Artist: Noami Uman

“Pornography, for MacKinnon, is not, as it has conventionally been understood, a matter of obscenity, free speech, or morality. Akin to hate-speech it is rather a matter of social inequality, inequality that is “substantially created and enforced – that is done through words and images” (MacKinnon 1994: 9, original emphasis). Pornography, for MacKinnon, is a “constitutive practice” (1987: 173) that produces gender inequality by constructing the abuses suffered by women (she cites rape, battery, sexual harassment, and prostitution) as sex. It “sexualizes” these abuses and “thereby celebrates, promotes, authorizes, and legitimizes them”. In so-doing it constructs women “as what men want from sex”(MacKinnon 1987: 171) and, in the process, “institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy”.7 As such pornography “eroticizes hierarchy … [and] sexualizes inequality” (MacKinnon 1987: 172). MacKinnon’s contention, however, is that pornography does more than only subordinate women (as if that were not enough).”

From Screening the past website:

Removed is more than just a feminist intervention into the pornographic genre (although it is that, too). Rather than exposing what many believe to be the “essence of [mainstream] pornography – woman without substance”, Uman renders woman as substance, a powerful, pulpy, roiling presence. [14] In his work on ‘screendance’, Douglas Rosenberg introduces the term “recorporealisation”, writing that in order for a body to be recorporealised, it must first be decoporealised or stripped of its somatic and fleshly resonances through mediatisation. [15] Under Uman’s recorporealisation of her, the women of Removed become ‘untouchable’ – the male hands that attempt to stroke their bodies “simply sink into light”. [16] Strangely, it is Uman’s abstinence from touching the whole bodies of her filmic women that renders them impervious to the male touch on-screen. Uman allows the bleach to do its work on the female figures, transforming them into skeins of light. Uman has said that she “wanted to see what would happen if [she] remove[d] the women” from her found footage, asking: “Would it still be pornography?” [17] In Uman’s film, however, the ‘erased’ body returns with a new and more powerful force. The body becomes hyper-visible as a relational and material-kinetic presence. What is manifested on-screen is the body’s kinetic twin; a double which both exceeds the body and originates from within.

Although I first came across Uman’s Removed (1999) I am also interested in the Tin Woodman’s’ Home movie below a) because it references such an iconic film and I have long been interested in doing something with Gone with the Wind (although I have no idea if I ever will get to it not least because doing so potentially invites all sorts of trouble) ; b) it relates to strongly to our childhood – collectively as people continue to watch this film – one of my own sons watched it obsessively when he was about three years old. These narratives which we are exposed to as young children have such a profound effect on us for the rest of our lives – fixing expectations which then become enormously difficult to divert, change, transform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=25&v=-JnRFAgHNKQ&feature=emb_logo