Resisting Binaries: Vulnerability, Agency and the Sovereign Subject Through a Feminist Critical Gaze

Abstract

[eng] Vulnerability has been traditionally opposed to resistance and agency. However, this proposition has been contested recently as a simplistic opposition of the binary kind: my argument is predicated on the idea that Andrea Arnold is a filmmaker who problematizes these concepts through a self-conscious critical gaze, in particular, in her film Red Road (2008). Drawing from Teresa De Lauretis’ approach to the technologies of gender, I will pay attention to how Arnold inverts the roles traditionally assigned in film: in this case, it is the male character the one under the female gaze, a strategy used by Arnold to question the myth of the sovereign subject. My focus will be on how Arnold presents her characters as vulnerable but always with full agency, and never as victims.