ABSTRACT

Historically, cinematic spectacles of acquired impairment have expended much energy negotiating the gender trouble that disability provokes in male bodies, typically infusing narratives of rehabilitation with fantasies of gender reconstruction. These gender crises arise because hegemonic expectations about masculine identity as synonymous with autonomy and dominance conflict with the normative social scripts framing disability as a state of helplessness and dependence. This paper explores the fraught intersection of disability and gender in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film that adapts the memoirs of Jean-Dominique Bauby to evoke a visceral experience of ‘locked-in syndrome.’ Drawing upon Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological conception of ‘film’s body,’ I develop a more particular account of the ways in which male bodies are embedded in social networks that grant affective intensity and political charge to the sensuous experience of touch within cinema. In what has to be the most extraordinary use of literal first-person perspective in the history of cinema, the film deploys the conventionally untouchable camera body to explore the intimacy and terror of being touched (intrusions to which both patient and viewer must yield), mounting a challenge to popular cinema’s dominant gaze, and the normative body it so often assumes on behalf of viewers.

摘要

从历史上看，获得性障碍的电影奇观花费了大量精力来解决残疾在男性身体中引起的性别问题，通常将康复叙事与性别重建的幻想融合在一起。这些性别危机之所以出现，是因为将男性身份视为自主和支配地位的同义词的霸权期望与将残疾框定为无助和依赖状态的规范社会脚本相冲突。本文探讨了朱利安·施纳贝尔 (Julian Schnabel) 的《潜水钟与蝴蝶》 ( The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)中残疾和性别之间令人担忧的交集。，一部改编自让-多米尼克·鲍比 (Jean-Dominique Bauby) 的回忆录的电影，以唤起对“锁定综合症”的内在体验。借鉴 Vivian Sobchack 的“电影身体”的现象学概念，我对男性身体嵌入社会网络的方式进行了更具体的说明，这些方式赋予电影中触觉的感官体验以情感强度和政治责任。电影史上对第一人称视角的最非凡运用，采用了传统上不可触碰的相机机身来探索被触碰的亲密感和恐惧感（患者和观众都必须屈服于侵入），对流行电影的主导凝视以及它经常代表观众承担的规范机构构成挑战。