Man Enough: An Interdisciplinary New York University Graduate Student Colloquium on Masculinity, presents:
Visual Pleasures and Bodily Cinema: Queer Spectatorship and Fem-Dom Internet Porn.
On Wednesday, 4 March 2009, 6:30-8:30 pm,
@ The Library, 2nd Floor, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, 24 West 12th Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues), New York City
Free and open to the public
Porn is proliferating, and S/M is mutating, but is theory keeping pace? This talk by Professor Christopher Vitale will focus on Fem-Dom internet porn (niche market pornography in which women dominate, abuse, humiliate, and/or penetrate men), as a way of seeking to update feminist spectatorship theories as defined by Laura Mulvey in her groundbreaking 1975 paper ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Integrating Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze’s readings of sadism/masochism, we will examine not only the genre conventions of Fem-Dom porn, but also the liminal ‘before/after’ negotiation scenes filmed by Kink.com as part of its effort to become a ‘community’ porn production facility.
By describing the potentials/limitations for queer spectatorship opened by these new forms of internet video, and the slippage of gender and sexual points of reference that allow for a ‘gaze’ beyond that of ‘erection of the eye’, this event will pose questions of more fluid fantasmatic positions, organs, and identifications in a fundamentally polymorphous economy of erotic looking, and what it might mean to view masculinity beyond the domain of mainstream notions of sexual ‘orientation’.
Christopher Vitale is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He has just recently completed a book manuscript on the philosophy of networks called The Networked Mind: A New Image of Thought for a Hyperconnected Age, and is currently working on an introductory text updating semiotic theory for the age of the internet called Media/Semiotics: A Guide to Making Meaning of Signs in Contemporary Culture.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University
Hosted by Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò
Light refreshments will be provided.
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