by Patricia MacCormack (Author)
Cinesexuality explores the queerness of cinema spectatorship, arguing that cinema spectatorship represents a unique encounter of desire, pleasure and perversion beyond dialectics of subject/object and image/meaning; an extraordinary 'cinesexual' relationship, that encompasses each event of cinema spectatorship in excess of gender, hetero- or homosexuality, encouraging all spectators to challenge traditional notions of what elicits pleasure and constitutes desiring subjectivity. Through a variety of cinematic examples, including abstract film, extreme films and films which present perverse sexuality and corporeal reconfiguration, Cinesexuality encourages a radical shift to spectatorship as itself inherently queer beyond what is watched and who watches. Film as its own form of philosophy invokes spectatorship thought as an ethics of desire. Original, exciting and theoretically sophisticated - focusing on continental philosophy, particularly Guattari, Deleuze, Blanchot, Foucault, Lyotard, Irigaray and Serres - the book will be of interest to scholars and students of queer, gender and feminist studies, film and aesthetics theory, cultural studies, media and communication, post-structural theory and contemporary philosophical thought.
Author Biography
Patricia MacCormack is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Film at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Her principal research interests are in continental philosophy, particularly the works of Deleuze, Guattari, Irigaray, Foucault, Bataille, Lyotard and Blanchot and she has published extensively in these areas. She has also written on a diverse range of issues such as body modification, post-human ethics, performance art, monster theory and particularly Italian horror film.