OOC DTP student Daniella Schütze has presented a paper at this year's Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) Conference.
The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) fosters interdisciplinary research within the areas of moving image history, theory, and aesthetics; cognitive science; and the philosophy of mind and art. The Society supports dialogue in all directions, so that every represented discipline may learn from the others. Through exchange, debate, and collaboration among moving image theorists, historians, analysts, philosophers, scientists, and artists, SCSMI promotes research into moving image media and the ways in which such media reflect, shape, and are shaped by the human mind.
Daniella's paper abstract is as follows:
“It’s much more fun to work with women”: Gendering Emotion and Fassbinder’s ‘Woman’s Films’’.
Daniella Schütze's paper engages with current interest in the study and experience of emotion, and builds on that interest by exploring the representation and elicitation of emotions by the controversial ‘woman’s films’ of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Informed by the politics of Gina Rippon’s Gendered Brain and by models of constructed and cognitive emotions (Feldman Barrett, LeDoux), attention is paid to the way Fassbinder’s distanciating static shots cast a clinical gaze on his ‘emotional women’, and the effects this has had on viewers' interpretations of the women characters. More broadly, this paper reflects on how cultural representations (such as films) are embedded in the environments that shape our emotional lives, and considers the implications for the status quo assumption that women are more emotional than men.