The 2005 Avignon Theatre Festival sparked a vast controversy about the insistent presence of bodies (whether wounded, broken, or humiliated) on stage. Without subscribing to the reactionary critical response to the Festival, it is legitimate to return to the debate in order to question the ubiquity of the “victim body” in contemporary theatre. Such representations, far from being heterodox, are in fact part of the massive ideology of “the ethical”, as diagnosed by Alain Badiou. The oppressed body thus tends to (...) be assimilated to the body of the victim. The result is the obliteration of the resistance of subjects to their oppression, or of their active response to it, theatre being reduced to the maxims of a democratic materialism: “there are only bodies and languages”. (shrink)

Au résumé de la thèse de Gilligan et Snider déjà présenté dans les articles précédents, l’autrice ajoute que femmes et hommes ainsi différenciées reconnaissent chacun·e leur vulnérabilité et celle de l’autre, ce qui les met sur la voie de l’égalité. Le film Atlantique de Mati Diop offre une belle illustration de cette théorie. On y voit les jeunes femmes reprendre à leur compte la revendication de dignité de leurs amis morts en mer dans le drame de l’émigration.

An Enduring Suffering. Changes in the Female Body and the Creation of a Pharmaceuticals Industry Imaginary. The article discusses the findings of a survey concerning the psychodynamics of work which was undertaken among employees in the pharmaceuticals industry. The survey sought to probe the psychological effects following from the closing-down of their company. The evocation of the bodies of their female fellowemployees who had suffered certain masculinising modifications, and of the premature death which was the fate of some, played a (...) central role in the evocation of the current suffering of those who had earlier been their colleagues. The placenta, the scientific material with which they worked, thus became collated with the anxiety-laden fantasies of the two woman researchers. The author of the article therefore addresses the status of the researcher’s body in the interpretation of her findings, and the place of fantasy, and the creation of an imaginary, in a protocol of research and action involving the socialisation of an actual trauma in a milieu where cases of the contamination of bodies are both secret and random. Gender mutation thus fulfils a metonymic function, insofar as it is the sole visible manifestation of the violation, whether real or imagined, of bodily integrity. (shrink)

La porno straight est un genre littéraire, photographique et cinématographique socialement et historiquement situé, facilement accessible, jusque dans l’univers domestique – le câble – et le domaine professionnel – les écrans de veille. Je ne connais pas la pornographie..