“Boundaries, emotion and wellbeing in film and other media”
When? 13 March, 2-4pm.
Where? Kennedy Seminar Room 3
Hybrid? Not this time, given the sensitive nature of included topics.
The participants of this CHMH Lab, Dr Katja Haustein from Comparative Literature, Dr Margrethe Bruun Vaage from Film and Media and Dr Afroditi Pina from Psychology, will approach the category of the boundary from very different starting points, using examples from film and other media that illustrate various challenges people face when setting boundaries: all humans need to set and maintain boundaries in order to protect themselves and their personal sphere, and such boundary-setting is important for wellbeing. How are boundaries set, and what role is played by emotions such as anger? We will explore boundaries from respect to playful overstepping, and to serious violations, such as the exploration of rape in fiction film and of revenge-porn in real life, developing our ideas in an interactive and openly conversational manner.
Trigger warning: please be advised that rape and sexual abuse will be discussed (though no explicit clips shown)
Tact, Touch, and the Media: An example from Truffaut
Katja will approach the topic by drawing on material from her new book, Alone with Others: An Essay on Tact in Five Modernist Encounters (CUP, 2023). Alone with Others looks at tact as an intuitive and creative mode of negotiating the appropriate distance between people. Departing from conventional debates that associate intimacy with affection and distance with alienation, Haustein shows how tact becomes significant in times of crisis, when established codes of sociability disintegrate, and new modes of communication have to be found. She reconstructs tact’s conceptual history from the late eighteenth century to the present, to then focus on three major periods of socio-political upheaval that have marked the history of twentieth-century Europe: the two World Wars and – different, but equally significant in terms of changing traditional ways of living together – the student revolution of 1968. In a series of reading encounters with key authors and filmmakers (incl. Proust, Plessner, Adorno, Truffaut, and Barthes), Alone with Others invites us to reconsider how we engage with other people, (moving) images, and texts, and gauges the significance of tact in our time.
Dr Katja Haustein is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Kent.
Women’s anger and the female avenger in film: an example from Women Talking
Margrethe will present some ideas from her forthcoming book The Female Avenger, Women’s Anger and Rape-Revenge Film and Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Although she explores some very explicit films in this book, in this presentation she will focus on a group of women in a religious community in the US in the fiction film Women Talking (Sarah Polley, 2022) as they discuss their options after facing years of sexual abuse. This is not a rape-revenge film, but one of the options the women consider is to stay and fight, and some characters do give voice to vindictive anger, which is the emotion Margrethe concentrates on in her book. A central argument in The Female Avenger is that anger can be apt, valuable and important: anger is a way to maintain and communicate boundaries and self-respect. Yet anger has not conventionally been readily accessible to women. She will sum up some of the important functions of anger, and why the imperative to forgive instead of feeling vindictive anger comes with problematic political implications – as is so beautifully articulated in Women Talking.
Dr Margrethe Bruun Vaage is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at Kent.
Image Based Sexual Abuse and its impact on victims: An example from My Blonde GF
Afroditi will discuss her research on Image Based Sexual Abuse and it’s multiple facets as well as the well documented and variform impacts of such behaviours on the victims who tend to be women (although not exclusively). The discussion will follow an excerpt from the recent documentary My Blonde GF (OKRE, Tyke Films, 2023) that follows the story of writer Helen Mort whose world was turned upside down when she discovered that her face had been digitally edited onto images of women in sexually explicit and violent videos. Helen shares the impact that deepfake pornography has had on her and her life, and challenges a culture that treats women’s appearance and image as property, while protecting the perpetrators’ anonymity.
Dr Afroditi Pina is a Reader in Forensic Psychology at Kent