Indocile Bodies: Bodily Transgressions in Selected Canadian Movies

Tomasz Sikora

Published:

Vol. 5 (2010)

Indocile Bodies: Bodily Transgressions in Selected Canadian Movies

Tomasz Sikora

Abstract

The article looks at the representations of corporeality, desire and transgression in selected films by David Cronenberg, Guy Maddin and Bruce LaBruce. The body acquires some kind of independence in these films, and the forces of excess that work in/though it (drives, desires) push the modern subject into various acts of transgression, thus threatening its propriety and stability. At a cultural level, this phenomenological instability of body- and self-boundaries may be linked to the Canadian sense of a “weak” national identity, rephrased by some as a positive case of “queer” nationality.

Key words: Body, desire, sexuality, transgression, excess, queer, Canadian cinema.

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Sikora, T. Indocile Bodies: Bodily Transgressions in Selected Canadian Movies. Romanica Silesiana, 5(1). Retrieved from https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RS/article/view/5779

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Tomasz Sikora

tsikora@up.krakow.pl

Affiliation:

Pedagogical University of Cracow

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Tomasz Sikora teaches at the English Department of the Pedagogical University of Cracow. He received his MA degree from Adam Mickiewicz University (1996) and a PhD in English from the University of Silesia (2001). In 2003 he published Virtually Wild: Wilderness, Technology and the Ecology of Mediation and over the past several years he has co-edited (with Dominika Ferens and Tomasz Basiuk) three volumes of essays on queer studies; he is also a co-editor of the online journal of queer studies InterAlia. His interests include American and Canadian Studies, gender and queer theory, philosophies of nature and discourses of the unnatural.

Vol. 5 (2010)
Published:

ISSN: 1898-2433

eISSN: 2353-9887

Publisher

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

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Indocile Bodies: Bodily Transgressions in Selected Canadian Movies

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Tomasz Sikora

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