Sarah French

The affective sublime in Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

This paper provides a comparative analysis of Lars von Triers Melancholia (2011) and Terrence Malicks The Tree of Life (2011), two recent films that engage with the sublime aesthetic. Bringing together Brian Massumis writing on affect with Jean-François Lyotards understanding of the sublime, we develop the notion of the ‘affective sublime’, a theoretical methodology that locates the sublime experience at the threshold between the cognitive and the corporeal. Drawing upon Lyotards distinction between the modern and postmodern sublime, we suggest that while The Tree of Life establishes the sublime as a central absence within a nostalgic narrative, Melancholia forces a direct collision with the unpresentable. Consequently, in accordance with Massumis delineation between emotion and affect, we suggest that the two films produce different affective responses. The Tree of Life provides absent content with formal and emotional coherence, quelling the feelings of pain and anxiety evoked by the sublime. In contrast, Melancholia refuses correct forms and actualises the potential of affective intensity through an encounter with sublime annihilation. We conclude that the affective sublime opens up new understandings of the interaction between the sublime object and spectator, one in which the visible object is less important than the sublime instant of affective experience.

Australian Higher Education

Australian higher education has evolved into a mature, high-quality, highly internationalized system within the Southeast Asian region. This success is partly an accident of history and geography—a former British colonial nation located in a global region in which demand for high-quality higher education is outstripping the provision capacities and capabilities of neighboring nations—and partly a result of strategic and collaborative national attention to system design, quality assurance, performance monitoring, and overseas marketing. Despite the success in building a high-participation domestic system and a major export industry, Australia must now reform its higher education funding model and re-examine what it means to be internationalized in the context of the rapid development of university systems in Asia and the transnational student flows that will grow over the next decade.

Reassessing the value of university lectures

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the role of the lecture in contemporary higher education. Moving beyond the polarised perspectives that characterise recent debates on the subject, it considers both the potential problems and possible pedagogical, practical and social benefits of the lecture as a mode of teaching and learning. Through an examination of scholarly literature on the pedagogical uses of the lecture as well as recent articles on its place in the future of higher education, we outline the key arguments and highlight some of the problems, contradictions and inconsistencies implicit in the debates. Drawing upon the recurring themes in the literature, we identify seven reasons as to why the lecture continues to be valuable in contemporary higher education. However, we also suggest that more innovative approaches to lecturing as well as alternatives to lectures are needed to adapt to a changing educational environment.

Neoliberal Postfeminism, Neo-burlesque, and the Politics of Affect in the Performances of Moira Finucane

Sarah French examines the relationship between postfeminism, neoliberalism, and neo-burlesque, and suggests that the contemporary neo-burlesque revival can be read as a troubling example of the dual commodification of performance and the female body in neoliberal times. Reflecting the intersection of postfeminism and neoliberal discourses, neo-burlesque performances frequently create paradoxical representations of female subjectivity that promote sexual agency and abstract notions of empowerment at the expense of politics. However, French proposes that there is simultaneously a resistant feminist burlesque performance practice. Examining subversive gestures and moments of embodied intensity in the work of Australian performance artist Moira Finucane, French argues that Finucane intervenes in the smooth continuity of the neo-burlesque genre and works on a micro-political level to instigate an affective break with neoliberal ideology.

Introduction: Staging Queer Feminisms

This chapter introduces the key arguments and theoretical frameworks of the book. It first discusses the state of sexuality and gender politics in contemporary Australia to provide the socio-political context from which the book’s case studies have emerged as sites of intervention and subversion. It then traces the recent history of feminist and queer performance in Australia, suggesting that their trajectories were somewhat divergent before aligning in the mid-2000s. The historical divide between theories of sexuality and gender is explored and a case is made for the productive intersectionality of feminism and queer in contemporary theory and theatre. An examination of Judith Butler’s theories on performativity and drag provides a key framework for the book’s analysis of sexuality and gender in contemporary Australian independent performance.

Queering History, Race and Nation in Sisters Grimm’s Summertime in the Garden of Eden and The Sovereign Wife

This chapter examines two productions by queer theatre company Sisters Grimm, Summertime in the Garden of Eden (2012, 2013) and The Sovereign Wife (2013), which present queer, camp, politically subversive reworkings of historical narratives. Set in the nineteenth century in America’s Deep South and Australia respectively, both plays interrogate the racial politics of national history, employing a complex use of drag that operates across a range of identity categories including gender, sexuality, class and race. By queering mainstream cinematic representations, they deconstruct myths of national identity and expose a history of racism and misogyny. By exploiting the challenge to gender authenticity central to drag performance, Sisters Grimm highlight the socially constructed and performative nature of all identity categories, especially that of race.

Pleasure, Pain and the Politics of Affect: Moira Finucane’s Gotharama and The Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina

This chapter examines two intimate solo works by Australian burlesque artist Moira Finucane: Gotharama (2005 and 2006) and The Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina (2007, 2009, 2010). Gotharama, a ‘faux Victorian Salon’, engages with horror and gothic fiction to explore the affective qualities of abject imagery while Argentina embraces the pleasurable and utopian aspects of a feminist camp aesthetic. Drawing on Brian Massumi’s writing on affect, the chapter argues that these performances demand an analytical model that gives focus to the embodied and experiential aspects of performance as well as their signifying properties. It suggests that by seeking to engage the spectator in moments of sensory experience and embodied intensity, Finucane’s works highlight the potential for affect to enhance the political function of performance.

Feminist Adaptation in The Rabble’s Orlando, Story of O and Frankenstein

This chapter examines three performances by Melbourne-based theatre company The Rabble, Orlando (2012) after Virginia Woolf, Story of O (2013) after Pauline Reage, and Frankenstein (2014) after Mary Shelley, which intertwine their explorations of feminist political themes with visceral imagery, sensory elements and embodied intensities. Drawing on Robert Stam’s theories on adaptation, the chapter suggests that each performance adopts a different approach to adaptation, characterised by their engagement with the notions of intertextuality, metatextuality and hypertextuality. The Rabble employ adaptation as a method with which to reassess the political implications of influential historical literary texts and reimagine them via a critical feminist and queer framework. Each performance dramatically reconfigures its source text to construct a feminist critique of contemporary patriarchal culture.

Queer Femme Drag and Female Narcissism in Yana Alana’s Between the Cracks

This chapter examines the subversive potential of queer femme drag through an analysis of the performance Between the Cracks (2013–2016) by Yana Alana, the larger-than-life persona of Australian cabaret artist Sarah Ward. Employing an expansive understanding of drag that is not based on the necessity to cross the gender boundary, it argues that queer femme drag uses gender parody to expose the performative nature of femininity as well as to challenge heteronormativity. Through her non-normative sexual identity and embodied queer acts, Yana Alana destabilises normative understandings of gender and sexuality, and employs female narcissism as a critical parody and tool of affirmative identity formation.

Spectacle, Community and Memory in the Performance Art of Brown Council

This chapter examines the live performances and video works by Sydney-based performance art collective Brown Council, which interrogate the role of the artist and the function of performance as a form of social and cultural critique, especially as it relates to gender and feminism. Their work retains key political concerns of second-wave feminism, including the need for communality and collaboration between women and a rejection of the female body as an object of visual pleasure. However, they also reframe earlier feminist discourses, parodying the essentialist and polemical nature of much second-wave feminist performance art, and employ a critical queer ambiguity to open up a multiplicity of interpretations.