On Thursday 5 of July at 6 pm Six chairs books and guest-host essayist and cinema curator Paulina Drėgvaitė will run its eighth twice monthly Open Reading Group – Clap when you want to! – which is an invitation to read ahead, collectively discuss and support dear bodies of women, of the earthly and the technological, and seek the joy of learning the planetary together.
With this weeks readings we will talk about film theorist‘s Laura Mulvey‘s seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‘ (1975), where she views cinema as a machine of pleasure, desire and the male gaze. Delving into a variety of examples of narrative, classical cinema, Mulvey looks for an alternative, feminist cinema, opening up possibilities of a different kind of visual regime. This essay, which, since its publishing has become a key text in feminist film studies, serves as this reading group’s point of departure. During this session, we will discuss both the essay and its critiques, and explore further realms of pleasure and displeasure, wandering into the notion of the abject, as written about by Luce Irigaray and Barbara Creed, horror films, the monstrous feminine and space aliens.
READINGS AND MATERIALS: Barbara Creed „Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: an Imaginary Abjection“, Screen, Volume 27, Issue 1, 1 January 1986, pp. 44-55 and pp. 56-70; Laura Mulvey „Visual Pleasure and Narrrative Cinema“, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, 1 October 1975, pp. 6-18. Materials are in English. Conversations might swing between Lithuanian/ English depending on participants’ mood and preferences.
TO SIGN-UP AND RECEIVE MATERIALS, please write to info@sixchairsbooks.lt; space is very very limited, but, if necessary we can move around the KAH building. The session will take place at the bookstore (Kauno menininkų namai / V. Putvinskio 56, Kaunas) from 6 to 8 pm. It is free and fresh beverages are provided.
CLAP IF YOU WANT TO!
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Inspired by the saying ‘If you can’t read a body, you’ll never finish a book’ from ‘The Great Outdoors’ (graphic novel by Monika Janulevičiūtė and Monika Kalinauskaitė), we believe that learning sensitivity of reading bodies could lead us to reading more or, rather, finding substantially new ways of reading books. This ORG concerns itself both with the critical feminist practices and its legacies, the cosmical and the comical, & material interdependence and suffering from ills of another species, engaging with hybrid thinkers working along the lines of cultural theory, biology, feminist sciences and technology.
