Forms of Affirmative Aesthetics in "Women without Men"

Authors

  • Maud Ceuterick University of Bergen, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, 5007, Bergen

Keywords:

Gender, Urban Space, Women in Iranian Cinema, Ghosts and Haunting, Affect and Film Aesthetics

Abstract

The digital sphere overflows with platforms that gather women’s testimonies of being harassed, not feeling welcome, or not being accommodated in the urban spaces. The street is a gendered space. However, literature, films, and digital media have repeatedly denounced, challenged, and counteracted the unbalanced relations of power and how they affect people of different genders, sexualities, ages or ‘races’. Through the analysis of Shirin Neshat's film Women without Men (2009), I explore several forms of what I call 'affirmative aesthetics', the aesthetic and narrative reconfiguration of spatial and power relations. Haunting as a filmic form in particular serves as a way to create a space for oneself, to make visible what patriarchal narratives made invisible.

Author Biography

Maud Ceuterick, University of Bergen, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, 5007, Bergen

Maud Ceuterick is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. She obtained her PhD in Film and Media Studies from the University of Otago, New Zealand. Her research on the relations between gender, space and power on screen appears in Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women: Gender, Space and Mobility in Contemporary Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She has also published on the road movie genre, masculinity and domesticity in transnational cinema, and women and everyday spaces
on screen, and space travel in contemporary cinema.

Adélia Sampaio

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Published

2020-01-22

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 1 (2020): Women and space in contemporary cinema

Section

Special Section