Havell, Clare Marie (2024) Anonymity and the stigmatised subject : exploring the face and voice of the sex worker in documentary film practice. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
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Abstract
Mapping the representational and material dangers of participating as a sex worker in documentary film practice is the central purpose of this thesis. Argued here is that the totalising and dispossessive treatment of the sex worker plays out through topographies of their face and voice. Conversely, this thesis locates practices of voice and face that counter stigma, rhetorical silencing and disciplinary operations of power enacted through the documentary lens. This thesis is undertaken through practice-integrated research, whereby creative documentary practice connects and is used in tandem with other methods. Also combining textual analysis, documentary case studies, and research interviews with sex workers who have taken part in documentary anonymously, the intervention is to argue that the marginal subject of this thesis requires a schizoanalytic methodology. Adopting feminist methods of situated knowledges, the thesis addresses voice and spectatorship from the perspective of sex worker documentary subjects themselves. This analysis finds that while coming into voice as a marginalised subject signifies power, how one comes to that voice, and how it is heard, remains complex. Further, strategies of blurring, voice distortion and even disembodiment which facilitate sex worker voice are prone to the amplifying social abjection of sex work and facilitating pseudo-proxies covering over sex worker subjectivity. Arguing that anonymity itself is prone to failure, and that this is widely understood by sex workers, as is the representational volatility of that anonymity, the thesis counters that anonymity should be understood as a practice rather than as something one attains. Nonetheless, this translucency of identity can enable vulnerable subjects to speak.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Copyright Holders: | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted. |
| Depositing User: | Acquisitions And Metadata |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Feb 2024 17:42 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Feb 2024 19:16 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/53106 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00053106 |
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