FEMINIST HORROR THEORY – Filmic Forms and Female Identity: Rewriting in the Key of Gender
Rossana Galimi
research: Seminar
FEMINIST HORROR THEORY – Filmic Forms and Female Identity: Rewriting in the Key of Gender
Rossana Galimi
In this seminar, Rossana Galimi will present her PhD research. Her project examines contemporary horror films by women filmmakers, employing a feminist perspective and utilising the framework of the so-called “body genres”. It seeks to understand if a current of feminist horror does exist and what its narratological and ideological meanings are. Furthermore, it aims to investigate if and how the emergence of a female gaze in horror can manipulate and reconfigure the typical features of this genre and its subgenres, rewriting cinematic forms and languages, and deconstructing patriarchal conceptions of subjectivity and gaze. The research also aims to challenge traditional feminist film theory, which is based on psychoanalytic theory and rarely considers corporeality, in order to elaborate a “feminist horror theory” that takes into account embodied perception as well as a notion of the body not as the shell of the unconscious but as the inscribed surface that constitutes identity. This theoretical framework will be developed also in relation to the genre’s evolution within immersive media.
Biography
Rossana Galimi
Rossana Galimi (BA Philosophy, 2019, University of Padua; MA Philosophical Sciences, 2022, University of Milan) is a PhD student in cotutelle in Philosophy and Human Sciences at the University of Milan, and in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research delves into the rewriting of the horror genre by contemporary women filmmakers, studied from the perspective of gender studies and the so-called “body genre”. She is also an affiliated member of the ERC project AN-ICON, in which she is carrying out research on gender issues in immersive environments, on the evolution of the horror genre in virtual reality (VR) with a feminist approach, and on gender theory between cinema and immersive media.
research: seminar
FEMINIST HORROR THEORY – Filmic Forms and Female Identity: Rewriting in the Key of Gender
Rossana Galimi
In this seminar, Rossana Galimi will present her PhD research. Her project examines contemporary horror films by women filmmakers, employing a feminist perspective and utilising the framework of the so-called “body genres”. It seeks to understand if a current of feminist horror does exist and what its narratological and ideological meanings are. Furthermore, it aims to investigate if and how the emergence of a female gaze in horror can manipulate and reconfigure the typical features of this genre and its subgenres, rewriting cinematic forms and languages, and deconstructing patriarchal conceptions of subjectivity and gaze. The research also aims to challenge traditional feminist film theory, which is based on psychoanalytic theory and rarely considers corporeality, in order to elaborate a “feminist horror theory” that takes into account embodied perception as well as a notion of the body not as the shell of the unconscious but as the inscribed surface that constitutes identity. This theoretical framework will be developed also in relation to the genre’s evolution within immersive media.