The moving image screen as a site for feminine pleasure

My paper investigates the relationship between the screen and feminine pleasure. From a practitioner perspective as an artist film-maker and doctoral researcher, I examine the moving image screen within my own practice, and consider the potential for feminist methodologies to rupture the dominant paradigms of the mainstream and produce screenwork that is radical in intent, aesthetics, and content. I illustrate my paper with examples of practice-as-research, such as the recent film Glass, which mediates Irigaray’s writing about the ‘feminine’ through close examination and ‘play’ with glass fragments found among the sand, pebbles, bladder wrack, and briny debris on Stonehouse Pool beach, Plymouth. This screenwork locates feminine pleasure in the liminal space of the strandline, between high and low water, at the intersection between the natural world and the urban environment. Through microscopic animation I manipulate found objects to create a miniature ’looking glass’, a ‘poetic text’ through which I may find a place for language of the body. I film using macro photography, manipulating the tiny objects and the digital camera with my fingers: touch and sight intertwine as I feel my way through the camera’s miniature dance in embodied time and space. Therefore, my practice-based doctoral research suggests that the mainstream may be disrupted through the radical deployment of ‘essentialist’ strategies, and that ‘making as a woman’, from a gendered position ‘as a woman’, creates a language of the body that gives voice to feminine pleasure through the moving image screen.