This book challenges common sense understandings of the unconscious effects of cinema and visual culture. It explores the castrating power of the early modern witch and the historical belief that pregnant women could manipulate and distort body image as figurative analogies for feminist theories of objectification and the male gaze. Through developing this history as an impure but lively analogy, this book serves as a provocation against the dominant imagining of objectification.
It offers innovative analyses of a wide-ranging selection of films and topics including Joyce Wieland'sWater Sark(1964) and its resonance with the works of John Cage and Stan Brakhage;the documentaryHistoires d'A(History of Abortion, 1973), which contributed to the successful legalisation of abortion in France; the Hong Kong horror filmDumplings(Jiaozi, é¤å 2004), where foetal cannibalism serves up an image of censorship; and the dual productionsThe Book of Mary(Le livre de Marie) andHail Mary(Je vous salue, Marie, 1985) by Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard that figure a self-reproducing virgin who hears herself while remaining a virgin, unseen.
