived in the cracks of history. In her own words: "Nothing - and everything - is sacred in this new cosmogony, beginning again with O."
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Contemporary writing on the erotic.
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El sexto volumen de la colección "Punto de Vista" está dedicado al feminismo y el cine documental... more El sexto volumen de la colección "Punto de Vista" está dedicado al feminismo y el cine documental. Desde su segunda ola, en la década de los 70, el feminismo y el documental han estado profundamente entrelazados. Si el feminismo fue la teoría, el documental se convirtió rápidamente en la práctica: testimoniar el incipiente movimiento de la mujer, rescatar la historia olvidada de las mujeres, expresar la propia subjetividad, y denunciar -a escala personal y social, local y global- los efectos de la insidiosa dominación patriarcal. El documental, en tanto que práctica cinematográfica accesible y cargada de conciencia crítica, se convirtió en el medio idóneo para que las cineastas y las activistas registraran y denunciaran la opresión sobre las mujeres y también para construir, quizás utópicamente, una sociedad más justa.
Pese al innegable valor e importancia del documental feminista ha tenido en el desarrollo de esta modalidad fílmica, ha pasado de puntillas por las historiografías canónicas del documental, y su incidencia en nuestro país (entre cineastas, espectadores/as, críticos/as y académicos/as) sigue siendo minoritaria. De ahí que el primer objetivo de este volumen sea -como lo han venido haciendo otras publicaciones del Festival Punto de Vista- llenar un importante vacío editorial e introducir a los y las lectoras en una serie de apasionados debates que han marcado los derroteros del documental y el feminismo (entendiendo ambos, como una práctica y como una teoría) a lo largo de las tres últimas décadas. Una de las principales consignas de la segunda ola del feminismo, a la que hemos querido rendir tributo desde nuestro título, ha servido también como guía -ciertamente subjetiva- para compilar una serie de ensayos que reflexionan sobre las complejas y múltiples relaciones entre "lo personal" (el cuerpo, la domesticidad, la intimidad, la memoria) y "lo político" (las naciones estado, el espacio público, los medios y la historia).
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© 2009 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of ... more © 2009 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 13 12 1110 09 5432 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ...
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Essays/Creative non-fiction by So Mayer
Wasafiri, 2018
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Liberty 80, Jan 2014
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The Wolf, Jul 2014
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Articles & Book Chapters by So Mayer
Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, 2017
This chapter argues for a re-reading of 1970s feminist psychoanalytic cinema – specifically Riddl... more This chapter argues for a re-reading of 1970s feminist psychoanalytic cinema – specifically Riddles of the Sphinx, Sigmund Freud's Dora, and Thriller & The Gold Diggers – as a Modernist (and specifically Steinian) critique of Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly located within the remediation of images and the foregrounding of speech and sound towards a feminist counter-cinema that was inherently political.
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This essay reads The Argonauts against a preceding literature of queer and trans parenting, speci... more This essay reads The Argonauts against a preceding literature of queer and trans parenting, specifically by women of colour, to account for absences and evasions in Maggie Nelson's relation to queer feminist literary history. Resituating her quotation about “kinship systems” from Judith Butler into Butler's discussion of house mothers in ball culture, it calls attention to the erasure of queer racialized embodiment and intellection (as recounted by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ contemporaneous Revolutionary Mothering) from Nelson's account, emblematized by Cherríe Moraga's Medea and – as embodied site of “shit and labor” – the perineum, figuring the work of connection.
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Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and Aesthetics, 2017
A reading of Tracey Moffatt's Nyungar community documentary SOLID WOMEN, connecting Moffatt's pra... more A reading of Tracey Moffatt's Nyungar community documentary SOLID WOMEN, connecting Moffatt's practice to the context of 1980s Australian indigenous feminisms.
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This paper argues for a feminist genealogy of anti-nuclear protest art, around the nucleus of the... more This paper argues for a feminist genealogy of anti-nuclear protest art, around the nucleus of the women’s camp at Greenham Common, 1981–87, a coherent account of whose significance is missing from both feminist film history and left protest history. Drawing on Adrienne Rich’s poetics as a thread connecting the larger anti-nuclear and non-violent/anti-military feminist movement specifically to aesthetic and political formations that informed films made at and about Greenham, the paper constellates a number of experimental works in relation to the well-known observational documentary Carry Greenham Home (Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson, 1983). Their legacy, and the concept of a Greenham genealogy, is apparent in Sally Potter’s anti-nuclear Cuban Missile Crisis-set drama Ginger & Rosa (2012), whose imbrication of poetry, politics, and experimental film techniques argues for a Greenham poetics. In particular, this paper considers a feminist poetics of attending to the nuclear, re-visioning the atomic, molecular and core as both an ecopoetics and a refusal of heteropatriarchal structures, both necessary to a viable alternative political formation. In their granular detailing of both world and work, these feminist texts offer a rich and continuous history, practice and analysis of anti-nuclear protest art that demands the same attention as they enact.
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Feminist Review, 2017
Jane Campion and Gerard Lee’s miniseries Top of the Lake (2013) marked New Zealand-born but Austr... more Jane Campion and Gerard Lee’s miniseries Top of the Lake (2013) marked New Zealand-born but Australian resident Campion’s return to New Zealand for the first time since The Piano (1993). The show’s central subject of child sexual abuse by state officials echoes the different yet resonating political situations in twenty-first century Australia and New Zealand, a state of emergency that allows for the emergence of what Rebecca Solnit (2009) calls a ‘disaster community’. Implicitly addressing critiques of her colonialist gaze in the earlier film, the miniseries both decolonises the idea of the utopian no-place and offers an alternate, emplaced vision of relational, anti-colonial provisional utopia through the main, mirroring female characters, Detective Robin Griffin and her half-sister Tui Mitcham. In contrast to contemporaneous police procedurals focussed on lone female officers, Top of the Lake rejects the authority of the police state and offers a resolution aslant that critiques generic expectations of individual heroism and resolution within a legal framework. Looking specifically at how the show knows its place—Lake Wakatipu on South Island, New Zealand—the article offers a close reading of Top of the Lake’s formal critique of the male colonial gaze and its adoption of a feminist soundscape in relation to Campion’s oeuvre; and considers its politics through indigenous media theory, to argue that it marks an initial step towards a decolonisation of viewing practices in relation to feminist conceptions of utopia.
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Sally Potter's THRILLER (1979) can be viewed, from the vantage of 2017, as a palpably political f... more Sally Potter's THRILLER (1979) can be viewed, from the vantage of 2017, as a palpably political film about the need for – and vanishing of – queer and feminist spaces that were always both precarious and precious. It thus connects both to the history of feminist and queer film curation in London, and to recent activism and curating in London, UK that focuses on disappearing as well as memorialised queer spaces.
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ARRIVAL (Denis Villeneuve) and INTO THE FOREST (Patricia Rozema) offer diverging takes on feminis... more ARRIVAL (Denis Villeneuve) and INTO THE FOREST (Patricia Rozema) offer diverging takes on feminist science fiction for the 21st century: while both invoke the feminist (SF) insurgence of the 1990s, INTO THE FOREST goes further in thinking ecologically and decolonially – offering first steps towards a truly feminist science fiction cinema.
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Books by So Mayer
Forty years of a transnational, trans-generational cinema has given rise to conversations between the work of now well-established filmmakers such as Abigail Child, Sally Potter and Agnes Varda, twenty-first century auteurs including Kelly Reichardt and Lucretia Martel, and emerging directors such as Sandrine Bonnaire, Shonali Bose, Zeina Daccache, and Hana Makhmalbaf. A new and diverse generation of British independent filmmakers such as Franny Armstrong, Andrea Arnold, Amma Asante, Clio Barnard, Tina Gharavi, Sally El Hoseini, Carol Morley, Samantha Morton, Penny Woolcock, and Campbell X join a worldwide dialogue between filmmakers and viewers hungry for a new and informed point of view. Lovely, vigorous and brave, the new feminist cinema is a political animal that refuses to be domesticated by the persistence of everyday sexism, striking out boldly to claim the public sphere as its own.
Pese al innegable valor e importancia del documental feminista ha tenido en el desarrollo de esta modalidad fílmica, ha pasado de puntillas por las historiografías canónicas del documental, y su incidencia en nuestro país (entre cineastas, espectadores/as, críticos/as y académicos/as) sigue siendo minoritaria. De ahí que el primer objetivo de este volumen sea -como lo han venido haciendo otras publicaciones del Festival Punto de Vista- llenar un importante vacío editorial e introducir a los y las lectoras en una serie de apasionados debates que han marcado los derroteros del documental y el feminismo (entendiendo ambos, como una práctica y como una teoría) a lo largo de las tres últimas décadas. Una de las principales consignas de la segunda ola del feminismo, a la que hemos querido rendir tributo desde nuestro título, ha servido también como guía -ciertamente subjetiva- para compilar una serie de ensayos que reflexionan sobre las complejas y múltiples relaciones entre "lo personal" (el cuerpo, la domesticidad, la intimidad, la memoria) y "lo político" (las naciones estado, el espacio público, los medios y la historia).
Essays/Creative non-fiction by So Mayer
Articles & Book Chapters by So Mayer
Forty years of a transnational, trans-generational cinema has given rise to conversations between the work of now well-established filmmakers such as Abigail Child, Sally Potter and Agnes Varda, twenty-first century auteurs including Kelly Reichardt and Lucretia Martel, and emerging directors such as Sandrine Bonnaire, Shonali Bose, Zeina Daccache, and Hana Makhmalbaf. A new and diverse generation of British independent filmmakers such as Franny Armstrong, Andrea Arnold, Amma Asante, Clio Barnard, Tina Gharavi, Sally El Hoseini, Carol Morley, Samantha Morton, Penny Woolcock, and Campbell X join a worldwide dialogue between filmmakers and viewers hungry for a new and informed point of view. Lovely, vigorous and brave, the new feminist cinema is a political animal that refuses to be domesticated by the persistence of everyday sexism, striking out boldly to claim the public sphere as its own.
Pese al innegable valor e importancia del documental feminista ha tenido en el desarrollo de esta modalidad fílmica, ha pasado de puntillas por las historiografías canónicas del documental, y su incidencia en nuestro país (entre cineastas, espectadores/as, críticos/as y académicos/as) sigue siendo minoritaria. De ahí que el primer objetivo de este volumen sea -como lo han venido haciendo otras publicaciones del Festival Punto de Vista- llenar un importante vacío editorial e introducir a los y las lectoras en una serie de apasionados debates que han marcado los derroteros del documental y el feminismo (entendiendo ambos, como una práctica y como una teoría) a lo largo de las tres últimas décadas. Una de las principales consignas de la segunda ola del feminismo, a la que hemos querido rendir tributo desde nuestro título, ha servido también como guía -ciertamente subjetiva- para compilar una serie de ensayos que reflexionan sobre las complejas y múltiples relaciones entre "lo personal" (el cuerpo, la domesticidad, la intimidad, la memoria) y "lo político" (las naciones estado, el espacio público, los medios y la historia).
Indeed, white filmmakers continue to play a role within indigenous cinema, but increasingly as accomplices rather than appropriators. By way of example, Origins hosts a mini-retrospective of the films made by Rolf de Heer, whose work with Yolngu actor and traditional dancer David Gulpilil is a model for collaboration.