Animated queerdom: animalistic performativity as transgressive allegory in

The animated film Queer Duck: The Movie (Xeth Feinberg, 2006) criticizes and ironizes contemporary queer subcultures by personified animals (a queer duck, a ‘gaytor’ alligator, a bi-polar bear, and so on) that echo Aesop’s fables, Krylov’s tales, Orwell’s book Animal Farm and icons like Bambi, Mickey Mouse and Angry Bird. Such iconography not only mocks the Biblical association of sodomy and bestiality, but queerly problematizes the relationship between sexual dissidence and the hegemonic sexual order. This film demonstrates the power of queerdom in deconstructing, destabilizing, subverting and transgressing the straight and narrow (and often homophobic) anthropocentrism. Through animated characters such as Oscar Wildcat and Bi-Polar Bear, this film negates the dichotomous relationship between nature and aestheticism, sex drives and culture, instincts and respectability. If the orgasmic body cannot be identified with the organic body, but is more an interference in and displacement of the body of ‘nature’, as Elizabeth Grosz suggests in her groundbreaking essay ‘Animal sex: libido as desire and death’ (1995), than the queer body, which is lively animated and celebrated by Queer Duck: The Movie, denaturalizes heterocentric assumptions about love, relationships, intimacies and libidinal ‘animalistic’ needs, as much as the prevalent machismo, body fascism and sissyphobia within the gay male community.

Robert Craven was the first head of the Hollywood office, American Humane Association, and worked closely with both studios and the Production Code Administration to ensure that animals were being treated well on set. However, correspondence within the PCA files suggests that his tenure, and the office he represented, was caught between serving the interests of the AHA and maintaining the magic and allure of Hollywood. This paper uses these letters, as well as studio and AHA archival material, to argue that animal bodies carry unique burdens of realism, and that the AHA had to work up, against and through the audience expectation that animals are vulnerable, and that even simulated images are dangerous to animal actors. Drawing on Anat Pick’s Creaturely Poetics, I demonstrate that animal bodies are viewed as both representation and reflection of the universal embodiment of vulnerability, and that the AHA was forced to demonstrate that animals were being protected even as the images claimed otherwise. To be on set was to observe that the animals were (often, but not always) safe, but to guarantee that to the public often required divulging of ‘trade secrets’, and Craven's shifting alliances do much, the paper contends to demonstrate the AHA's tenuous position.

Revisiting John Berger’s seminal essay on the visual animal, ‘Why look at animals?’ (1980), I invert Berger’s title in order to explore instances where the visibility of animals is at stake and where seeing is intricately linked to forms of surveillance and control. In the context of advanced optical and tracking technologies that render animals permanently visible, the possibility of not-seeing emerges as a progressive modality of relation to animals. My talk is concerned with the implicit connections between looking and extinction, where rare or endangered animals are fatally observed, and where animal sighting acts as a lure and reward against the backdrop of animal vanishing. Not-seeing does not merely alter the optics of the human–animal encounter but mitigates human desire to make animals unconditionally visible. It is not a matter of endorsing the censorious attitude to images implicit in Berger’s critique that seeks some primordial intimacy with animals. Nor does not-seeing reinforce the mystery and otherness of animals that mythologizes them in the human imaginary. Unseeing is attentive to the notion of animal privacy that denies human eyes and their technological proxies unlimited access to other lives. In its ultimate guise, not-seeing belongs to the repertoire of gazes of what I call ‘vegan cinema’, a cinema that approaches the vulnerable objects of the gaze without devouring them.

The Brony fandom, an online and embodied community populated by men and boys devoted to the Hasbro reboot of the My Little Pony franchise with Lauren Faust’s Friendship is Magic animated series (2010), initially met with denunciations related to age and gender inappropriateness. It has subsequently witnessed not merely a public reappraisal but something more like a warm embrace. Documentaries (A Brony Tale [2014] and Bronycon [2012]) link FIM’s parable-style homilies about friendship and personal growth to the anti-cynicism ethos of the now-tame Brony ‘herd’. This paper argues that the recuperation of the Brony fandom, and the celebration of the allegedly ground-breaking gender dynamics it represents, is achieved through the subtle appropriation of the discourse of equine assisted therapy (EAT). With EAT, the horse’s dance-like movements are understood as remediating the neural underconnectivity of those with autism spectrum and anxiety disorders, two conditions associated with the Brony demographic (Edwards and Redden). This paper forms part of a larger project on the horse and modernity that begins with Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms; as such, it contributes to a larger argument concerning the role of the horse as a signifier and a material enabler of physical and spiritual transport.

The uniquely British phenomenon of the ‘TV Pickup’ illustrates a collective human behaviour that is at once social and individual. Millions of spectators simultaneously activate electric kettles following the broadcast of EastEnders every week. This synchronized power demand requires governmental anticipation, vigilant monitoring and the preparation of energy infrastructure and hydroelectric power. The technological coevolution of two networks involved in the phenomenon– television and energy grids – demonstrates how technical ensembles develop a nonhuman rapport over time, and these historical relations are effaced as human habits develop. This paper analyzes methods of scientific videography and new media art visualizing the imperceptible effects of electrical transmission, and traces how media devices have evolved according to the frequency of the grid. Drawing from Michel Serres’s understanding of governmentality as parasitic, where ‘the Leviathan’ is at once a social contract and a ‘bestial’ model of informational relationality, I contend that those collective habits that emerge from media relations – like those apparent in the ‘TV Pickup’ – are coopted in the move to ‘educate’, network and synchronize machines (smartphones, smart TVs and the ‘smart grid’). The habitual is increasingly integrated in green energy initiatives, signaling a shifting political relationship between the social and the machine.

The mainframe computer programme forms a central narrative archetype within many science fiction films. As an artificial intelligence that lacks a physical mobile form, its gendered presence is complex. While the mainframe computer is often coded as maternal and/or paternal, implying artificial intelligence founded on procreation, at the same time it is inherently queer. This is evident in its potential to become the singularity, a post-human queer consciousness, beyond the corporeal world. This paper considers this representational potential within mainstream film, foregrounding case studies such as: Forbidden Planet (1956), where the alien Krull computer replicated the psychological Id; 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where the onboard computer Hal worries about death and the eternal dream state; Alien (1979), where Mother the main frame fails to protect her own; and Transcendence (2014) where the post-human and the human coexist in order to save humanity. I argue Lee Edelman’s notion of the queer death drive is central here, in denying the need for a reproductive futurity. Within these films the post-human potential of the queer mechanistic world, offers a way save ‘the world’, becoming a displaced, but useful, form of queer and alien consciousness.

This paper attempts to think through the figurative properties of the animal by exploring Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Porcile/Pigsty (1969), in which animal life and death, and the human love of the animal all figure prominently. Pasolini’s practice is marked by an obsession with realist referentiality, but at the same time his films tend towards a mode of allegorical critique. Porcile cuts back and forth between two stories. The first narrates the story of Julian (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who is in love with pigs; the second shows the wanderings of an unnamed man (Pierre Clementi) who (fictionally) kills and eats other humans, and also actually kills nonhuman animals. The real animal life expended in the film subtends the allegorical dimensions of other animal–human and human–human relationships. The equivalence that the film has notionally granted human and animal bodies – as both being susceptible to exploitation, sacrifice and ingestion by humans – is not borne out by the real economies of life and death onscreen. Thus, despite its allegorical ambitions, the film disrupts its own investment in allegory’s chain of equivalences. Porcile sketches the limits of any allegorical critique of capitalism, insofar as capital and allegory both trade in equivalence.

Special effects proliferated in Hollywood in the 1930s, when rear projection and optical printing pervaded the majority of studio productions, from the most fantastic to the most unobtrusive. Considering the diversity of roles effects played, my paper explores their function in two otherwise dissimilar canonical films that revolve around uniting human characters and dangerous creatures. Moving away from the focus on realism and spectacle that tends to guide scholarship on effects, I argue that the use of rear projection and optical printing contributed to the construction of particular forms of cinematic space in this period. Mirroring contemporaneous developments in theatre design, which increasingly sought a seamless integration of theatre and image space, Hollywood films employed effects to create synthetic diegetic spaces constituted by the assembly of heterogeneous fragments, often figured as layered planes within the image. Within that context, the human–creature interactions in King Kong and Bringing Up Baby emerge as particularly thrilling experiments with the new possibilities opened up by this synthetic space. Moreover, since the films articulate the relationships among characters, in significant part, through their construction of that space, this exploration provides a new perspective on their portrayal of humanness and its intersection with race and gender.

A key filmmaker of Chile’s post-dictatorship generation, Alicia Scherson’s feature debut Play (2005) and her follow-up Turistas (2009) construct intimate inventories of the worlds which surround their protagonists – Cristina, a maid from Southern Chile living in Santiago, and Carla, a middle-class woman abandoned by her husband in a national park. Amid this attention to the material and sensory experiences of the city and nature alike, nonhuman animals are frequently encountered, observed, imagined and dreamt; unsurprisingly, perhaps, as Scherson originally studied as a biologist. This paper explores how the presence of animals (both real and imagined) becomes a means through which to confront questions of habitat, belonging and being ‘at home’ in the world. The juxtaposition of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ modes of animal life, as well as the often unsettling or uncanny dimension of the human–animal encounter, opens up space fraught with the uncertainty and anxiety that accompanies the noncoincidence of self and world. If, in Donna Haraway's words, we ‘polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves’, then this paper seeks to demonstrate how Scherson’s creatures are a reflection of our misplacement.

This paper explores the long take in three areas of 1970s American media practice in order to trace the ecologies it foments among living and nonliving things. More specifically, I put James Benning’s long take aesthetic in experimental works such as One Way Boogie Woogie (1977) and 11 x 14 (1977) alongside the first uses of Steadicam in Rocky (John Avildsen, 1976) or Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby, 1976) as well as films made by the Environmental Protection Agency to document air and water pollution during the 1970s. In each case, I argue, long takes mediate relationships to perdurance and change that prompt spectators to consider their encounters with perceptible environments as well as the ultimately unrepresentable experiences of nonhuman entities. The result thus not only offers the long take as an approach to ecological questions, but also understands the device as organizing ecologies in its own right. Such a conclusion proves particularly meaningful in the context of the 1970s, when both neoliberalism and the modern environmentalist movement were on the rise.

Though one is fictional and the other a documentary, Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009) and The Wolfpack (Crystal Moselle, 2015) tell fascinatingly concurrent stories: in both, teenagers kept in captivity since infancy by their parents discover, through watching films, an alternative reality that presents them with a simultaneously promising and threatening means of escape. In gesturing at the liberating potential of encountering film, both works suggest that films effectively function to make us human, by constructing our sense of individuality and agency. Yet in the absence of other humanizing forces, namely the cultural referents acquired through socialization that equip us to distinguish reality from representation, these young people lack the necessary ability to contextualize what they watch. As a result, film’s aptitude for modeling empathy alongside self-preservation is compromised, with film instead enabling a continuation of the inhumane violence and vulnerability imposed by their captors. This paper ponders the representational and ethical questions raised by these works’ troubling of the binaries real/unreal, nature/culture, and human/nonhuman. In so doing, these films self-reflexively engage critical issues in screen studies and animal studies to offer sobering observations on the link between our interactions with screens and with one another.

‘Scooby-Doo, where aren’t you?’: Time Warner, Cartoon Network, and synergizing a Great Dane

As a forty-five-year-old product with fifteen original series, Scooby-Doo is a microcosm of American television history. Debates about the nature of children’s entertainment, battles over a free-market approach to regulation vs. governmental censorship, and the impact of media concentration and conglomeration upon diversity, quality and consumerism all play out alongside the Scooby-Doo texts. Once a little Saturday morning series produced by Hanna-Barbera, Scooby-Doo is now a top-selling global brand for Time Warner. In line with the conference theme ‘Screening Animals and the Inhuman’, Scooby-Doo’s success is not simply attributable to the series themselves but to the brand’s ancillary properties that go across a range of media, formats and industries. Whether the Ice Capades or video games, these consumer products and experiences are an integral part of the brand’s commercial profitability, historically reflecting the larger industrial apparatus surrounding Scooby-Doo. This presentation examines Time Warner’s synergistic deployment of Scrappy-Doo via recontextualizations of the character on Cartoon Network. Series like The Venture Bros. and Robot Chicken as well as various network bumpers have all satirized the character under Time Warner’s blessing, enabling the Scooby-Doo brand to remain hip, relatable, and spreadable for adult consumers and fans who despise the 1980s cartoons featuring Scrappy-Doo.
CECILIA SAYAD  University of Kent

Monsters and everyday life

This paper addresses the topic of ‘Screening Animals and the Inhuman’ through a discussion of the coexistence between supernatural phenomena and the documentary mode both in mock found-footage horror films and in ghost-hunting reality TV shows. Here the ‘inhuman’ relates to demonic figures, even though this investigation also includes the more arguably ‘human’ ghost. I draw from studies about the relationship between new technologies and the occult by Tom Gunning, Jeffrey Sconce, Annette Hill and Karen Williams in order to investigate, within the boundaries of genre studies, new articulations of the relationship between horror and the documentation of reality, and more broadly, the ways in which the connection between supernatural themes and documentary modalities change our relationship to the filmic and televisual image. I argue that the confusion between fiction and fact within both found-footage horror and reality TV blurs the boundaries between the films and the surrounding world, removing horror narratives from the exclusive domains of the symbolic, the unconscious and the escapist, embedding the ‘monster’ in everyday experience. Discussed works include the Paranormal Activity movies and the Paranormal State and Ghost Hunters reality shows.

Godfrey Reggio’s film Visitors (2013) is composed primarily of gazes. It begins with a gorilla’s direct gaze as it emerges from darkness, and this initial gaze is quickly followed by a series of human gazes. The gorilla’s gaze haunts the film, however, as it reappears in the middle of the film and also concludes it. These gazes are affective; the viewer spends almost the entire duration of the film being stared at, and thus quickly becomes sensitized to these gazes and their idiosyncrasies, as well as their effects. This paper examines these gazes and how they are experienced in the film. Focusing primarily on the gorilla’s gazes, I review theories surrounding the human gaze in regards to affect and power, and compare these theories to how the animal gaze has been examined, including concepts such as gaze sensitivity and its socioecological context and the effects of mirror neurons, arguing that this simian gaze acts as a bridge that combines, yet challenges, both. I ask: how do the gorilla’s gazes problematize how the human gaze has been theorized and its effects? How can theories of the animal gaze be incorporated in existing anthropocentric theories on the gaze?

Our proposed panel addresses the languages through which multispecies investigations and critical animal studies approach their central topic of concern: nonhuman life. Utilizing a variety of media, including the spoken and written word, the moving image, and audio, this panel questions the underlying capacities of each to think with animals. Whether through ekphrasis, theoretical investigation, or filmic observation, the abiding concern of letting animals into the lecture hall will be examined from a variety of standpoints. My portion of the panel investigates the methodologies of experimental physiology as it approaches the animal subject. Taking Lisa Cartwright’s work as a springboard, the presentation asks how her history of onscreen bodies might shift when we focus on animal bodies. Specifically, the famed, and in some circles notorious, vivisectionist Claude Bernard is highlighted as the progenitor of certain methodology of abstraction still employed in scientific filmmaking. The presentation weaves between found footage from numerous educational films, as well as new material of hundred-year-old animal specimens, shot at the Grant Museum in London. The audience is invited to consider the mediated processes through which living animals are transformed into scientific ideas and facts, as well as the corporeal remainders that are left behind.

In NBC’s Hannibal, Will Graham suffers from what Hannibal Lecter describes as ‘pure empathy’, which allows him to perfectly ‘assume the point of view’ of the murderers he profiles for the FBI. However, Will’s empathic gaze is never simply an adopted visual perspective; rather, it always necessitates a re-enacted performance, suggesting that empathy involves an embodied understanding of the physicality of another. This paper presents such kinaesthetic empathy as a spectatorial paradigm that transcends the anthropocentric gaze. Combining work on kinaesthesia with the theory of Einfühlung, it argues that the experience of ‘feeling into’ a foreign other involves a sensitivity to bodily comportment. Yet while current scholarship on kinaesthetic empathy retains a human focus, Hannibal’s striking animal imagery establishes the moving body as the locus of recognition for all types of creaturely bodies. Indeed, although Will worries about losing himself in his empathic intersubjectivity, his companion animals – his pack of stray dogs and the stag of his nightmares – always return his gaze and mirror his movements, kinaesthetically anchoring his embodied sense of self. Kinaesthetic empathy thus shifts the gaze from an axis of projection-subordination to one of creaturely, bodily accompaniment, opening up a new ethics of screen spectatorship and representation.