Differential Embodiment

With the growing inclusiveness of diverse gender, race, etc, three short, independent films - Limbo (Gokce Erenmemisoglu), Limit (Javard Daraei), and Ready for My Closeup (Jordan Werner) -  at the presentation from Tampa’s Sigmund Freud Film Festival (the brainchild of Rodrick Colbert) viewed at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society on May 15, 2021 gave occasion to think about “differential embodiment” (Shildrick). All three films reminded me of the works of Margrit Shildrick. In The Broken Body (co-authored with Janet Price), Shildrick questions the assumption that the ‘disabled’ are disqualified from sexual subjectivity. 

Limbo is a whimsical, surprising, somewhat disturbing, very short film in which two characters’ prosthetic limbs become separated at times from the rest of their bodies during their ‘hook up.’ What if Limbo is about metaphorical pieces and parts, like multiple selves, always striving toward wholeness? 

Shidrick additionally questions whether polymorphousness - both in the literal body and in its desire - is perverse, a question that serves as a countervail to the Freudian idea that fetishism is an attempt at resolution of castration anxiety in the little boy where a lost limb and a penis can stand for and restore, respectively, the lost penis. [Contemporary thinkers might locate this anxiety in early attachment relationships and to self image rather than with the ‘horror’ of anatomical difference.] Shildrick notes “the impossibility of a fully developed, invulnerable self.” 

Shildrick and Price write, “slippage between what is possible for them and what is required of them...women can never finally answer to the discursive requirement of femininity but remain caught in an endless cycle of body fetishization.” Even the TABs (temporarily abled bodied) “fail to contain or express their ideal standards.”

 

In Ready for My Close-up an aging actress and her son go to drastic measures to reclaim (surgically) her youth.

“All women are positioned in and measured against an inaccessible body ideal, in part determined by a universalized male body[*]” which “further marginalizes the already marginalized.” 

 [*in Ready for My Close-up, he is “my goofy manchild son”]  

In Limit, a young man desperately seeks help from strangers but his grunts and the film’s ominous score cause suspenseful suspicion in the audience. Vulnerability is reconfigured not as a weakness but as the possibility of becoming.

Shildrick and Price remind us that “disabled and ill people - those whose bodies are deemed as broken are labeled as other - are forced to negotiate a set complementary to those of able bodiedness… [their] performative acts - corporeal signs, gestures, claims and desires elicited in embodied subjects - serve no less to produce effect of identity, coherence, control, and normativity.”