Explore
Taking its cues from the New Narrative writing movement, like a dog considers how sexual identity is morphed, hidden, and denied by cultural forces like film, pornography, rape culture, and sexual semiotics. The speaker of like a dog writes about her sexuality, sexual trauma, and relationships in the epistolary form to explore how the personal becomes collective and how overt sexuality is necessary for questioning dominant ideologies. The intimacy (or perhaps voyeurism) that is opened through the epistolary form is balanced with commentary on the films of Lars von Trier, primarily Nymphomaniac, as a way to move away from the speaker’s experiences and into the larger social forces that seek to define us.
Amidst these letters are images from a handwritten journal where blood, hair, vaginal fluids, and other bodily residues are used to direct the shape and content of the writing surrounding them. The tactility of the journal delivers the reader to the body, not as an intellectualized object, but as the physical, messy, oozing force that it is.
Neither fiction nor nonfiction, and inhabiting a realm between gossip and scholarly film analysis, like a dog exists in a liminal zone that offers the speaker a site to rip away the layers of cultural conditioning surrounding sexuality and relationships, and to peek at what lies beneath. This interrogation of identity may not lead to answers but the speaker of like a dog is able to finally hear her own voice and to begin the work of rebuilding an identity that blooms from within.
This book is included in DOAB.
Why read this book? Have your say.
You must be logged in to comment.
Rights Information
Are you the author or publisher of this work? If so, you can claim it as yours by registering as an Unglue.it rights holder.Downloads
This work has been downloaded 10 times via unglue.it ebook links.
- 10 - pdf (CC BY-NC-SA) at Unglue.it.
Keywords
- Epistolary
- film studies
- Film theory & criticism
- Film, TV & radio
- Films, cinema
- Healing
- Lars von Trier
- New narrative
- relationships
- Sexual Abuse & Harassment
- sexual assault
- Sexuality
- Social issues & processes
- Society & culture: general
- Society & Social Sciences
- The arts
- thema EDItEUR::A The Arts::AT Performing arts::ATF Films, cinema::ATFA Film history, theory or criticism
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBF Social and ethical issues::JBFK Violence and abuse in society::JBFK2 Sexual abuse and harassment
- violence in society
Links
DOI: 10.53288/0469.1.00Editions