Symposium on Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Pornography

Thursday 3rd March 2016, 9:30am – 4pm, Darwin Lecture Theatre 3, University of Kent

Clarissa Smith – Professor of Sexual Cultures in the Centre for Research in Media & Cultural Studies University of Sunderland
Clarissa Smith – Professor of Sexual Cultures in the Centre for Research in Media & Cultural Studies University of Sunderland
Petra van Brabandt – Lecturer at the St Lucas School of Arts Antwerp “Wet Aesthetics and Queer Pornography”
Petra van Brabandt – Lecturer at the St Lucas School of Arts Antwerp
“Wet Aesthetics and Queer Pornography”
Eliza Steinbock “Look! But also, Touch! Theorizing Images of Trans Eroticism Beyond a Politics of Visual Essentialism”
Eliza Steinbock
“Look! But also, Touch! Theorizing Images of Trans Eroticism Beyond a Politics of Visual Essentialism”

Panel Discussion

This one-day symposium focuses on the intimate relationship between cinema, embodiment, and pornography. By bringing together an interdisciplinary range of speakers, originating from disciplines such as philosophy of art, film and media studies, and cultural studies we investigate the relationship between cinema and the senses. From investigating the “cinema of attractions” in early cinema, to the “haptic visuality” apparent in intercultural and feminist film, and “body genres” such as horror, melodrama, and pornography; in very different ways film scholars have argued against the conventional emphasis on vision and visibility and in favour of an understanding of embodied spectatorship. In relation, recent research in analytic aesthetics has focused on the multimodality of perception as well as definitions of erotic art and pornography. This symposium explores in what ways different pornographies engage with the sensate, tactile, and visceral experience of sexuality. By instigating a dialogue between scholars from different approaches we hope that this symposium will advance scholarly engagement with the “carnal aesthetics” of pornography.

 

Programme:

9.30am – 9.45
Opening remarks by Dr Hans Maes, Senior Lecturer, History of Art, University of Kent

9.45 – 10.45
Clarissa Smith – Professor of Sexual Cultures in the Centre for Research in Media & Cultural Studies University of Sunderland
“More Than Just Flesh: The Porn Performer’s Body in Action

10.45 – 11.45
Ingrid Ryberg – Filmmaker and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Media Studies of Stockholm University 
“Feeling Wasteland: Utopianism and Backwardness in Queer Porn

11.45 – 12.00
Coffee and tea

12.00 – 13.00
Petra van Brabandt – Lecturer at the St Lucas School of Arts Antwerp
“Wet Aesthetics and Queer Pornography”

13.00 – 14.00
Lunch (not provided)

14.00 – 15.00
Eliza Steinbock – Assistant Professor and postdoctoral researcher at the Film and Literary Department of Leiden University
“Look! But also, Touch! Theorizing Images of Trans Eroticism Beyond a Politics of Visual Essentialism”

15.00 – 16.00
Panel Discussion with Eliza Steinbock, Petra van Brabandt, Ingrid Ryberg, Clarissa Smith, and Pandora Blake.

The symposium and film screening are two of the components that make up the cross-disciplinary project Confined Projectionswhich is part of the International Festival of Projections taking place at the University of Kent 18-20 March 2016. The project also includes the exhibition of six custom-made mutoscopes, showing work by national and international artists and filmmakers. Taking the mutoscope as leitmotiv, this project investigates the tension between public and private, visibility and invisibility, and proximity and distance in the film experience, revealing interesting connections between this early form of cinema and more recent developments in erotic filmmaking.

With the generous support of:

The British Society of Aesthetics
The Aesthetics Research Centre, University of Kent
The Centre for Film and Media Research, University of Kent

Further information and registrationhttps://confinedprojections.wordpress.com