Results by title

A collection that explores evolving interdisciplinary rhetoric across spatial design disciplines.

Watch this Space examines key emerging and evolving practices, theories, and methodologies that operate in the blurred boundary between spatial design disciplines and moving image studies more broadly. The collection is premised on the argument that the understanding of “space” in these areas continues to expand, reaching the point in which it blurs with multiple other disciplines including media art, cultural studies, art practice, and more. The result of this evolving interdisciplinary understating of space in design disciplines and moving image studies is an expanded field of haptic-visual practice and theory that can be investigated as both a material and an image-based construct.

The work engages with an evolving set of ideas, underlining how each of its primary discipline areas now increasingly incorporates tools and methodologies from each other’s fields. For example, architects routinely engage with cinematic practice as a means of exploring space; cultural theorists inspect filmic space as a two-dimensional surrogate of the real; media artists incorporate knowledge of spatial design in video installations; and filmmakers create spaces on screen that are informed by architectural theory. This all follows what can be defined as a discursive turn in our view of spatial relationships across disciplines which, by definition, is complex, eclectic, occasionally contradictory, and at times characterized by surprising confluences.
 
The varied essays collected here explore the diversity of how we today define, understand, and engage with notions of the body in architectural–urban space. It does so through a triadic structure that progresses from haptic relationships of the body in architectural space, through film readings of represented space in mainstream cinema, to experimental spatial projects inspired by film and the moving image. This tripartite structure specifically encourages a look across disciplines, broadening architectural, urbanist, media, and cinematic concerns through insightful case studies.
 

Examining the expansive nature of Indigenous gender representations in history, literature, and film

Within Native American and Indigenous studies, the rise of Indigenous masculinities has engendered both productive conversations and critiques. Lisa Tatonetti intervenes in this conversation with Written by the Body by centering how female, queer, and/or Two-Spirit Indigenous people take up or refute masculinity, and, in the process, offer more expansive understandings of gender. 

Written by the Body moves from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archive to turn-of-the-century and late-twentieth-century fiction to documentaries, HIV/AIDS activism, and, finally, recent experimental film and literature. Across it all, Tatonetti shows how Indigenous gender expansiveness, and particularly queer and non-cis gender articulations, moves between and among Native peoples to forge kinship, offer protection, and make change. She charts how the body functions as a somatic archive of Indigenous knowledge in Native histories, literatures, and activisms—exploring representations of Idle No More in the documentary Trick or Treaty, the all-female wildland firefighting crew depicted in Apache 8, Chief Theresa Spence, activist Carole laFavor, S. Alice Callahan, Thirza Cuthand, Joshua Whitehead, Carrie House, and more.

In response to criticisms of Indigenous masculinity studies, Written by the Body de-sutures masculinity from the cis-gendered body and investigates the ways in which female, trans, and otherwise nonconforming masculinities carry the traces of Two-Spirit histories and exceed the limitations of settler colonial imaginings of gender.