| Luminous Screens: the Cinematic Image Between Figure and Time argues that the contemporary global circulation of sexed racial and ethnic images demands new interfaces with the visible surfaces of the cinematic image. At the crossing of gender and sexuality studies, film and visual theories, and postcolonial diasporic critique, the dissertation describes and multiplies the paradoxical and hyperbolic modes of visibility initiated by the growing visual representations of previously unrepresented gender, sexual, racial, and ethnic bodies and by the new mobility and flexibility of the cinematic image, enhanced by new digital and screen technologies. I suggest that an exploration of the convergence between these two visual conditions produces a descriptive mapping of the perceptual shifts that accompany the tightly bound cultural and economic operations of globalization. Luminous Screens focuses on three modules of visibility in circulation across bodies of cinema delimited by nation, mode of production (state, independent, commercial), genre, and aesthetics. The modules include the cipher of the Asian female body, the visual screen, and the image of the queer and transgender body. These modules present figures that morph between conspicuous visibility and the lure of vision and meaning beyond what is immediately legible. As I contend, their paradoxical modes of visibility are effects of optical commodification, which potentially provoke new visual strategies that engage with the exterior surfaces and multiple frames of the commodity-image.;The Introduction provides a theoretical portal for the dissertation. It draws from and pushes the limits of the humanist and anti-humanist film semiotics exemplified in the cinema theories of Bazin and Deleuze, while situating the three intervening modules of visibility through postcolonial feminist revisions of semiotics, post-cinematic shifts in cinematic interpretation, and queer and transgender theories of visuality and embodiment. Chapter One discusses the science fiction porn film I.K.U., directed by diasporic Taiwanese digital artist Cheang Shu Lea. I.K.U. features a gender morphing Asian female Coder dispatched to collect sexual data by an untraceable command source, allied with film viewers. Chapter Two on Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai's 2046 looks at the gendered emotive and spatial arrangements that prop visual and temporal movement across sci-fi future, serial present, and recurring past. Chapter Three deals with the virtual visibility of gay intimacy in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain and Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together as a visual transcoding between postcolonial diasporic aesthetics and transnational visibility. And the last chapter on Gabriel Baur's documentary Venus Boyz returns to the contradictory interplay between explicit visibility and transparency highlighted in the first chapter's sci-fi pornography. The ethnography's visual documentation of masculine drag and transgender visual subcultures compresses multiple, contentious modes of visibility. |
