Barbara Hammer in the Seventies

Barbara Hammer in the Seventies: Or, What a Body Can Do addresses the intersection of experimental film, lesbian sexuality, and the women's movement in Hammer's early films. Grounded in an embodied, sexual, and gendered positionality, these films interrogate the politics of visibility and identity and perform a discontinuous repertoire of lesbian images that resist the medium of film's established constraints and the decade's broader systems of signification.

Hammer's films offer a critique of the dominant discourse that privileges the discreteness and self-sufficiency of the individualistic human subject. By performing the (lesbian) body in its 'environment'in erotic and communal relation to other bodiesand staging the relation of human bodies with the materiality of non-human beings and objects, they create a site of intervention into the humanist project, as it informs film studies, feminism, and queer theory.

This rereading of Hammer's work offers an important contribution to conversations between feminism and queer studies. In remembering the feminist origins of queer studies, it recenters political and ethical questions such as the fundamental relationality of the subject, the subject's dependency on others, and the resulting ethical responsibility for and towards the other.

A much-needed account of the early works of pioneering lesbian feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer, grounded in archival research and interviews with Hammer herself Situates Hammer's films within the American feminist, queer, and avant-garde visual cultures of the 1970s, arguing that all three aspects are essential to understanding her work Identifies important themes of embodiment, materiality, relationality, and performance in Hammer's early filmmaking

Autorentext

Krystyna Mazur received her MA from the English Department of the University of Warsaw and her PhD from Cornell University. Her first book, Poetry and Repetition: ***Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, was published by Routledge in 2005 as part of the series Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory. Her major research interests include U.S. literature, American studies, queer studies, and film studies. *.

Inhalt

Chapter 1-Introduction.- PART I.- Chapter 2 -1970s: Contexts.- Chapter 3- Performing the Lesbian.- Chapter 4 - What a body can do: a Hammer Toolbox. -PART II.- Chapter 5 - Dyketactics at the Limits of Feminist Lesbian Community.- Chapter 6 - Becoming-Jane Becoming-Animal: Jane Brakhage.- Chapter 7 - Strength in Doubles: Lesbian (Auto)biography.- Chapter 8- Coda: Hammer's Queer Feminists Pedagogy, Collaboration, Legacy.