Nicholas Chare

Introduction: Trans-: Across/Beyond

In 2012 at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian archives in Los Angeles, Cassils gave a first performance of the ongoing artwork Becoming an Image (a work that combines performance, photography and sculpture). In a dark room, Cassils repeatedly aggressed a 2000lb clay block, kicking and punching it. This sustained assault was recorded intermittently by flash photography. The photographer’s camera flash seared images of Cassils working over the clay into the retinas of those present. These transitory visions of the work in progress foregrounded its resistance to fixity, its studied elusiveness. Cassils has since exhibited some of the photographs taken that day. Subsequent to one performance at a solo show, Body of Work, held at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York, Cassils showed the remains of the pummelled block as a sculpture, After. In an echo of Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961), After was displayed accompanied by a sound installation piece, Ghost, a recording of the artist’s earlier violent attacks on the clay block. Ghost provided ‘sound-images’ of After’s production. Becoming an Image was originally intended to be site-specific, a one-off, but is now conceived of as a work in process, a becoming without envisioned end.

Handling Pressures: Analysing Touch in American Films about Youth Sport.

This paper examines how films produced in the USA in the past 10 years and featuring the coaching of youth sport, represent the issue of touch during instruction and training. Touch in such films is figured in diverse ways ranging from pats of reassurance and hugs of congratulation to cuffs of disapprobation. Touch is also occasionally depicted differently, dependent upon the ethnicity and gender of the central characters in specific films. These distinctions are evaluated for what they reveal about the nuances of understandings of touch in film portrayals of sport education in American high schools. The difficulty of interpreting physical contact between coaches and athletes in these films, and what this reveals about the problem of policing touch in general in educational settings, is explored. Finally, the paper examines how the films expose the intricacy of tactile encounters in ways that challenge the judiciousness of risk-averse ‘no-touch’ policies and practices in sports coaching.

Introduction: gesture in film

In his classic study, Gesture, Adam Kendon describes the visible actions that comprise utterances (Kendon, 2004, pp. 1–2). These visible utterances can occur in conjunction with, or independently to, speech. Kendon’s definition of gesture draws attention to it as a deed and a doing. Gesture is an activity, a product of energy and motion. Human gestures occur as a result of particular movements of the body, of the face (such as rolling the eyes, winking), the neck (nodding, shaking the head), the hands (the V sign, waving), the shoulders (shrugging), the knees (genuflecting), the torso (bowing, turning your back on someone), the buttocks (mooning, twerking) or combinations thereof. Many gestures form pictures through specific motions: outlining an absent object’s dimensions or mimicking exploits. David McNeill distinguishes between imagistic and non-imagistic gestures. For him, as Kendon summarises, “imagistic gestures are those in which movements are made that are interpreted as depicting the shape of an object, displaying an action of some kind, or representing some pattern of movement” (Kendon, 2004, pp. 99–100). These kinds of gestures are moving representations of acts or artefacts: motion pictures of a kind. If gestures are often imagistic then connecting gesture and film, as this special issue proposes to do, is an evident, if not unproblematic, move to make. It is, of course, easy to examine gestures made by actors in films. These frequently form an integral dimension to mise en scène, a bodily contribution to mood. In 12 Angry Men (Dir. Sidney Lumet, USA, 1957), for example, the gestures of each of the jurors play a major role in establishing their character and their shifting positions within the evolving power dynamic in the jury room. The thoughtfulness that an actor and director dedicate to gesture is eloquently attested to by Carol Mayo Jenkins’s coda to the issue. In a beautiful exploration of the actor’s approach to gesture in their craft, Jenkins draws attention to how gestures move beyond words. Visible utterances are frequently carefully choreographed to lend emotional weight to a scene. The dramatic power of gesture is obvious in Festen (Dir. Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark, 1998), in which the central character Christian, a child abuse survivor, repeatedly, nervously rubs his hands as if endeavouring to remove a stain. Here the actor playing Christian, Ulrich Thomsen, consciously cultivates a physical symptom of trauma, a bodily manifestation of the memory of unspeakable events to communicate psychic distress to the spectator. The gesture, however, is obviously meant to be viewed as an unconscious one. Gestures, as utterances, are not always the product of conscious intent. Some gesticulations emerge unbidden, indexing the agency of the unconscious in bodily communication. Gestures, chattering fingers in Christian’s circumstance, betray repressed memories. The capacity for bodies to suggest psychic trauma is considered in Nicholas Chare’s “Gesture in Shoah” which, building on his earlier work regarding how gesture as a suggestive form of pressure points towards aspects of psychic life beyond signification

Literary Veins: Women's bodybuilding, muscle worship and abject performance

This article examines the erotic practice of muscle worship through the prism of Julia Kristevas concept of abjection. Muscle worship is a form of BDSM activity which usually involves the erotic veneration of muscle, preferably that of bodybuilders, by way of activities such as caressing, kissing, licking, and massaging their muscles. The analysis draws primarily on Kristevas exploration of Louis-Ferdinand Célines abject oeuvre and on the queer theoretical writings of Adrian Rifkin to make sense of this pursuit. The article traces how muscle worship assumes a similar role to the literary examples explored in Powers of Horror, acting as a means to purge the abject. The sessions, however, are more of the genre of theatre than the novel. This theatrical dimension is investigated at length both in relation to muscle worship and to BDSM more broadly.

Pressing the Flesh

only in psychology and philosophy, but also in theatre and literary criticism, for example), today he is little known, and his work largely ignored outside Finland. In more than one respect Kaila’s thinking seems ‘outdated’ because it is so heavily context-related (which is obvious even in Livingston’s presentation). As such, a sharp contrast between Kaila and Bergman emerges when it comes to the vitality, vigour and attractiveness of their respective philosophical insights. In an important sense Bergman’s philosophizing has passed the test of time, and Kaila’s has not. Granted, the latter may have shaped the thinking of the former, just as any good master does, but eventually the disciple has overtaken the master (again, as good disciples do). That Bergman used the cinematic medium in the process is only further confirmation that cinema is sometimes philosophy. As one follows Livingston’s comprehensive presentation of the Kaila-Bergman case, one cannot help asking oneself: Is it not really Kaila’s philosophy that plays an ancillary role here? Does not this case invalidate (or significantly challenge) Livingston’s thesis about the fundamentally pedagogical function of cinema in its relation to philosophy?

Policing Technology: Listening to Cop Culture in The Wire

This article attends to the television show The Wire’s (2002–2008) soundtrack, demonstrating some of the ways in which it specifically seeks to engage the ear of its audience. The ways in which The Wire explores the roles of both sound and vision in law enforcement are examined. The article suggests that the show draws attention to often overlooked acoustic aspects of police culture. The Wire demonstrates how the ever increasing importance of technologies of surveillance, such as closed‐circuit television and wiretaps, in police culture has contributed to a reorientation of the profession. This shift in the nature of policing, it is argued, has had significant ramifications for what has traditionally been perceived as a masculine occupation. New technologies used in law enforcement have become symbolically coded as feminine. It is a coding that has caused a crisis of masculinity for some policemen, a phenomenon which The Wire picks up on. The article then goes on to argue that despite its nuanced portrayal of the impact of technology on police culture, the show ultimately represents law enforcement as a profession that is still dominated by men, as evinced by a paucity of women’s voices. It concludes by considering how the crisis in masculinity explored in The Wire can be understood as a recurring trope in the work of David Simon, which is also present in Generation Kill (2008).

Transcribing the corporeal: physical feminism, autobiography and the intermedial

Abstract This article will analyse two autobiographies published by British athletes Jessica Ennis and Victoria Pendleton, who won gold medals (in the heptathlon and the keirin, a sprint cycling event, respectively) at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. In the run-up to the Olympics, Ennis and Pendleton were often portrayed by the media as ‘poster girls’ for the British team. Their perceived physical attractiveness was frequently privileged over their athletic achievements, undercutting their physical feminist credentials. The first half of this article considers how the women negotiate their popular representations and seek to conform to norms of feminine comportment and objectifying media constructs. The second half of the article focuses on the potential for the autobiographies to provide counter-narratives to the limiting media representation of the women as icons of beauty. It examines the hitherto neglected roles played by photographs in sporting autobiographies. The autobiographies are read as intermedial and the complex interplay between text and image is analysed to investigate whether it is possible for the athletes to communicate something of their vital physicality through life-writing.

Landscape into Portrait: Reflections on Lili Elbe and Trans* Aesthetics

In 1931, the memoir Fra mand til kvinde: Lili Elbe’s bekendelser [From Man to Woman: Lili Elbe’s Confessions] was published in Denmark. Using pseudonyms, the account details the life of Lili Elvenes (referred to as Lili Elbe in the book) who was born Einar Wegener (referred to as Andreas Sparre in the book) and who practiced as an artist under that name until undergoing sex reassignment surgery. When it was first published in English translation in 1933, the illustrated memoir of Lili Elvenes edited by Niels Hoyer was entitled Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Sex Change – The True Story of the Miraculous Transformation of the Danish Painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre). The unillustrated mass market paperback, published in 1953 by the Popular Library, also used this title. Upon its reissue in 2004, however, the subtitle of the autobiography was modified to The First Sex Change – A Portrait of Lili Elbe, drawing attention to the perceived primacy of the change or transformation effected by Elbe and also introducing a play on words. Portraits can comprise verbal descriptions of a person but the term is also commonly used in art to refer to a likeness of a person that is made from life. A trace of Einar Wegener, whose name is now excised from the subtitle, endures through the reference to an artistic genre. Wegener was an artist but he was a landscapist not a portraitist. It was his wife, Gerda Wegener (née Gottlieb) (known as Grete in the memoir), who built a reputation in portraiture.

Sports coaching on film

This special issue, “Sports Coaching on Film”, sets out to analyse representations of sports coaches in film and to indicate some of the ways in which the study of film depictions of coaches might be informative for actual sports coaching. The project was inspired, in significant part, by Emma Poulton’s and Matthew Roderick’s ground-breaking special edition of Sport in Society, “Sports in Films”. In their Introduction to the special issue, Poulton and Roderick draw attention to how “constructions and representations of sport and athletes have been marginalised in terms of serious analysis within the long-standing academic study of films and documentaries” (2008, p. 107). There were notable exceptions to this state of neglect, scholars who had already brought the study of sports films to the fore included Aaron Baker, particularly through his book Contesting Identities, and Deborah Tudor who had authored Hollywood’s Vision of Team Sports (Baker, 2003; Tudor, 1997). The state of affairs described by Poulton and Roderick has subsequently changed with a number of important monographs and edited collections published in the past five years (e.g. Babington, 2014; Chare, 2015; Crosson, 2013; Ingle & Sutera, 2013; Lieberman, 2015). These studies foreground the importance of the study of sports films for increasing our understanding of class, ethnicity, gender, race and sexuality as they are articulated in specific cultural, social, and historical contexts. Some of these recent investigations briefly explore the significance of the figure of the sports coach. Lieberman, for instance, devotes a chapter of her book Sports Heroines on Film to portrayals of female coaches (pp. 126–150). There is, however, still no in-depth study focussed specifically on portrayals of coaches and coaching in sports films. This is a considerable omission given coaching forms a particularly influential dimension of athlete development. Our special

Sound coaching: tending to the heard in American football films

Abstract This study focuses on how the use of sound, particularly dialogue, in American football films contributes towards the depiction of varied forms of coaching behaviour and practice. Building on a pre-existing investigation that employed Any Given Sunday as a research tool to analyse motivational speeches, the study begins by addressing some of the difficulties that potentially accompany film-based research into sports coaching. It then examines how differing approaches to coaching involving emotional intelligence or the calculated use of performance data are communicated through dialogue such as motivational speeches. The study concludes by attending to the interrelated issues of sexism and zoomorphism in cinematic portrayals of emotion-driven football coaching.