BOOKS & REVIEWS by Slava Greenberg
Indiana University Press, Feb 7, 2023
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Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, 2024
2024 ASCA Book Award
Slava Greenberg. Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship. Indi... more 2024 ASCA Book Award
Slava Greenberg. Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship. Indiana University Press, 2023.
Can one see with ears and hear with eyes? A seemingly simple question that follows from Slava Greenberg's book confronts and reconfigures one's implicit sensory hierarchies of being-in- and experiencing the world. A reading that makes one question their understanding of the everyday is a good one; a reading that induces (self-)reflection on the reader's own positionality is a remarkable piece of intellectual work.
Slava Greenberg explores the complexities of disabled bodyminds representations in what may be the most transgressive cinematic convention - animation. As a powerful tool of imagination that goes beyond the possibilities of physical bodies, not only human ones, Greenberg's cases are a fun ride, ranging from ancillary (and fascinating) insights about mainstream productions like Pixar's Nemo and Netflix's hit BoJack Horseman to in-depth case studies of avant-garde animations like Rocks in My Pockets. Here, animation becomes not only an entry into the world of crip filmmakers but also a means to evoke in spectators an alternative understanding and awareness of their own bodies. Greenberg subverts conventional perceptions of gaze- and able-centric spectatorship, and by rethinking both audio and visual pleasures, asks what happens if we sensory disorient and crip (blind, deat) the spectator?
The book is erudite in execution, ASCA in spirit, and empathetic in its message: animated lived experiences and their innovative artistic forms, when confronted with critical disability studies perspective, give us a powerful tool to envision futures that will accommodate diverse bodyminds.
2024 ASCA Award Committee: Anna Greszta, Divya Nadkarni, and Gaston Franssen
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Film Quarterly, 2023
Slava Greenberg’s Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship is a welcome contribution ... more Slava Greenberg’s Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship is a welcome contribution to new works at the intersection of disability media studies and animation studies. Greenberg takes a phenomenological approach informed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as contemporary cinema scholars and disability studies scholars, to offer a theory of “crip animation.” Drawing on work by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, who argue that phenomenology affords the capture of both disability perspectives and the influence disability has upon subjectivity, Greenberg urges a practice of disability-informed animation production and spectatorship.
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Articles by Slava Greenberg
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Film Quarterly, 2022
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Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 2021
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The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 2021
The essay focuses on The Great Women Animators, as a gender-centered, ideologically-driven, possi... more The essay focuses on The Great Women Animators, as a gender-centered, ideologically-driven, possibly feminist-motivated database as a case study to explore possible modes of archival classification and reorganization of knowledge. Offering ‘feminist animation’ as a new category to the existing archive through an intertextual and intersubjective play with its existing materials is made possible by drawing lines between the animators, their works, and biographies. Among the great women animators are– Signe Baumane, Marjut Reminnen, Ruth Lingford, Shira Avni, and Marjane Satrapi – who have aesthetically, ethically, and politically exposed patriarchal, racist, and ableist images in the past four decades. Their works have centered feminist perspectives on issues such as sexual violence, gender oppression, and the state of women in conflict and war zones along with gender perspectives on incarceration, displacement, and dictatorships. By so doing, as an archival category, ‘feminist animation’ may offer not only building bridges between animated works by formerly unknown works but also teach us about the power structures and privileges involved in knowledge preservation.
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ערב רב, 2022
"המשגתה של היימן את ההטרדה החזותית הסדרתית נחוצה למרחבים אשר מבקשים להעמיק, לאתגר ולחשוב מחדש על ... more "המשגתה של היימן את ההטרדה החזותית הסדרתית נחוצה למרחבים אשר מבקשים להעמיק, לאתגר ולחשוב מחדש על סוגיות של אמנות, מגדר, פוליטיקה ויחסי כוחות, אבל בעיקר כאלו אשר מעלים על נס את 'חציית הגבולות'". סלבה גרינברג בשיחה עם מיכל היימן.
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Docalogue , 2020
The first part of Disclosure is almost unbearable for any trans spectator, bombarding us with tri... more The first part of Disclosure is almost unbearable for any trans spectator, bombarding us with triggering archival footage of transphobia and clips cut out of their contexts in films and television series portraying trans and gender variant people in dehumanizing ways. The intensity of the back-to-back screening of these clips felt like a violent attack, almost as if I was viewing Nazi propaganda films. As a self-defense mechanism, I held onto Susan Stryker’s intervention and theorization of the transness of the cut. I initially concluded that Disclosure is not meant for me as a trans spectator but rather as a film scholar, cinephile, film historian, archive buff, and activist. This provided the distance I needed to continue watching and discover the gift that awaited. It took over a third of the film – and the accumulation of testimonies countering, opposing, and objecting to these violent images – for me to feel safe again and let go of my defense shield. This renewed sense of safety is a direct result of the testimonies of somewhat diverse trans “talking heads” not only responding to the clips but also re-contextualizing them, resisting their original use. They manifest a visual and a verbal opposition.
Disclosure offers different pleasures (and pains) to trans and cis spectators. While the archival clips are meant to educate cis spectators, the testimonies address trans viewers first and foremost. My own reading of these testimonies encourages “thinking how narrative can itself transition depending on embodied spectatorship” (Joshua Bastian Cole 108: 80). The film explicitly aims to be about and for oppositional trans looks. Executive producer Laverne Cox asserts that: “The film is about trans spectatorship. It’s about how we look and how we see…It’s bell hooks who came up with the idea of the oppositional gaze, which is so exciting to think about…What does it mean to center trans ways of looking?…Is there a trans gaze?”
Disclosure also gives trans viewers the opportunity to experience the pleasures of being represented, joining in communal spectatorship, even traveling in time. Although each interviewee sits alone in a room they are often edited as if they were a group: several respond to the same scene, film, or series. Disclosure thus offers a sense of collective spectatorship, documenting interviewee responses and including trans viewers, too.
As the film progresses, focus shifts from general commentary about trans representation and onscreen visibility to testimony from those affected by transphobic portrayals, introducing various ways of coping with and resisting such images. Emmy nominee Rain Valdez shares her memory of a family viewing from her childhood: “My family and I would always watch movies together. We were watching Soapdish but once we got to the end my family got really quiet because it gave them a confirmation that if I chose a certain life… I would be the bad guy. Or I wouldn’t be loved. I was seven or eight at the time, and we never talked about it after that, but I remember the next day, my mom would try to get me to wear more masculine clothes.” Valdez’s testimony allows trans viewers to travel back to our own ‘first’ (traumatic) encounters with images of us, not for us, and also, at the same time, makes it possible for us to join contemporary and future trans and nonbinary children in their/our living rooms, in contestation and solidarity.
When several interviewees share different experiences of the same film or television series a communal spectatorship, one most trans viewers never experienced, is gradually crafted. In his theory of “revisitation,” Cáel M Keegan notes how trans spectatorship must involve a “temporal folding-back of the self upon its own record of perception” that invites us to reencounter something we have seen before, but have not quite understood (2016: 30). This experience was offered to me through Disclosure’s sequence of testimonies by men of trans experience for whom, as for me, Max (The L Word) was a first encounter with a toxic trans masculinity (ignorantly and dangerously) attributed to hormone therapy, particularly testosterone.
Six different trans people react to Boys Don’t Cry, a film which was the inspiration for Jack Halberstam’s articulation of the “Transgender Gaze” (2005). Zeke Smith and Michael D. Cohen focus on the first part of the film and speak about how the representation of a (white) trans masculine character resonated with them; Brian Michael Smith and Laverne Cox focus on the violence and killing of Brandon and how terrifying watching it was for them; both Mickey R. Mahoney and Tiq Milan speak about the erasure of Brandon’s Black friend and ally Philip DeVine from the film. While this sequence problematizes the idea of a unified trans gaze by insisting on the intersectionality of race, age, and gender, the exclusion of disability contributes to the erasure of that part of DeVine’s identity. This happens too frequently with representations of people with disability; however, it also brings attention to the absence of disabled trans interviewees in the film.
Disclosure shows us an oppositional gaze at play by presenting an incomplete kaleidoscope of looks and a partial polyphony of voices. We are shown different experiences of the same film. The ‘oppositional’ sequences remind us that there is no one possible ‘trans look.’ While this could be an educational moment for cis viewers, its greater significance lies in its potential to offer trans spectators an experience of communal spectatorship. As the film shows, we have been consuming such images alone. The ‘talking-heads’ transforms into fellow-audience members talking back to the screen with you. We are offered a unique experience of opposing and applauding trans representations together. In this streaming era, intensified during our current quarantine reality of home viewing, this film offers a glimpse into what communal or collective spectatorship may mean for those who have little or no direct access to it.
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TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2020
Spectrums: New Gender Movement (2017) is a low-budget, independent documentary web series directe... more Spectrums: New Gender Movement (2017) is a low-budget, independent documentary web series directed, filmed, and edited by Zohar Melinek Ezra and Afek Testa Launer. Spectrums breaks linear time by delaying progress, jumping back and forth, and mourning and celebrating the past while imagining futures that include trans* and gender-nonconforming bodies. The rapid jump-cuts draw attention to this flawed continuity (in documentary as well as in life) and emphasize the fragility of trans* time. Spectrums’ characters disrupt linearity by wasting time, purposely delaying linear progress in their transitions, being pushed outside “family time,” and even circling back. Spectrums operates on trans* time lines, delaying progress in a loopy present and imagining possible futures from reinvented pasts.
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גחליליות: כתב עת לקולנוע וטלוויזיה, 2020
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Jewish Film and New Media: An International Journal , 2019
In the years following the Second Intifada, Israeli cinema has centered on two prominent themes: ... more In the years following the Second Intifada, Israeli cinema has centered on two prominent themes: “the mundane,” focusing on the civilian experience, mainly through the feminine body, and “the penitent soldier,” focusing on the masculine body in combat. While the latter, mostly manifested in: Beaufort (Joseph Cedar 2007), Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman 2008), and Lebanon (Samuel Maoz 2009), were internationally acclaimed, the former were not regarded as related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nevertheless, I argue that although the “mundane” films focus on personal experiences, they use metaphors of the hospital and the sea in addressing political events. I offer an aesthetical and political analysis of three such Israeli films produced shortly after the Second Intifada, which locate recent and past traumatic events at hospitals, beaches, and the sea: Nuzhat al-Fuad (Judd Ne’eman 2006), Jellyfish (Shira Gefen and Etgar Keret 2007), and It All Begins at Sea (Eitan Green 2008). The films produced after the Second Intifada present the sea as a space in which the body is dismantled, while the conventional hospital is the space that diagnoses and disciplines the body, but is unsuccessful at healing it. The return to the sea, as the first traumatic site, expresses the radical longing for intensive treatment to get at the roots of the current symptom that appears in the hospital. These spaces, are symbolic of the fine, complex relationships between the body and the state after a violent conflict erupts. The hospital functions as a branch of the state, by means of which the state is supposed to provide protection to the body. By contrast, the sea is a dual symbol in Israeli Zionist culture. At the same time that the sea functions as a place for release from the gaze of the state's regulatory regime, the sea is also the place from which the People related to this State were born, according to the Zionist ethos.
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Review of Disability Studies: International Journal, 2018
The essay seeks to explore body-focused phenomenological writing in disability studies and film t... more The essay seeks to explore body-focused phenomenological writing in disability studies and film theory throughout publically shared anecdotes, coming-out narratives, and embodied autoethnographies. Through the author’s own bodily experiences in academia, particularly writing, attending conferences, and teaching, Greenberg bridges the gaps between the disciplines through an embodied autoethnographic phenomenological methodology inspired by film scholar Vivian Sobchack.
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מגדר: כתב עת אקדמי רב תחומי למגדר ופמיניזם , 2018
מאמר זה בוחן את האופנים בהם יוצרות פמיניסטיות עם מוגבלות מגיבות ומתנגדות למבט המציצני על הגוף הנכ... more מאמר זה בוחן את האופנים בהם יוצרות פמיניסטיות עם מוגבלות מגיבות ומתנגדות למבט המציצני על הגוף הנכה, תוך הישענות על כוחם של המובטים להשיב מבט. שתי היוצרות הנדונות עושות שימוש בהסתר פנים או גילוין של הפנים בשתי יצירות קולנועיות במטרה לאתגר את המבט המסוגלני. עבודת ווידאו ארט הם'I של נילי ברויאר מציבה את הגופניות הנכה אל מול מה שמכונה "הגוף הנבחר" של החברה הישראלית. המפגש הטעון המוצג בווידאו בין גופים נכים לבין ייצוגים הגמונים שהפיקו הציונות ותרבות המערב נערך עם הגב למצלמה כאשר פני המשתתפים נסתרות בעוד שונות גופם גלויה. לעומת זאת, סרטה הדוקומנטרי של דנה דימנט תפקוד גבוה עוסק בנראותם של מי "שלא רואים עליהם" ומציג את מאבקה של קהילת אנשי הספקטרום האוטיסטי בישראל. דימנט מציגה תקריבי פנים ובכך משתמשת בדואליות הגלומה בקלוז-אפ, בין התקרבות אל הסובייקט לבין הפיכתו לאובייקט. על אף הבחירות הצורניות המנוגדות, שתי היצירות עוסקות בנראות ומעמתות את הצופה עם שביקש/ה להדחיק. בעוד שהם'I מחייב את הצופה להביט בגופניות הנכה מבלי היכולת לתייג אותה בסטיגמה בשל הסתרת פני המשתתפים, תפקוד גבוה מציג את ההשתהות הכרוכה בהבחנה במוגבלות הבלתי נראית באמצעות התקרבות לפניהם. שתי היוצרות מציידות את עצמן ואת משתתפיהן באפשרות המטאפורית להשיב מבט לצופה ולערער את תפיסתו המסוגלנית תוך שימוש בתיאוריות פמיניסטיות ותיאוריות של תרבות חזותית.
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Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal , 2017
Acclaimed Australian animator Adam Elliot dedicated his career to illustrating the experiences of... more Acclaimed Australian animator Adam Elliot dedicated his career to illustrating the experiences of people with disabilities. Elliot’s first trilogy – Uncle (1996), Cousin (1999) and Brother (2000) – is a black and white claymation accompanied by narration reminiscing beloved family members with disabilities. The article intersects disability studies, phenomenology and film studies in an analysis of the disabled body in Elliot’s claymations and the crip ethics they may evoke in spectators. The author argues that Elliot’s clayographies disorient the past by yearning for it and crip the future by criticizing the marginalization of people with disabilities, and focusing on the desire for life ‘out-of-line’. The hybridity of the trilogy is an infusion of documentary ‘domestic ethnography’ or home videos, centering familial ‘others’ with fictional film-noir that allows entrance into the dark realm of recollection. The viewers are offered bodily experiences that emphasize the body’s vulnerability and perishability, presented not in a tragic or inspirational fashion, but as inseparable from human existence. By conjuring these oppositional cinematic styles and genres in clay, disability is represented as the definition of the human experience through an ethical remembrance.
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Frames Cinema Journal, 2014
Three short avant-garde animated films address the issues of vision disabilities and blindness: M... more Three short avant-garde animated films address the issues of vision disabilities and blindness: Many Happy Returns (Marjut Rimminen 1996), A Shift in Perception (Dan Monceaux 2006) and Ishihara (Yoav Brill 2010). Through the use of diverse animation techniques intensified by sound strategies all three films evoke a dream-intoxicated-like atmosphere. These shorts subvert – in form as well as content – former cinematic and cultural representations of people with vision disabilities. Thus, by providing a phenomenologically-sensual alternative, these works critique the able-bodied cinematic construction of spectatorship. I argue that these shorts offer an antidote to the social organization of vision, and above all, to the supremacy attributed to vision in the experience of spectatorship.
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Book Chapters by Slava Greenberg
Thinking with an Accent (ed. Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar) University of California Press, 2023
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Television Studies in Queer Times (Routledge), 2023
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Israeli New Media Reader: Film, Television, Internet (Texas UP), 2024
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Documentary and Disability (Palgrave Macmillan, ed. Helen Hughes and Catalin Brylla), 2017
By combining film studies, phenomenology, and disability studies, Greenberg offers an analysis of... more By combining film studies, phenomenology, and disability studies, Greenberg offers an analysis of two animated documentary series that explore disabled experience: Animated Minds and Creature Discomforts. Although they utilize different aesthetic styles - graphic animation and clay animals - both series rely on visual metaphors to evoke their viewer’s bodily senses. The chapter examines corporeal metaphors that embody experiences of disability and suggests that by emphasizing sensible/sentient bodies, animated documentaries may potentially evoke viewers’ embodiment. The metaphoric imagery, which is aurally accompanied by subjective testimonies about life with disability, enhances intersubjective engagement by illustrating the testimonies as experienced through and by the bodies of their subjects, thus touching spectators’ own bodies. In some cases, spectators are further confronted with the socially-bestowed privileges of their bodies.
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BOOKS & REVIEWS by Slava Greenberg
Slava Greenberg. Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship. Indiana University Press, 2023.
Can one see with ears and hear with eyes? A seemingly simple question that follows from Slava Greenberg's book confronts and reconfigures one's implicit sensory hierarchies of being-in- and experiencing the world. A reading that makes one question their understanding of the everyday is a good one; a reading that induces (self-)reflection on the reader's own positionality is a remarkable piece of intellectual work.
Slava Greenberg explores the complexities of disabled bodyminds representations in what may be the most transgressive cinematic convention - animation. As a powerful tool of imagination that goes beyond the possibilities of physical bodies, not only human ones, Greenberg's cases are a fun ride, ranging from ancillary (and fascinating) insights about mainstream productions like Pixar's Nemo and Netflix's hit BoJack Horseman to in-depth case studies of avant-garde animations like Rocks in My Pockets. Here, animation becomes not only an entry into the world of crip filmmakers but also a means to evoke in spectators an alternative understanding and awareness of their own bodies. Greenberg subverts conventional perceptions of gaze- and able-centric spectatorship, and by rethinking both audio and visual pleasures, asks what happens if we sensory disorient and crip (blind, deat) the spectator?
The book is erudite in execution, ASCA in spirit, and empathetic in its message: animated lived experiences and their innovative artistic forms, when confronted with critical disability studies perspective, give us a powerful tool to envision futures that will accommodate diverse bodyminds.
2024 ASCA Award Committee: Anna Greszta, Divya Nadkarni, and Gaston Franssen
Articles by Slava Greenberg
Disclosure offers different pleasures (and pains) to trans and cis spectators. While the archival clips are meant to educate cis spectators, the testimonies address trans viewers first and foremost. My own reading of these testimonies encourages “thinking how narrative can itself transition depending on embodied spectatorship” (Joshua Bastian Cole 108: 80). The film explicitly aims to be about and for oppositional trans looks. Executive producer Laverne Cox asserts that: “The film is about trans spectatorship. It’s about how we look and how we see…It’s bell hooks who came up with the idea of the oppositional gaze, which is so exciting to think about…What does it mean to center trans ways of looking?…Is there a trans gaze?”
Disclosure also gives trans viewers the opportunity to experience the pleasures of being represented, joining in communal spectatorship, even traveling in time. Although each interviewee sits alone in a room they are often edited as if they were a group: several respond to the same scene, film, or series. Disclosure thus offers a sense of collective spectatorship, documenting interviewee responses and including trans viewers, too.
As the film progresses, focus shifts from general commentary about trans representation and onscreen visibility to testimony from those affected by transphobic portrayals, introducing various ways of coping with and resisting such images. Emmy nominee Rain Valdez shares her memory of a family viewing from her childhood: “My family and I would always watch movies together. We were watching Soapdish but once we got to the end my family got really quiet because it gave them a confirmation that if I chose a certain life… I would be the bad guy. Or I wouldn’t be loved. I was seven or eight at the time, and we never talked about it after that, but I remember the next day, my mom would try to get me to wear more masculine clothes.” Valdez’s testimony allows trans viewers to travel back to our own ‘first’ (traumatic) encounters with images of us, not for us, and also, at the same time, makes it possible for us to join contemporary and future trans and nonbinary children in their/our living rooms, in contestation and solidarity.
When several interviewees share different experiences of the same film or television series a communal spectatorship, one most trans viewers never experienced, is gradually crafted. In his theory of “revisitation,” Cáel M Keegan notes how trans spectatorship must involve a “temporal folding-back of the self upon its own record of perception” that invites us to reencounter something we have seen before, but have not quite understood (2016: 30). This experience was offered to me through Disclosure’s sequence of testimonies by men of trans experience for whom, as for me, Max (The L Word) was a first encounter with a toxic trans masculinity (ignorantly and dangerously) attributed to hormone therapy, particularly testosterone.
Six different trans people react to Boys Don’t Cry, a film which was the inspiration for Jack Halberstam’s articulation of the “Transgender Gaze” (2005). Zeke Smith and Michael D. Cohen focus on the first part of the film and speak about how the representation of a (white) trans masculine character resonated with them; Brian Michael Smith and Laverne Cox focus on the violence and killing of Brandon and how terrifying watching it was for them; both Mickey R. Mahoney and Tiq Milan speak about the erasure of Brandon’s Black friend and ally Philip DeVine from the film. While this sequence problematizes the idea of a unified trans gaze by insisting on the intersectionality of race, age, and gender, the exclusion of disability contributes to the erasure of that part of DeVine’s identity. This happens too frequently with representations of people with disability; however, it also brings attention to the absence of disabled trans interviewees in the film.
Disclosure shows us an oppositional gaze at play by presenting an incomplete kaleidoscope of looks and a partial polyphony of voices. We are shown different experiences of the same film. The ‘oppositional’ sequences remind us that there is no one possible ‘trans look.’ While this could be an educational moment for cis viewers, its greater significance lies in its potential to offer trans spectators an experience of communal spectatorship. As the film shows, we have been consuming such images alone. The ‘talking-heads’ transforms into fellow-audience members talking back to the screen with you. We are offered a unique experience of opposing and applauding trans representations together. In this streaming era, intensified during our current quarantine reality of home viewing, this film offers a glimpse into what communal or collective spectatorship may mean for those who have little or no direct access to it.
Book Chapters by Slava Greenberg
Slava Greenberg. Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship. Indiana University Press, 2023.
Can one see with ears and hear with eyes? A seemingly simple question that follows from Slava Greenberg's book confronts and reconfigures one's implicit sensory hierarchies of being-in- and experiencing the world. A reading that makes one question their understanding of the everyday is a good one; a reading that induces (self-)reflection on the reader's own positionality is a remarkable piece of intellectual work.
Slava Greenberg explores the complexities of disabled bodyminds representations in what may be the most transgressive cinematic convention - animation. As a powerful tool of imagination that goes beyond the possibilities of physical bodies, not only human ones, Greenberg's cases are a fun ride, ranging from ancillary (and fascinating) insights about mainstream productions like Pixar's Nemo and Netflix's hit BoJack Horseman to in-depth case studies of avant-garde animations like Rocks in My Pockets. Here, animation becomes not only an entry into the world of crip filmmakers but also a means to evoke in spectators an alternative understanding and awareness of their own bodies. Greenberg subverts conventional perceptions of gaze- and able-centric spectatorship, and by rethinking both audio and visual pleasures, asks what happens if we sensory disorient and crip (blind, deat) the spectator?
The book is erudite in execution, ASCA in spirit, and empathetic in its message: animated lived experiences and their innovative artistic forms, when confronted with critical disability studies perspective, give us a powerful tool to envision futures that will accommodate diverse bodyminds.
2024 ASCA Award Committee: Anna Greszta, Divya Nadkarni, and Gaston Franssen
Disclosure offers different pleasures (and pains) to trans and cis spectators. While the archival clips are meant to educate cis spectators, the testimonies address trans viewers first and foremost. My own reading of these testimonies encourages “thinking how narrative can itself transition depending on embodied spectatorship” (Joshua Bastian Cole 108: 80). The film explicitly aims to be about and for oppositional trans looks. Executive producer Laverne Cox asserts that: “The film is about trans spectatorship. It’s about how we look and how we see…It’s bell hooks who came up with the idea of the oppositional gaze, which is so exciting to think about…What does it mean to center trans ways of looking?…Is there a trans gaze?”
Disclosure also gives trans viewers the opportunity to experience the pleasures of being represented, joining in communal spectatorship, even traveling in time. Although each interviewee sits alone in a room they are often edited as if they were a group: several respond to the same scene, film, or series. Disclosure thus offers a sense of collective spectatorship, documenting interviewee responses and including trans viewers, too.
As the film progresses, focus shifts from general commentary about trans representation and onscreen visibility to testimony from those affected by transphobic portrayals, introducing various ways of coping with and resisting such images. Emmy nominee Rain Valdez shares her memory of a family viewing from her childhood: “My family and I would always watch movies together. We were watching Soapdish but once we got to the end my family got really quiet because it gave them a confirmation that if I chose a certain life… I would be the bad guy. Or I wouldn’t be loved. I was seven or eight at the time, and we never talked about it after that, but I remember the next day, my mom would try to get me to wear more masculine clothes.” Valdez’s testimony allows trans viewers to travel back to our own ‘first’ (traumatic) encounters with images of us, not for us, and also, at the same time, makes it possible for us to join contemporary and future trans and nonbinary children in their/our living rooms, in contestation and solidarity.
When several interviewees share different experiences of the same film or television series a communal spectatorship, one most trans viewers never experienced, is gradually crafted. In his theory of “revisitation,” Cáel M Keegan notes how trans spectatorship must involve a “temporal folding-back of the self upon its own record of perception” that invites us to reencounter something we have seen before, but have not quite understood (2016: 30). This experience was offered to me through Disclosure’s sequence of testimonies by men of trans experience for whom, as for me, Max (The L Word) was a first encounter with a toxic trans masculinity (ignorantly and dangerously) attributed to hormone therapy, particularly testosterone.
Six different trans people react to Boys Don’t Cry, a film which was the inspiration for Jack Halberstam’s articulation of the “Transgender Gaze” (2005). Zeke Smith and Michael D. Cohen focus on the first part of the film and speak about how the representation of a (white) trans masculine character resonated with them; Brian Michael Smith and Laverne Cox focus on the violence and killing of Brandon and how terrifying watching it was for them; both Mickey R. Mahoney and Tiq Milan speak about the erasure of Brandon’s Black friend and ally Philip DeVine from the film. While this sequence problematizes the idea of a unified trans gaze by insisting on the intersectionality of race, age, and gender, the exclusion of disability contributes to the erasure of that part of DeVine’s identity. This happens too frequently with representations of people with disability; however, it also brings attention to the absence of disabled trans interviewees in the film.
Disclosure shows us an oppositional gaze at play by presenting an incomplete kaleidoscope of looks and a partial polyphony of voices. We are shown different experiences of the same film. The ‘oppositional’ sequences remind us that there is no one possible ‘trans look.’ While this could be an educational moment for cis viewers, its greater significance lies in its potential to offer trans spectators an experience of communal spectatorship. As the film shows, we have been consuming such images alone. The ‘talking-heads’ transforms into fellow-audience members talking back to the screen with you. We are offered a unique experience of opposing and applauding trans representations together. In this streaming era, intensified during our current quarantine reality of home viewing, this film offers a glimpse into what communal or collective spectatorship may mean for those who have little or no direct access to it.
The analysis extends to the contemporary psychedelic revival era, recognizing the continued therapeutic and recreational use of Ketamine among trans individuals. Utilizing Davis’ concept of techgnosis and trans-writing on Ketamine I look at the technological unconscious, and the uses of myth, magic and mysticism in the film. Notable trans scholars like McKenzie Wark and Susan Stryker have explored its appeal, highlighting its potential to provide a break from bodily gender dysphoria and altered states of conscience. This paper contributes to understanding the intertwined histories of psychedelic exploration, the therapeutic application of Ketamine, philosophical “knowledge by Ketamine,” psychedelic cinema, and trans history. Employing film analysis and archival research, a complex narrative about chronic post-operative pain alleviation and Ketamine consumption by trans people is revealed. One for All… offers the potential of psychedelic cinema and philosophy as an avenue for re-exploring the origins of the pre-revival era.
Bibliography
Davis, Eric (1998/2015), Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information.
Lhooq, Michelle. “McKenzie Wark on Raving and the ‘Gentrification of Ketamine’” Interview Magazine, March 5, 2023, and personal correspondence with Wark on March 22, 2023.
Pisters, Patricia. “Introduction to Deleuze and Guattari and the Psychedelic Revival,” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 17, no. 4 (2023): 457-466.
Ramey, Joshua “Becoming-Metal: On Knowledge by Ketamine,” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 17, no. 4 (2023): 526-544.
Stryker, Susan. “Ketamine Journal,” In SaF05, ed. Charlotte Prodger (Argyll and Bute, Scotland: Cove Park, 2019), 19-26.
Vargas E., Chris. One for All…, 2007, 7 min.
Erickson’s phone books mediate the artist-activist’s frustration with the medical establishment regarding trans medicine for trans-folks-to-come, while his photo album winks at these future kin. Years later, filming these archival treasures, Chris Vargas reciprocates the wink. Yet, this practice extends beyond metaphor, probing questions about the status of the “motion pictures” and “transsexual” archives, the physical and virtual location of the documents, films, and objects constituting cinema’s and trans heritage.
Ultimately, this paper argues, trans media archaeology is not a divergent form of media archaeology; it is a core aspect. “Film history as media archaeology” traces parallel histories and charts alternative trajectories, generating not only the excavation of diverse pasts but also an archaeology of possible futures (Elsaesser 2016, 25). The four examined media objects engage in archaeology reflecting and disrupting established medical discourses, which developed in tandem with cinema across the 20th century. Thus, through these “archival gifts,” (Malatino 2022) this paper offers the trans archival obsession, fueling media archaeology’s driving force.
The first part, “Dysphoria is Everywhere” introduces the prevalence of hyphened dysphoria (in contrast with the medicalized Gender Dysphoria) in prominent trans and queer writing (e.g. Reed Erickson, Sandy Stone, Susan Stryker, Chris Straayer, Erica Rand, and Torrey Peters). In the second part, “Dysphoria is Everything” I propose thinking nipple-dysphoria through an analysis of Reed Erickson’s only bare-chested photo in his self-curated photo-album Eric’s Ego Trip. The third and final part, “Dysphoria is all at Once” reads the photo and Everything Everywhere all at Once through Crip and Mad temporalities and suggests that chronic postoperative pain (CPOP), like phantom limb sensations, regret, disappointment, and anger as well as attempts at their alleviation through use of prosthetics and painkillers are all manifestations of hyphened dysphoria.
This paper uses Sobchack’s articulation of the uncanny in home movies as a methodology in investigating three possible dysphoric encounters between trans* viewers and the ‘before’ image in home movies, as they are represented in documentary film. I discuss the first, axiological dysphoria through an analysis of Burton Before and After, in which Burton is asking himself “Is that really me?” I explore the second, epistemological dysphoria, i.e. a quest to acquire more ‘objective’ knowledge of ‘myself’”, through the documentary This Man is Me in which a trans man is using the home movie as proof that this has always been “himself.” To expose the third, ontological dysphoria which arouses “the existential question ‘What really am I?. I read She’s a Boy I Knew’s use of home movies to reflect on the fluidities of family roles. This final encounter stresses the realization that we are all constantly and endlessly transitioning and transforming, and that gender dysphoria triggered by past body images is experienced with particular force in the trans* body but is a phenomenon shared by cis and trans* people.
ההרצאה בוחנת את המשמעויות של הסתר פנים או גילויין בשתי עבודות וידיאו שהופקו בישראל ועוסקות במוגבלות באופן פוליטי. הראשונה היא עבודת הוידיאו ארט הם'I משנת 2007 של נילי ברויאר, והשנייה הוא הסרט הדוקומנטרי תפקוד גבוה משנת 2014 של דנה דימנט. בוידיאו הם'I פני השחקנים הנכים נסתרות בעוד שונות גופם גלויה. לעומת זאת, בסרט תפקוד גבוה דימנט מציגה תקריבי פנים רבים ומאפשרת נראות של אוטיסטים "שלא רואים עליהם." על אף הבחירות הצורניות המנוגדות, אנחנו טוענות ששני הסרטים עוסקים בנראות של המוגבלות ומעמתים את הצופים עם שביקשו להדחיק. באמצעות מונטאז'ים המתמקדים בגוף, שני הסרטים קוראים תיגר על המבט האייבליסטי ומערערים על יכולתו לקבע מסכה על פני האחר.
Read through Ben Moshe’s abolitionist perspective, the volume elaborates on rather than critiques classification models, which in turn may feed into normalizing and rehabilitating medical narratives instead of unveiling them. The diagnostic tools like the DSM (and ICD) assessing mental disorders value independence and self-determination through which they are “constructed as skills or traits that can be mandated, regulated, and taught to those (backward, retarded, primitive, degenerate) who are assessed whether they ‘have it.’ The burden of proof is on the person who needs to be as normal or comparable as possible to their peers, but not on the peers or social system that creates segregation from those deemed as nondisabled” (Ben Moshe, 80). What is lacking in any debate about ableism and sanism is a crip/mad of color perspective as articulated by Ben Moshe, a perspective that exposes these values and the ways in which they are used to pathologize and incarcerate cognitively disabled people, women, indigenous people, black people, and their intersections (ibid), as well as trans and mad folks.