Other Writing by Sara Swain
Offscreen, 2017
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Public, 2020
Our current understandings of hospitality are largely informed by the Western European philosophi... more Our current understandings of hospitality are largely informed by the Western European philosophical tradition. This tradition, however, restricts accommodation to the proprietary space of the human house, or to its equivalent, the nation state. Both can only offer a constrained, exclusive, and temporary welcome. This has significantly limited the possibilities for imagining and practicing hospitality. In order to challenge the perceived scarcity at the heart of hospitality’s spatial imaginary, this essay turns to Kedi, Ceyda Torun’s 2016 documentary about Turkish street cats. Using the film as a guide, it explores what hospitality can look like outside the house. By tending to the relationships between cats and the people of Istanbul, the film offers a glimpse of a more capacious, creaturely, and cosmopolitan alternative I call, “feral Hospitality.” This is an itinerant and performative hospitality that produces rather than consumes space.
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Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought, 2013
Purposefully tasteless, the 'gross-out' comedy is notorious for its lowbrow predilections... more Purposefully tasteless, the 'gross-out' comedy is notorious for its lowbrow predilections for toilet humor, salacious sight gags and sexually explicit jokes. Considered by critics to be the lowest form of entertainment, films of this sort are at best affectionately tolerated while at worst they are coolly dismissed. But no gross-out comedy in recent years has been maligned as mordantly as DIRTY LOVE (John Asher, 2005). This ribald, Rabelaisian romp was penned and produced by its star, Playboy model-turned-comedian Jenny McCarthy. This low budget lightweight was not only a monumental box office blunder, but it also consistently garnered poor ratings across the board. It even won a whopping four Golden Raspberries (“Razzies”) the year of its release. Yet for a film that so few people saw (and enjoyed), it let loose a startling deluge of hostility. The reviews, though scant, all harbored a perceptible, unrivaled rancor. Roger Ebert harangues in The Chicago Sun for example, “DIR...
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This dissertation wonders what non-human animals can illuminate about media in the visible contac... more This dissertation wonders what non-human animals can illuminate about media in the visible contact zones where they meet. It treats these zones as rich field sites from which to excavate neglected material-discursive-semiotic relationships between animals and media. What these encounters demonstrate is that animals are historically and theoretically implicated in the imagination and materialization of media and their attendant processes of communication. Chapter 1 addresses how animals have been excluded from the cultural production of knowledge as a result of an anthropocentric perspective that renders them invisible or reduces them to ciphers for human meanings. It combines ethology and cinematic realism to craft a reparative, non-anthropocentric way of looking that is able to accommodate the plenitude of animals and their traces, and grant them the ontological heft required to exert productive traction in the visual field. Chapter 2 identifies an octopus’s encounter with a digita...
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A review of Jody Berland’s new book, Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures... more A review of Jody Berland’s new book, Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures (2019). Rather than simply serving as content for media, Berland argues that animals perform the work of mediation itself. Still situated within colonial formations, Berland posits animal bodies, energies, and affects continue to be used to facilitate connections at fledgling frontiers.
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PUBLIC Journal, 2020
Our current understandings of hospitality are largely informed by the Western European philosophi... more Our current understandings of hospitality are largely informed by the Western European philosophical tradition. This tradition, however, restricts accommodation to the proprietary space of the human house, or to its equivalent, the nation state. Both can only offer a constrained, exclusive, and temporary welcome. This has significantly limited the possibilities for imagining and practicing hospitality. In order to challenge the perceived scarcity at the heart of hospitality’s spatial imaginary, this essay turns to Kedi, Ceyda Torun’s 2016 documentary about Turkish street cats. Using the film as a guide, it explores what hospitality can look like outside the house. By tending to the relationships between cats and the people of Istanbul, the film offers a glimpse of a more capacious, creaturely, and cosmopolitan alternative I call, “feral Hospitality.” This is an itinerant and performative hospitality that produces rather than consumes space.
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This paper examines the representations of virginity in Joss Whedon’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”... more This paper examines the representations of virginity in Joss Whedon’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” It considers the way virginity and its “loss” are framed and situated within the show’s larger constructions of sexuality, gender, and identity. Virginity is frequently used as a rhetorical device in cultural narratives to denote purity and innocence. Consequently, losing one’s virginity is commonly understood as a significant rite of passage, and invoked to suggest character development and maturity—an initiation into the world of adulthood. This transition is often wrought with polemical overtones contingent on the circumstances of the act itself and a character’s emotional “readiness” to deal with its consequences. Ostensibly, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” relies on virginity as such a rhetorical device. After all, the first sexual experiences of the show’s core characters are situated amongst threats of immediate danger or impending apocalypse. However, this paper argues that Whedon’s treatment of sexual initiation is much more nuanced than it initially appears. To substantiate this, the paper analyzes and assesses Buffy’s first sexual experience in the episodes “Surprise” and “Innocence,” Xander’s in “The Zeppo,” and Willow’s in “Graduation Day Part 1” and “Graduation Day Part 2.” The paper explores the way the act in question is discursively constructed and stylistically framed within these episodes, and how they fit within the series more generally. It also relates the context of the act to the characters’ overall trajectories within the series as a whole. Whedon certainly constructs first sexual experiences as significant events, but the meanings ascribed to them vary from character to character. First sexual experiences are incredibly meaningful in the Buffyverse, but that meaning is not fixed. Their meaning is personal and particular, and cannot be generalized. Ultimately, the paper laud’s Whedon’s important contribution to sexual representation by making space for a wide spectrum of experiences. These diverging experiences ultimately play with conventional tropes of virginity and as such mobilize sexuality, gender, and identity in progressive ways.
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Conference Presentations by Sara Swain
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In January of 2014, Ailton Schoemberger happened upon a troop of long-tailed macaque monkeys whil... more In January of 2014, Ailton Schoemberger happened upon a troop of long-tailed macaque monkeys while exploring the Uluwatu Hindu Sea temple on the southern tip of Bali, Indonesia. Hoping to record himself feeding and interacting with them, Schoemberger hit record on his GoPro, and set it down on a nearby ledge—only to have an unseen monkey snatch up the camera and scamper away with it. One of the temple’s employees eventually stepped in and negotiated with the monkey for the camera’s safe return. The GoPro was eventually recovered. Since it had remained engaged throughout the ordeal, it was also accompanied by some indelible footage which Schoemberger later uploaded to YouTube as “Monkey Steals GoPro Hero 3+.”
Despite its seeming singularity, the web is actually teeming with similar videos borne of animals encountering cameras and pilfering them in mid-record. Cumulatively, they compose an emerging cultural form I call “accidental animal videos.” They are coeval with the rising popularity of the GoPro and ubiquitous filmmaking practices—but not merely so. Using “Monkey Steals GoPro Hero 3+” I illustrate how these videos also create, accentuate, and draw our attention to new and surprising intersections between animal worlds and human worlds.
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In the spring of 2010, somewhere near the ocean floor off the coast of New Zealand, a Giant Pacif... more In the spring of 2010, somewhere near the ocean floor off the coast of New Zealand, a Giant Pacific octopus stole Victor Huang’s digital camera, and accidentally made a movie. Huang uploaded the bizarre footage to YouTube under the perfunctory title: “octopus steals my video camera and swims off with it (while it’s Recording).” Despite the absurdity and seeming singularity, the constellation of events at the crux of “octopus steals my video camera” is by no means rare. In fact, YouTube is teeming with similar videos, borne of animals encountering cameras and pilfering them in mid-record. Cumulatively, they provide enough coherence to suggest a nascent genre, one I provisionally call “accidental animal videos.” They may be droll diversions, but this paper takes them seriously as instances of cinematic realism, and opportunities to genuinely reflect on cinema’s significance as a non-anthropocentric medium. For André Bazin, identifying a film as realist was an alibi to explore the relationship between a film’s style and its ontology. The most generative discussions emerged out of those cinematic moments where representational aesthetics proved fundamentally at odds with the material realities of production. Accidental animal videos are exemplary of such frictional encounters. They begin with the human intention to produce images of animals as Nature. Thanks to capricious animals, they become exciting tangents that challenge the anti-realist, anthropocentric conventions of wildlife imagery, which indulge the human desire to keep nature and culture separate. By failing to reproduce a world that conforms to how humans desire to see it, these videos do something uniquely cinematic. In addition to acknowledging the material reality of wildlife imagery, they testify to cinema’s ability to transform our worldview with the uncontrollable aspects of representation. The camera is always to a certain extent estranged from the human, but especially so in the arms of an octopus. It is its innate automatism that grants the world the ability to make itself in its own image. A non-human remove is fundamental to cinematic mediation: it protects the surprising hybridity of reality from our tendency to familiarize it. Accidental animal videos offer proof that reality cannot be fully assimilated into representation and temper our entitlement to access the world on our terms. They are valuable reminders of cinema’s potential to enrich our impoverished world picture.
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Other Writing by Sara Swain
Papers by Sara Swain
Conference Presentations by Sara Swain
Despite its seeming singularity, the web is actually teeming with similar videos borne of animals encountering cameras and pilfering them in mid-record. Cumulatively, they compose an emerging cultural form I call “accidental animal videos.” They are coeval with the rising popularity of the GoPro and ubiquitous filmmaking practices—but not merely so. Using “Monkey Steals GoPro Hero 3+” I illustrate how these videos also create, accentuate, and draw our attention to new and surprising intersections between animal worlds and human worlds.
Despite its seeming singularity, the web is actually teeming with similar videos borne of animals encountering cameras and pilfering them in mid-record. Cumulatively, they compose an emerging cultural form I call “accidental animal videos.” They are coeval with the rising popularity of the GoPro and ubiquitous filmmaking practices—but not merely so. Using “Monkey Steals GoPro Hero 3+” I illustrate how these videos also create, accentuate, and draw our attention to new and surprising intersections between animal worlds and human worlds.