FILM 3420D Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Primal Scene, Rape Of Males, Grotesque Body
4 Apr 2016
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Grotesque bodies (bakhtin: grotesque is not simply abnormal but has a norm of its own, an alternative, utopian form of the social where freaks are not excluded: carnival. Sideshow freaks kept as slaves (the siamese twins, the little black man, etc. ) Identification with otherness becomes the new norm. The freak reinterpreted as the hidden self in all of us. Queer politics of moving from shame to pride. In the new regime of hypervisbility femininity repositioned as the real other, the greatest horror on earth. Previous consensus: woman only terrifies when represented as man"s castrated other. Freud: shock of the male child discovering that the mother doesn"t have a penis. The excess that is expelled from the body for it to become bounded, complete. Clean and proper vs. abject body // classical vs. grotesque body. Untrammelled pleasure in playing" with the body and its wastes: maternal authority. Child separates from the mother"s body that becomes abject.
