Conference proceedings for affective encounters rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies EDITED BY ANU KOIVUNEN & SUSANNA PAASONEN Anu Koivunen & Susanna Paasonen (eds) Conference proceedings for affective encounters rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies University of Turku School of Art, Literature and Music Media Studies Series A, N:o 49 ISBN 951-29-2237-1 E-book at [http://www.utu./hum/mediatutkimus/affective/proceedings.pdf] Media Studies, Turku 2000 Design by Minna Rainio Published in association with the Finnish Society for Cinema Studies (SETS ry) _affective encounters_ Contents Anu Koivunen Preface: The Affective Turn? 7 Sara Ahmed Communities that feel: Intensity, Difference and Attachment 10 Ana Paula Baltazar Architecture as Interface: Forming and Informing Spaces and Subjects 25 Jennifer Lyon Bell Character and Cognition in Modern Pornography 36 Rosemary Betterton Spaces of Memory: Photographic Practices of Home and Exile 43 Joanna Bouldin The Body, Animation and The Real: Race, Reality and the Rotoscope in Betty Boop 48 Hannu Eerikäinen Love Your Prosthesis Like Yourself: ‘Sex’, Text and the Body in Cyber Discourse 55 Taru Elfving The Girl in Space-time Encounters with and within Eija-liisa Ahtila’s Video Installations 75 Amy Herzog Affectivity, Becoming, and the Cinematic Event: Gilles Deleuze and the Futures of Feminist Film Theory 83 Katarina Jungar and Elina Oinas Inventing “African Solutions”, HIV Prevention and Medical Media 89 Sanna Karkulehto Effects and Affects of Queer as Folk 101 Martta Kaukonen ”I Must Reveal a Shocking Secret” Transvestites in American Talk Shows 107 Jane Kilby Tracking Shock: Some Thoughts on TV, Trauma, Testimony 112 Emmy Kurjenpuu Women’s Magazines Meet Feminist Philosophy 118 Minna Lahti “I Thought I Would Become a Millionaire” – Desire and Disillusionment in Silicon Valley, California 123 Mari-Elina Laukkanen Ladies for Sale. The Finnish Press as a Proteer 128 Ilmari Leppihalme Do Muscles Have a Gender? A Female Subject Building her Body in the Film 132 Pumping Iron II: The Women 5 _affective encounters_ Justine Lloyd and Lesley Johnson The Three Faces of Eve:the Post-war Housewife, Melodrama and Home 138 Tapio Mäkelä Re-reading Digitality through Scientic Discourses of Cybernetics: Fantasies of Disembodied Users and Embodied Computers 152 Norie Neumark E/motional Machines: Esprit de Corps 162 Kaarina Nikunen Dangerous Emotions? Finnish Television Fans and Sensibilities of Fandom 171 Sanna Ojajärvi Visual Acts - Choreography of Touches, Glances and Movements between Hosts and Assistants on Television 182 Susanna Paasonen Best Wives are Artefacts? Popular Cybernetics and Robot Women in the 1970s 190 Megan D. Pincus Must They Be Famous Vaginas? The Effect and Affect of Celebrity on The Vagina Monologues and V-Day 2001 198 Liina Puustinen Gender for Sale, Advertising Design as Technologies of Gender 203 Leena-Maija Rossi Why Do I Love and Hate the Sugarfolks in Syruptown? Studying the Visual Production of Heteronormativity in Television Commercials 213 Christine Ross Depression and Video Art at the Turn of the Millennium: The Work Of Diana Thater 226 Janne Rovio The Vintage Van Damme Look 232 Moira Sullivan Lesbographic Pornography 246 Rebecca Sullivan Biotechnological Embodiment: Gender and Scientic Anxiety in Horror Films 253 Heidi Tikka Missing the Point - Situated User Experience and the Materiality of Interaction 258 Julia Turnock A Cataclysm of Carnage, Nausea, and Death: Saving Private Ryan and Bodily Engagement 263 Pasi Väliaho An Audiovisual Brain: Towards a Digital Image of Thought in Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma 270 Hans Wessels The Positioning of Lou Reed from a Profeminist Perspective 277 Jennifer Willet Imagining the Self 285 6 Preface: The Affective Turn? Anu Koivunen, University of Turku akoivu@utu. In many disciplines, scholars have introduced affects, emotions and embodied experi- ences as timely research topics. Six years ago, Kathleen Woodward (1996, p.758) diagnosed an “explosion of academic fascination with the emotions” reviewing new scholarship on emotions as a symptom of and compensation for “the anaesthetiza- tion of the emotions in everyday life” (ibid., p.760). Linda Nicholson (1999, p.145ff), again, has argued that “the therapeutic turn” – emotion, instead of reason, as the logic of public life – has effected a democratisation of U.S. culture and politics, whereas Lauren Berlant (1997, pp.3-10) has powerfully critiqued the privatisation of citizenship borne in the Reagan era. In her view, the “nationalist politics of intimacy” has usurped the public sphere as a space for social antagonism and struggle, reduc- ing citizenship to personal acts and values, and reframing nationality as a question of feelings and traumas. In many accounts of contemporary cultures as obsessed with intimacy and affect, media gures as the key locus of this development. In media studies, the inter- est in affectivity has been fuelled by many concurrent developments: the focus of media narratives on trauma and survival, the intensity of large-scale media events such as the death of Princess Diana, proliferation of reality genres in television, new media interfaces and the strive for interactivity, innovations in cinema sound and image technology and conjoining changes in aesthetics. Earlier notions of lm specta- torship have been criticised for excluding emotion, affect and feeling (Kaplan 1989; Kuhn 1992) and revised with reference to, for instance, phenomenology (Sobchack 1992; Silverman 1996). The multisensory nature of perception has recently been theorised in terms of “haptic” or “tactile” visuality that, according to Laura Marks (2000), invites viewers to respond to the image in “an intimate, embodied way”. Fur- thermore, the affectivity of research itself has emerged as an issue as scholars have reected upon the politics of emotions in the knowledge production (Shattuc 1994; Pearce 1997; Brunsdon 2000). Within feminist criticism, the interest in affect has, in a sense, a long history: the conceptual links between woman, body and emotion is a recurrent issue. For criti- cal feminist scholarship, affects appear often as something to be deconstructed -- to be revealed as constructed, as not-natural (Cvetkovich 1992). This approach, how- ever, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (1995) have argued, may run the risk of disregarding the specicities of affects and treating them as a transhistorical Affect to be evaluated as either hegemonic or subversive. Also, the reconceptuali- sation of the feminist subject as corporeal has generated new kinds of questions concerning affectivity. (See Terada 2000.) How to conceive of embodiment in “the genomic era” when nature has, to quote Sarah Franklin (2000, pp.190--191), lost its axiomatic value as foundation and become “only a trope” and “a receding horizon”? In her keynote address to the 4th European Feminist Research Conference in Bologna, Rosi Braidotti (2000) summarised the challenge for feminist studies: “Politics… has as much to do with the constitution and organization of affectivity, memory and desire as it has with consciousness and resistance. The embodied self, sexuality, memory and the imagination are crucial to the making of political subjectivity.” To explore affective encounters, then, is to investigate a multitude of issues. On the one hand, it is to examine media forms, representations and narratives, cul- tural framings and meaning-making processes. It is to ask how encounters with dif- Koivunen A. & Paasonen S. (eds),Conference proceedings for affective encounters: rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies , University of Turku, School of Art, Literature and Music, Media Studies, Series A, N:o 49 E-book at [http://www.utu./hum/mediatutkimus/affective/proceedings.pdf], Media Studies, Turku 2001. _affective encounters_ ferent media engage senses and affects (emotions, feelings, passions) and, hence, have effects. On the other hand, exploring affective encounters involves inquiring into the gendering, sexualising, classing and racialising of subjects. Affects, in this sense, pose questions about the links between the subjective and the cultural, individual and social, self and other, inside and outside. Hence, studying affective encounters embroils asking how identities are “lived, felt and practiced” (Ahmed et al 2000, p.15) and “how we construct our own histories through memory…how we position ourselves within wider, more public, histories.” (Kuhn 1992, p.243.) *** In September 2001, around 150 scholars and postgraduate students from 14 differ- ent countries convened at the University of Turku (Finland) to discuss affects, embodi- ment and media. Besides linking with the different ongoing discussions described above, the aim of the conference was to enable affective encounters: to provide an interdisciplinary forum of exchange for the participants and to invite productive dia- logues – even among unlikely partners: media history and feminist theory; aesthet- ics and feminist epistemology; studies in media use and theories of the embodied subject; theories of cinematic emotions and the politics of representations; social- constructionist and psychoanalytical approaches to affects and emotions; and nally, constructionist notions of embodiment and cultural study of science. The conference proceedings at hand represent some of these encounters and dialogues. More will follow as affects and embodiment hopefully continue to be -- as Woodward suggested – a “hot topic”. Turku, 28 December