On Thursday April 16th, at 4:30pm in the IWS Seminar room, Sandra Macpherson will be giving a talk entitled, “Bad Romance; or, Heterosexuality.”. The talk will focus in part on sex in cinema, as part of the graduate course on the history of pornography being taught by Dr. Kathy Lubey. Please announce to your graduate students and forward to any faculty colleagues in other departments you think may be interested. Here is Sandra’s bio and more information about the book project from which this talk is pulled.
Sandra Macpherson is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State, where she teaches eighteenth-century British literature and culture, literary theory, and film. She is the author of “Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form” (Hopkins University Press, 2010), and articles on Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and the history of pornography. She is presently at work on a new project called “The Shape of Form,” and her talk comes from the book’s final chapter which tracks the afterlife of eighteenth-century pornography in the “cinema of cruelty” from Luis Bunuel to Catherine Breillat. Macpherson ties Breillat’s body of work to the evolution of the “rape melodrama,” a post-’68 sub-genre typified by such films as “Belle de Jour,” “The Night Porter,” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” which goes into dormancy in the 1980s only to re-emerge in the late ’90s in the New Extremism of Gasper Noe, Michael Haneke, and Lars von Trier. Macpherson asks what this version feminism with its emphasis on female masochism and subjugation has to offer a contemporary feminist discourse focused on restricting representations of sexual violence.
Thursday, April 16th, 2015
4:30 pm, IWS Seminar Room
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