School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemFrom spirits to the screen: a cultural history of magic and magical entertainment(2010)This thesis examines the history of magic in Western culture, particularly focusing upon the contemporary period in which magic is performed within a context of secular entertainment such as that of cinema. It begins with a conceptual discussion of magic that defines the term through the cultural attributions of its performance, namely, that magic is a descriptive term used to make sense of unknown or ambiguous phenomena. This thesis then goes on to ground this assertion historically, by suggesting that magic is a culturally contingent term that has been defined through two main phases. These are the periods of Spiritual Magic, a pre-Enlightenment context in which magic was an efficacious principle of causality, and that of Entertainment Magic, in which the belief that once gave magic its efficacious powers is eliminated by the secular turn of culture and magical performance becomes a form of entertainment. Entertainment Magic relies upon the conjuring of magical appearances and experiences, or effects and affects, through illusion. This thesis examines one strand of this illusion making: that of screen displays which instrumentally construct projected visual illusions as magical appearances. These instruments, which include the Camera Obscura, Magic Lantern, Phantasmagoria and the Kinetoscope, provide the technical legacies of illusion making and magical performance that come to inform the cinematic medium as the apotheosis of this form of visual illusion making. The final section of this thesis examines the films of Georges Méliès to explore cinema as a medium of magic that is comprised of effects and affects. The trick film demonstrates that cinema’s magical effects are part instrumental, based upon technological special effects that create magic through visual illusions, and part narratival, for it is a narrative context that gives meaning to illusions and encourages the spectator to suspend their disbelief in illusory effects. Further, however, the status of cinema as a magical entertainment is also based upon its ability to affect the spectator, to conjure the conditions of magical experiences through the mediums imaginary appearances.
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ItemReproductive power; menstruation, magic, and taboo(2010)In Western culture menstruation is considered to be a curse, an illness, or at least an aspect of feminine “nature” best suppressed. In this thesis I argue that the menstrual taboo has been oppressive to women. Through a closely reading of Sigmund Freud’s writing on femininity, I argue that Freud depicts a monstrous aspect of femininity, connected with the mother and female castration, which he believes must remain repressed. I propose that he is unable to detect a direct connection between female castration and menstruation, because he is himself unconscious of the operations of the menstrual taboo. I draw on Freudian theorist Claude Dagmar Daly who critiques Freud’s negligence regarding the menstrual taboo, and pinpoints a “menstrual complex” at the heart of Freud’s Oedipus complex. In fleshing out the monstrous menstruating mother at the heart of the Oedipus complex I work with French feminist theorists Julia Kristeva, LuceIrigaray, and Hélène Cixous and trace this figure to the hysteric. Drawing on French feminist Catherine Clément’s writing on the hysteric, I reveal a marginalised space of feminine Nature that opens up in the splitting of the hysteric from the sorceress. I argue that the figure of the sorceress presides over an extremely important aspect of feminine Nature associated with women’s “blood magic.” I use the term “blood magic” to describe a periodic magical power that is an aspect of feminine Nature, which has been repressed in Western culture. The roots of the term “blood magic” are in anthropological accounts of menstrual rituals. My use of the term Nature denotes the possibility of the expression of a femininity by women, where as “nature” is evidence of the colonisation of femininity by the dominant phallocentric culture in the West. A sacred space of feminine Nature that resides on the borders of culture cannot be accessed and returned to culture until it has been dislodged from the patriarchal depiction of menstruation as a monstrous threat to civilization. I find that the hysteric provides an historical instance of feminine disorder linked to the sorceress that allows me to explore the domain of the sorceress and what I have referred to as “blood magic.” In order to develop this positive reconstruction of the menstrual taboo I draw on several case studies in which women’s menstrual cycles are ritualised for women’s empowerment. It is in relation to this sacred ritual space of femininity that I call for women to write their own feminine imaginaries, in connection with their menstrual cycles. Moreover, I argue that this constitutes the expression of an authentic account of female sexuality by women, which is dually the writing of a menstrual dialectic. Authenticity in these terms refers to the expression of the menstrual aspect of female sexuality by women. It therefore requires that women recognise the value of articulating the menstrual aspect of female sexuality.