Since the 1990s, film phenomenology, affect theory and feminist corporeal thought have increasingly redirected attention from the body primarily as an image or sign toward the lived, sensory, material, and socially situated dimensions of cinematic experience. This seminar investigates films organized around non-ideal bodily states: pain, fatigue, discomfort, illness, sexual friction, emotional blockage, and bodily transformation. Rather than treating these states merely as themes, it asks how duration, sound, gesture, performance, spatial restriction, repetition, and tactile imagery make them formally perceptible.

Films including Julia Ducournau's Titane (2021), Coralie Fargeat's The Substance (2024), Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (2009), Vivian Qu's Angels Wear White (2017), and Yang Lina's Spring Tide (2019) connect bodily vulnerability to gender, class, violence, care, sexuality, and institutional power. Drawing on Elizabeth Grosz's concept of the volatile body, Vivian Sobchack's embodied spectatorship, Laura U. Marks's haptic visuality, and Jennifer Barker's cinematic tactility, the seminar investigates whether corporeal illegibility opens alternative possibilities for gendered desire or turns bodily difference into spectacle.

Ultimately, the seminar asks: when cinema makes a body felt rather than merely seen, does it open an alternative relation to gendered embodiment and desire, or intensify the body's availability as spectacle? How do phenomenological proximity, affective intensity, formal organization, and institutional circulation differently shape the political address of painful, fatigued, awkward, ill, disabled, queer, or materially transforming bodies? 

We invite papers on women's, feminist, queer, trans, diasporic, experimental, documentary, popular, and art cinemas. Possible topics include but are not limited to: pain and fatigue, illness and medicalization, sexual awkwardness and blocked desire; pregnancy, menstruation, aging, and reproductive embodiment; disabled, racialized, classed, queer, or technologically transformed bodies; breathing, voice, silence, and bodily rhythm; touch and haptic visuality; duration and repetition; body horror and affective excess; failure, immortality, and non-normative movement; surveillance and vulnerable bodies; and the political and ethical limits of making bodily suffering perceptible.