Arya Ray displays on attending the one-day convention Gender & Style: Medical Humanities and the Transferring Picture, held at Durham College in September 2024.
Visible representations of embodied experiences typically maintain the facility to maneuver the beholder, and it’s conceivable that the shifting picture can thus be used to disclose a variety of subjectivities, epistemologies, and structural inequalities utilizing instruments of visible illustration and narrative storytelling. Via the lens of the shifting picture, this at some point convention held at Durham College zoomed in on the entanglements of gender and style by a broad vary of crucial views not solely by well being and a Medical Humanities lens, however from interdisciplinary views throughout Literary Research, Artwork Historical past and Visible Research, Movie Research, Important Concept, Queer and Trans Concept and Feminist Philosophy.
This evaluate will deal with 4 shows – one from every of the day’s panels – that collectively summarise my key takeaways from the convention as an attendee.
I’m haunted: Approaching the Unspeakable
‘To be haunted and write from that location … will not be a technique or consciousness you may merely undertake or adapt as a set of latest guidelines and an id; it produces its personal insights and blindnesses’ (Gordon, p. 22).
Edyta Simply (Linköping College), the primary speaker of the day, develops this very methodology to navigate the ‘insights and blindnesses’ primarily based on her first-hand expertise of endometriosis (Gordon, 1997, p. 22). Amongst a panel centred on gendered, bodily experiences of ‘unspeakability’ and their relation to the horror style, Simply recounts and analyses her personal expertise of sickness. Her presentation was structured as a sequence of excerpts from her personal strategy of writing about her sickness by juxtaposing bodily and medical encounters with tropes from supernatural horror, interspersed with repetitive stills from Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015). Simply talks in regards to the verisimilitude between the in poor health physique and the haunted physique and posits that narrativising the physique’s expertise of continual sickness, which will be unfamiliar and incomprehensible, by supernatural horror, which makes use of acquainted strategies to strategy the incomprehensible, can facilitate a reconciliation between oneself and one’s in poor health physique.
Simply’s written items mirror the construction of the presentation itself, alternating between descriptions of the film and of her embodied expertise: ‘Immediately there may be an excessive amount of of me in me—an odd “lump” is exhibiting on the correct, decrease facet of the stomach and it strikes, after which it disappears deep below the pores and skin. A sudden clapping of the arms, the clock that stops at 3.07 am each evening, an odd odor within the rooms, a bumping on the door’ (The Conjuring, 2013).
Presumably, by the items, Simply is telling her personal physique’s story to herself as she asks questions akin to ‘what do you worry?’ and ‘will I ever be again?’, however this methodology which Simply says is ‘undoubtedly near writing remedy’ (Simply, 2024, pp. 201-214), universally speaks to experiences of sickness. Supernatural entities typically possess the facility to expel familiarity by the classical levels of demonic possession: infestation, oppression and possession (The Conjuring, 2013), however Simply’s methodology recontextualises these motifs of horror films to develop a vocabulary for approaching one’s personal expertise of sickness – ‘I don’t know what it’s, however it haunts me’ (infestation), ‘consider me’ (oppression), ‘seizing management’ (possession). In the identical manner a ‘susceptible’ physique’s encounter with a malicious spirit can result in a schism between the thoughts and the physique, the physique’s encounter with continual sickness can render it unfamiliar, and medical narratives will be simply as defamiliarizing. Utilizing the language of horror films and the expertise of watching a horror film arms one with a vocabulary. Figuring out a demon’s title provides you energy over the demon, and creating a vocabulary to your sickness prepares you to struggle the anxiousness and loneliness that may accompany continual sickness.
Written in first and second individual, the items elicit an emotional response from the viewers although the expertise of sickness is very personalised. Via storytelling, Simply proposes that this not solely devises a language for oneself but in addition prepares oneself for conversations with medical personnel – overwriting the normal medical narrative of ache scales and normality with extra descriptive and subjective narratives of embodied sickness. Edyta Simply’s presentation was marked by vulnerability and highlighted the position of the shifting picture in approaching the unspeakable, unravelling infinities such because the thoughts/physique break up and the position of movie in contextualising our personal our bodies that most of the following audio system echoed.
(Not) One feather at a time: Fostering Multiplicity
Cat Chong, a PhD Candidate at Nanyang Technological College Singapore, introduced on genrecripping human-animal entanglements locations its deal with Abi Palmer Invents the Climate, a sequence of 4 splendidly refreshing and experimental brief movies that includes a collaboration between writer-artist Abi Palmer and her two cats, Cha-U-Kao and Lola Lola.
Abi Palmer Invents the Climate is structured round Palmer’s experiences with fibromyalgia, and the way she makes use of multimedia modes of artwork to navigate this expertise through the Covid-19 pandemic. Palmer metaphorically ‘invents the climate’ for her cats, utilizing foraged objects to create synthetic indoor environments which might be ‘cat-accessible’ to reflect the surface climate situations. Via Palmer’s masterful amalgamation of the environmental movie, collage, and autobiographical modes of storytelling, Chong explores the position of crip-queer pleasure in reorganising and questioning energy buildings of information and meaning-making.
Palmer’s introduces components of the surface world to her cats ‘one feather at a time’ – trying to recreate each function of every season that she thinks are central to it akin to Rain for autumn, Fog for winter, Mild for Spring and Warmth for summer season. This methodology prompts Chong to ask, ‘what style is the climate?’. This query presents a key entry level into their interrogation of how style, and certainly gender, is captured inside superfluous layers of distinctions. Gender finds its etymological origin in concepts of style and thus Chong exhibits that the sociocultural categorisation of style into disciplines and gender into labels has the potential to be reframed as embodied types of information.
Chong’s presentation subsequently addressed Palmer’s purposeful untethering from verified establishments of genres by disrupting the viewers’ preconceived relations between the tactile signifier and the summary signified – akin to a disco ball to carry out the position of the Solar. Historically ‘common’ phenomena are queered by the cats’ defamiliarized experiences. Chong speaks about how this destabilisation of style can foster a way of multiplicity of id (Allen, Felicity, 2023). Palmer makes an attempt to regulate one thing that’s uncontrollable, and on this, her illustration is absurdly pressing and wildly frantic which intentionally ‘unstraightens’ methods of obligatory able-bodiedness and heteropatriarchal modes of actualisation.
Chong makes use of Palmer’s work, positioned on the confluence of the arthouse movie and nature documentary, to posit the crucial for dissolving institutional classes of style/gender utilizing crip-queer discourses. This dissolution, they posit, utilises its multiplicity of disruption to productively and actively create new types of information.
Chong’s presentation was a part of the panel on objects, our bodies and their manifestations in artists’ interpretations of shifting photographs, with shows about working as a inventive act of poesis in addition to fluidity in embodied inventive practices, however the themes of their discuss resonated throughout panels with presenters akin to Anjana Menon, who spoke in regards to the multiplicity of gendered illustration in Malayalam cinema.
We leak and seethe: Representing, and Holding Consideration
Lynn Wray, Analysis Fellow on the College of Leeds, introduced the viewers’s consideration to a collaborative mission between the LivingBodiesObjects workforce on the College of Leeds and the Bhopal Medical Attraction that sought to formulate progressive modes of representing the persevering with disaster of water contamination in Bhopal, with a deal with drawing and holding consideration.
In 1984, Bhopal noticed what has been termed the world’s worst industrial catastrophe – an operational oversight precipitated a chemical response within the Union Carbide pesticide plant and an estimated minimal of 500,000 individuals of close by cities had been uncovered to a extremely poisonous fuel. Whereas the world’s consideration was drawn to this second, the sluggish poisoning of the water our bodies of Bhopal have escaped illustration, and Wray’s discuss highlighted the mission’s modes of visualising the ‘sluggish violence’ that was wrought upon the communities in Bhopal and continues to impression their existence even at the moment.
‘By sluggish violence I imply a violence that happens step by step and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that’s dispersed throughout time and area, an attritional violence that’s sometimes not seen as violence in any respect’ (Nixon, 2011, p. 2).
Wray introduced visible examples of proof of this ‘sluggish violence’, which included each embodied signs in addition to results displaced upon materials objects. Images of home objects akin to buckets and bowls which have quickly corroded as a result of sluggish poisoning of their water methods represented the impacted communities’ sluggish and extended struggle for clear water and environment friendly supporting infrastructure. A noteworthy theme of this presentation was the mission’s deal with devising a mode of illustration that not solely captured the eye of the viewer, but in addition holds one’s consideration past the preliminary encounter. The position of the shifting picture in prolonging the second of encounter right here was clear, as Wray launched the scrollamation drawings that her workforce had produced – slow-moving photographs of the sluggish contamination of fabric and water our bodies – on a digital storytelling platform referred to as Shorthand. The scrollamation advised the story of pure erosion caused by the sluggish violence of contaminated water, and compelled the viewer to have interaction with the visuals for longer durations of time.
Sickness will all the time keep in my data: Actualising Hidden Experiences
My fourth and closing theme that was highlighted and reiterated all through the Gender and Style convention was the position of the shifting picture and extra broadly, medical humanities, in actualising hidden experiences of sickness, marginalisation, and othering.
This theme was captured in Marta Cenedese’s splendidly fascinating presentation, reflecting on Lotta Petronella’s documentary movie Själö: Island of Souls (2020), a part of the concluding panel on areas and actualisations of insanity and wellbeing. The documentary, primarily based on archival analysis, modern observations, and meditative visible storytelling, tells the story of Själö, an island which has been house to individuals with leprosy, incurable mentally in poor health ladies who had been past rehabilitation, and organic analysis institutes over time. It intertwines the island’s pure magnificence with its melancholic historical past, utilizing non-conventional approaches to sequential storytelling to replicate on themes of reminiscence, isolation, sickness and shared meaning-making.
Cenedese explores the haptic dimensions of movie as a medium, positing the digital camera as an organ of tactile, oral and visible contact. Själö: Island of Souls makes use of instruments of juxtaposition and assemblage to layer a multiplicity of voices and deadlines that intersect and overlap – hauntingly stunning visuals, a meditative narrative voice, and historic context. Cenedese makes use of materials proof akin to recovered fragments of letters that had been written by the confined ladies of the island however by no means despatched to make seen what had been seen previously, however as a result of temporality of the island, had been tough to voice in hindsight. The hauntings of the island within the type of the sicknesses of its inhabitants, are made seen by visible storytelling within the type of motifs that characterize the island’s ‘sluggish poisoning’ akin to aspen bushes, bugs, and shutting home windows. Because the viewers on the convention sat nonetheless for a number of moments to look at excerpts from the movie, the pictures of nightfall within the movie had been mirrored by the rising darkness seen from the venue’s home windows, and the facility of the shifting picture to deliver the unfamiliar shut was palpable.
The movie juxtaposes the gorgeous flora of the island with the palpable nature of the physique by what Cenedese calls ‘haptic shocks’ – embodied voiceovers which might be antithetic to their visuals, urging the viewer to dissociate from the sweetness and discover new meanings by these resonances. The meditative visuals are interspersed by moments of sudden contact – cupped arms within the rain, a hand on the blueprints of the asylum – arms extending by time and historical past to the touch these which have been rendered invisible. Cenedese concluded with a quote from the director that options within the documentary:
‘Once I was 32, I used to be taken to a psychiatric ward. Within the admission letter the trigger is “psychosis and worry of God” … I haven’t seen a psychiatrist in 5 years. I’m effectively. However my illness will all the time keep in my data.’
Via this conclusion, Petronella makes her personal story of sickness part of a collective of girls that stretches throughout time. The movie galvanises a mode of conceptualising sickness that extends past the person to the collective by the layering of historic resonances, poetic illustration, haptic temporality and synaesthesia.
Conclusion
This interdisciplinary and thrilling confluence of concepts was hosted by Durham College’s Discovery Platform for Medical Humanities and Linköping College’s Division of Gender Research, Division of Thematic Research. The Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham investigates what they name ‘hidden experiences’, and this wealthy and interdisciplinary convention delineated a variety of such experiences of sickness, insanity, wellbeing and marginalisation. Approaching the shifting picture as a mode, type, style or software, the audio system addressed the query: what position does the shifting picture play?
Whereas I don’t search to oversimplify what was an especially various and nuanced array of views, the 4 broad themes highlighted on this evaluate try and encapsulate the presenters’ solutions to this. The shifting picture can strategy the unspeakable, it will probably foster multiplicity of identities, it will probably characterize the marginalised and maintain one’s consideration, and it will probably actualise hidden experiences.
Convened by Veronica Heney, Fiona Johnstone and Edyta Simply, this convention was effectively organised and enthusiastically attended, with numbers within the viewers solely rising all through the day. Discussions on the finish of every panel and on the closing of the day mirrored upon shared infinities all through the convention, 4 of which I’ve introduced right here, and revealed a number of novel routes of exploration, collaboration and experimentation that may as soon as once more deliver the medical humanities, artwork, and allied disciplines to a generative confluence of concepts and meaning-making.
In regards to the Creator:
Arya is an Occasions and Fellowship Coordinator on the Institute for Medical Humanities and is eager about gothic literature with a deal with South Asian tradition and folklore. He’s additionally a Analysis Assistant with the ReaderBank mission, finding out experiences of studying and creativeness. Learn one other evaluate by Arya right here and observe his work on X @bhooterraja_08.
References:
Allen, R. (2023). Troublesome and Unhealthy. The London Overview of Books.
Allen, Felicity (2023). Style and Multiplicity within the Transferring Picture.
Gordon, A. (1997). Ghostly Issues: Haunting and the Sociological Creativeness. College of Minnesota Press.
Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015). Directed by Leigh Whannell.
Simply, Edyta. (2024). ‘Horror & Life: Telling a Story in Order To not Run’. Advances in Utilized Sociology, 14, pp. 201-214.
Nixon, R. (2011). Sluggish Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard College Press.
Palmer, Abi (2023). Abi Palmer Invents the Climate. Collection of experimental brief movies. https://www.abipalmer.com/abi-palmer-invents-the-weather
Petronella, L. (2020). Själö: Island of Souls. Documentary Movie.
Schillace, Brandy, host. “LivingBodiesObjects and the Tragedy at Bhopal.” Medical Humanities Podcast, July 11, 2024. https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2024/07/11/livingbodiesobjects-and-the-tragedy-at-bhopal/.
The Conjuring (2013). Directed by James Wan.
