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THE FILM ATLAS ISSUE 1 WOMEN ON SCREEN EDITOR’S NOTE I recently met a rather large man in a pink shirt that read, “men aren’t funny.” Having just spent four years in left-leaning class rooms, I have grown accustomed to seeing feminist statements. They resonate with me and they are important to me. And now that being a feminist is increasingly fashionable in mainstream culture, these statements are more accessible. The text on the pink shirt stood out to me beyond contemporary stock feminism; not because it was better, but because it was so different. The shirt was cheekily THE FILM ATLAS challenging the sexist folklore that women aren’t funny by defi ning men through the same erroneous pigeonhole. Rather than looking at the victim of sexism, the text was searching for its perpetrator. ISSUE 1 In its satire of an antifeminist social mythology, the shirt was effec- tively demanding justice; presenting an accused and suggesting a retributive punishment by declaring men as unfunny. All this for just WOMEN ON SCREEN $19.99+ tax — oh! what a time to be alive! My hope is that the fi rst issue of The Film Atlas can serve a similar purpose to this pink shirt. The Film Atlas is a journal exploring visual culture. It contains a collection of articles — both academ- ic and meditative — that look at fi lm through a critical lens. Issue 1 is titled Women on Screen and is appropriately dedicated to females in cinema. Its content strives to look at feminism, and the women who work to realize female images, differently. To accomplish this we asked fi lmmakers, fi lm students, and fi lm lovers to talk to us and to write for us. It is our collective hope that the articles in this journal might inspire a laugh, a sigh of solidarity, or a new perspective on women in visual culture. Yours, Genevieve Citron Lead Editor and Journal Curator, The Film Atlas MASTHEAD CONTENTS Lead Editor and Journal Curator The Future is Female*: On Queer Futures and Alien Genevieve Citron Transcendence in Science Fiction Cinema and Beyond By Sophia Larigakis Senior Editors page 5 Katie Elder “It’s in the Eyes”: Constructed Value of the Feminine Conor Wickham Gaze in Amanda Knox By Katie Elder Advisory Editor page 11 Carolyn Buszynski Malory Archer: Mad Femme Spy Executive of Tomorrow By Genevieve Citron Editors page 15 Adrienne Buller The Life and Times of Kay Francis Charlotte Butler By Meghan King Rachel Summers page 19 Reservoirs of Embodied Memories in Ikwé: A Reflection on Authors Ancestral Knowledge Coursing Through the Body Pam Austin By Jacqueline Holloran Cooper Keara Campos page 23 Genevieve Citron Kill Bill, Tom, Dick, and Harry Jacqueline Holloran Cooper By Keara Campos Katie Elder page 25 Meghan King Player 1 Disconnected: Exploring Virtual Sites of Sophia Larigakis Subaltern Agency in Virginia David Leblanc By David Leblanc Sam Yoannou page 31 Marriage as Marxist Perversion: Manipulation and Control in Graphics David Fincher’s Gone Girl Madison Newey By Pam Austin page 37 Cover Art The Cost of a Good Cry: A Meditative Reflection on Femininity Aleeza Yermus and Power By Sam Yoannou Art Director page 43 Dylan Freeman-Grist Be Bold: An Interview with Filmmaker & Feminist Emma Higgins The Film Atlas Staff Design Consultant page 47 Frieda Zapf The Future is Female*: On Queer Futures and Alien 6 Transcendence in Science Fiction Cinema and Beyond dominant history by queer cultures (125). Ann tential as a site for imagining revolutions. Rarely By Sophia Larigakis Cvetovich, quoted in Luciano’s article, suggests does the ‘monster’ subvert embodiment, despite that “[i]n the absence of institutionalized docu- a promise of transcending the limits of human mentation or in opposition to official histories, skin. In “Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopoli- memory becomes a valuable historical resource” tics in the Pharmacopornographic Era,” B. Pre- (125). Where dominant historiography upholds ciado, assigned female at birth, describes how an illusory ideal of objectivity, queer archiving they hack gender, capitalism and Big Pharma by practices embrace the power of the affective, committing to a regimen of non-prescribed tes- the subjective and the multiple. I want to know: tosterone. In the unauthorized use of a molecule how can we map these queer archiving practices associated with a specific gender, Preciado seeks onto how we see, experience and shape the his- to subvert and resist an institutionally and phar- tories and political landscapes of the future? macologically induced gender binary. Their’s is In her seminal essay “A Manifesto for Cy- a sci-fi contortion of non-fiction anti-science: borgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Femi- a powerful and queer Frankenstein. This resis- nism in the 1980s,” Donna Haraway presents the tance — in text and in life — to the corporate cyborg as the “fiction mapping our reality,” as heteronormative negation of the queer body does “an imaginative resource,” as a “potent [myth]” what science fiction should do: it provides radi- (Haraway 191-196). The cyborg, she suggests, cal visions (and embodiments) of corporeal au- is the postmodern weapon against heteronor- tonomy and transcendence. mative patriarchal capitalism, it is the ultimate In cinema, literature, and even legisla- synthesis — of human/animal and machine — ture, to be alien is to embody and represent an Under the Skin. Dir. Jonathan Glazer. 2013. and yet its wholeness is incoherent; the cyborg absolute Otherness, a non-belonging, an un- “Perhaps the body is, after all, our spaceship, the with theories and mythologies that grapple with is a new totality that revels in its schisms. The fathomable difference. Aliens are conceptual- only vehicle we have for transcendence.” — Palle the nuances of female and queer embodiment cyborg is a mythic proposal for a breakdown of ized as an invasive force, as something rotten Yourgrau, introduction to Chris Kraus’ Aliens and and subjectivity, and which posit alien or cyborg boundaries, a blueprint for “partiality, irony, in- and poisonous in the holy womb, as an intru- Anorexia, 2000 “difference” — as a powerfully subversive “vehi- timacy, and perversity” (192). Its myth rejects an sion that renders the familiar unrecognizable. cle for transcendence” (Yourgrau). The radical ideal of wholeness, and thus refuses to demon- The term “alien” in legislative rhetoric refers to This essay began in my mind as a vague potential of the future, I suggest (and hope, and ize difference. Haraway suggests that the cyborg anyone who lives within a country but has not inquiry into representations of gendered female imagine), is deeply linked to a negotiation with identity is “potent subjectivity synthesized from been officially and institutionally declared a cit- bodies and subjectivities in science fiction cin- (other, one’s own) non-normative bodies. The fusions of outsider identities” (216). Haraway’s izen thereof. One can be a legal, illegal, resident, ema. Like an alien parasite, the essay grew mon- future is a cyberfeminist stage on which to ne- cyborgs unite not in filial ties but, like a cho- non-resident, enemy and non-documented alien. strous and volatile. It evolved into an interroga- gotiate alien transcendence; our bodies ours to sen queer family, through affinity. These myth- What unites these types of “aliens” is the trans- tion of genre, an examination of the constraints hack. ic figures seek to reclaim and thus subvert that gression of borders, and an official declaration of of the gendered corporeal, a record of disap- For those of us for whom the past and “which marked them as other” (217). The cyborg a person’s non-belonging, a rhetorical xenopho- pointment and identification, an open-ended, the present are not nostalgic temporalities — extends a bionic middle finger to a worldly hier- bia. The term implies an intrusion, a breach of unsatisfied anti-manifesto of queer feminist because the structure of society was and is not archy predicated upon what is and is not “natu- ‘protective’ boundaries. The alien, then, is a queer future visions. In dialogue with theoretical my- on our side — the future is the only temporal ral.” Haraway’s mythology is a radical refiguring figure. Queerness is a rejection of arbitrary bor- thologies of cyborgs and aliens, this essay piv- realm left in which to envision a different experi- of difference; it is a glistening queer future. ders and a renunciation of binding embodiment. ots upon two science fiction films made in the ence of society. Therein lies its radical potential. It is no radical insight that science fiction Queerness is also persecuted just as “difference” same year and starring the same actress: Jon- In her essay “Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come: is preoccupied with masculine-scientific forms of has always been. Luciano writes that queer camp athan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) and Spike Velvet Goldmine’s Queer Archive,” Dana Lucia- reproduction; the genre is replete with botched “blossoms in the childhood experience of feeling Jonze’s Her (2013). Both films examine non-nor- no suggests that at the core of queer historiogra- attempts at life-giving and claims to godliness singularly alien to one’s straight surroundings” mative (alien, cyborg, bodiless) femininities, and phy is a rejection of the idea of history as singu- disassociated with the act of giving birth. These (Luciano 133). The affective force of feeling alien demonstrate (whether intentionally or not) that lar, objective, linear and logically “progressive” efforts to create a kind of unnatural life are often in the face of violent banality propels queer bod- the violent and restrictive confines of gender ex- (Luciano 123). Rather, queer archiving practices just the reiteration and re-articulation of vio- ies into productive rebellion; the rejection of tend also to these non-human forms.

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