Get Your Smart On
Thinking broadly about Linda Williams' piece on body genres (e.g., horror, porn, and melodrama), and the politics of representation, in preparation for Thursday's Feminist Theory session.
One of the big ideas in Linda Williams’s piece on “body genres” in film theory is that perversion should not be used as a pejorative term to condemn some sexualities over others, i.e., to condemn any sexuality that is not reproductive. As Freud (and psychoanalysis) has taught us, sexual desire doesn’t naturally aim at reproduction, but involves substitution of aims and objects. So all sexuality is a type of displacement and projection of desire onto an object or another person, desires that give expression to what is repressed. In that sense, sexual desire seems to come out of nowhere, often surprising us. It feels excessive and out of our conscious control, and can be disturbing. The excesses we might forgive in the name of love or lust!
Body genres such as horror, porn, and melodrama, all produce involuntary, visceral bodily reactions in viewers, be it screaming, crying, or arousal. (The laughter produced in comedy seems different, and she touches on this briefly…) These are visual representations of excessive emotions and bodily states on screen, where they serve as a kind of mimetic mirror for the viewer’s own body. As Williams notes, we cry along with the tragically wronged woman in the melodrama, we are frightened along with the woman being slaughtered in the horror film, and seeing aroused bodies makes us aroused.
These “body genres,” of which these are prime examples but not an exhaustive list, share two other things: they are historically treated as lower or disreputable forms of representation, and (not coincidentally) they use women’s bodies to represent that excess, a projection onto women’s bodies of what Williams’ son identifies as the “gross.”
A brief aside: That point is very interesting when you consider the history of the word “empathy,” which comes from Aesthetics. As I recount in my essays Empathy: A Philosophical Introduction, it is a Hellenized term that is meant to capture the way in which works of art can affect us, physically and emotionally, at this visceral, bodily level. It’s very interesting that the campaign against empathy is a campaign against these excessive feelings produced through representation, feelings grounded in the physical body. The loss of control, especially of bodily control, so well represented by the orgasming woman, is especially feared. But it is not feared more than the pleasure of the loss of control is (not so secretly) desired.
William argues that women’s bodies are the representational space for the projection of the out of control, for the uncontrollable emotion and excessive bodily reaction. This means that the out of control and excess has a structure — it is not anarchic or unmoored from representation or logic. The representation of the out-of-control is governed by representational structures. She reminds us, perversions have structures. There’s an excess, there’s a structure to excess, and you can see that when you juxtapose these genres, all of which are marked by evoking excessive emotion. The melodramas that make you weep, the pornography that turns you on, the horror film that gives you a fright and makes you scream. And (I would add) the cathartic pleasure in the release. There is a pattern structure, a logic to it.
So perversion is structured and regular, not exceptional. Perversion isn’t an exception to a pre-established norm. Freudian theory and poststructuralism both show us how norms are established after the fact and then projected back as origin/original. Perversion is the exception to a norm or a rule, but rather the exception itself is the way that norm or rule is established and maintained.
This is another aside: I went to see a philosophy talk many years ago in Berkeley, CA on “dance as a way of knowing.” I remember honing in on how when you watch a dance performance as a non-dancer, that’s a different experience than watching a performance as a dancer. Because as someone who has danced in the past, who has done some of those moves, you have this bodily reaction and relationship to those movements. You know internally what it feels like to move that way. A lot of learning how to dance is making that connection between what movement is and what it looks like, the shapes your body is making, connecting the inside and the outside.
And so, I wonder if people who are asexual watch porn differently. Likewise, if someone experiences a murder in their family, how does true crime feel? Someone who has been terrorized, what is the relationship between their body/bodily sensations and the representation of horror. And then that leads me to think about all the images we have been seeing, over these past two years, of genocide, in so many horrible forms, that feels also like terror.
This piece lays out a way for us to be able to approach, with some intelligence, the genre of pornography at a time when there was a lot of hoopla around trying to define what pornography was, largely in order to try to ban it.1 And it’s super hard to define what pornography is, but one easy definition would be something that is made to turn you on. So it’s made to evoke a bodily sensation or to have a bodily reaction. And if you put that next to horror and the weepies (melodramas), you can see that pornography is not exceptional in that, in fact, all art is made to evoke feeling, and arguably, all displays of feeling are excessive.
Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2-13.