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October 2000, Week 3

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Subject:
From:
Janet Staiger <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 18 Oct 2000 23:55:37 -0500
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CALL FOR ESSAYS

Intentions Re-Figured—The Consumption and Production of
Hollywood Cinema:  Intersections in Nationality, Race, Gender, and Sexuality

A Proposal for an Anthology
edited by David Gerstner and Janet Staiger

"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave
it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in
order.  At least spare us their morality when we write."
                                Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"

This edited anthology will include essays that consider how directors,
producers, scriptwriters, and other Hollywood and American artists have
consumed Hollywood cinema in relationship to cinema and the other arts and
how this cultural consumption enabled their creative practices in producing
new American films. We are particularly concerned to think through how
nationalities, race, gender, and sexuality are factors within these
practices of consumption and production. Thus, the implications of the
intersections of these individuals’ identities in the act of creative
production require an extensive historical and textual analysis of their
particular contexts.

Theoretical and Historiographical Objectives

This collection has several historiographical objectives. First, it attempts
to return to the problem of biographism, authorship, and intentionality in
media, concerns problematized by such writers as Michael Baxandall, Andre
Bazin, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault.  While we acknowledge the
difficulties associated with asserting agency in the act of production, we
believe that recent work in cultural studies on consumers of media texts
reopens the door to a complexly theorized discussion of creative agency.  If
fans and groups of viewers can be said to produce texts that are
circulated—from simply interesting interpretations to entirely new fan
narratives—then theorizing, in similar ways, the texts that Hollywood
workers produced seems justified. To be clear, we are interested in a
‘biographism’ of cultural consumption and production that draws upon its
complex historical relationship to nation, race, gender, and sexuality.

Second, we wish to emphasize that the work involved in writing the history
of these creative acts of consumption and production is itself an on-going
process which resists a finalized or totalized account of "facts." We are
interested, then, in the transformative possibilities of writing history, or
what Michel de Certeau suggests is the practice of "making history." In this
formulation, history is not History as such. In this historiographical
model, the writing of history is the ongoing re-writing of histories.

Third, we wish to draw upon recent theoretical work that re-conceptualizes
individual identity as constituted via the intersections of material
discourses. Identities bump up against the realities of the social,
political, cultural, and aesthetic circumstances of historical moments. This
is all well and good, but such an image of the subject does not deal with
the concept of agency as a complex circumstance of position-taking. As the
work of several key post-structuralists stress, the question is not simply
an issue of the "death of the author." Rather, the question more fruitfully
posed is "what is an author?" Seen in this light, the  consideration of
agency is a way to revisit the cultural producer not as a privileged
character of cultural ideology, but as a cultural body restrained by that
ideology yet enabled with performative and illocutionary possibilities.
Agency is certainly an act of consumption and production where creative
practice intersects with the complexities of race, gender, sexuality, and
class that ultimately affect agency and experience.  Theorizing this
(contradictory) self has recently been aided by the concept of
"intersectionality."  Indeed, we use the term "intersectionality" as it is
currently theorized in third-wave feminist scholarship and critical race
theory so as to underscore the critical approach we take in this collection
to the human subject. Intersectionality recognizes the interlocking and
relational feature of identities.

Questions for the authors (and readers):
1)  What is at stake for the body in the writing of history through a
theoretical model that queries historical subjectivity and positionality?
2)  In what ways might a radical version of history be written?  How can one
engage in a project that not only explores and complicates acts of
consumption and production in particular contexts, but one that is
theoretically aware of its own gesture as work of writing (in Derrida’s
sense), a work of intervention, in its own contemporary context?
3)  How can the writings of histories serve as an intervention both at the
level of subject-positionality but also in the areas of interdisciplinary
concerns?  This project seeks to open fields of study through an
interdisciplinary model that weaves larger cultural and historical concerns
within a particular field (i.e., film studies).  Can we any longer simply
speak of simply film studies as film studies?  How has cultural studies,
deconstruction, poststructuralism, feminism, queer studies, and so forth
damaged the "disciplines" as disciplines?

Practical Matters

We are calling for essays that consider these issues in relation to specific
individuals or groups of individuals.  Because of our concerns, we would
prefer all cases to involve someone (or group) with at least one
non-hegemonic identity or identification.  We would like the theoretical
issues to be a significant portion of the essay but not to overwhelm an
actual discussion of historical and creative matters.

Ideas, abstracts, partial or full papers should be sent by December 1, 2000, to
David Gerstner <[log in to unmask]) and Janet Staiger
<[log in to unmask]>. A tentative deadline for final papers of
approximately 8,000 to 9,000 words would be December 1, 2001.  New York
University Press is considering this anthology.

David Gerstner is Lecturer at the University of Otago (New Zealand) until
December 6, 2000, and Assistant Professor at the City University of New
York—Staten Island after 1 February 2000.    He is author of "Queer
Modernism: The Cinematic Aesthetic of Vincente Minnelli" in Modernity and
"Queer Angels of History Take it and Leave it From Behind" in The Stanford
Humanities Review. Janet Staiger is the William P. Hobby Centennial
Professor of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.  She is
author of several books including most recently Perverse Spectators:  The
Practices of Film Reception and Blockbuster TV:  Must-See Sitcoms in the
Network Era.

**********************************************************
Janet Staiger
   William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Communication
Department of Radio-Television-Film, CMA 6.128
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712  USA
512-471-6653 (office)
512-329-5104 (home)
512-329-5144 (home fax)
[log in to unmask]

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