Queer-ing Texture: Tactility, Spatiality, and Kinesthetic Empathy in She Monkeys

Abstract

The piece is situated within a critical context in which phenomenological approaches to film intersect with debates around queer cinema, and lesbian film in particular. With a specific focus on Apflickorna / She Monkeys (Lisa Aschan, 2011), it proposes ways of accounting for the “queerness” of queer cinema through a consideration of embodiment, intercorporeality, kinaesthetic empathy and a phenomenological understanding of “orientation”. Through an exploration of the links between (cinematic) texture and spatiality, the article accounts for the tactile and muscular encounters on offer in cinema and how they might speak to, and resonate with, queer habits, alignments and tendencies. In doing so, it gestures beyond a concern with representation, in-/visibility, identity, and related concerns around appropriation and queer readings, that have been historically dominant in studies of gay and lesbian (and queer) film. Instead, it proposes ways of “grasping” – in both a rational as well as tactile, kinaesthetic and muscular sense – the queer implications of these films, by drawing on phenomenological approaches to film as well as to gender and sexuality.