Page 98 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

“More Sexpression Please!” 83

and . . . that relation is an erotic one . . .” (1991[1982], 276). Both sight and
sound therefore establish a visceral relationship or “palpable connection”
between the beholder and the object beholden.
Vivian Sobchack (2004) coins the term “cinesthetic subject” to capture
the fact that spectators experience cinema through all the senses, not just
vision. “[T]he cinesthetic subject both touches and is touched by the
screen—able to commute seeing to touching and back again without a
thought and, through sensual and cross-modal activity, able to experience
the movie as both here and there rather than clearly locating the site of
cinematic experience as onscreen or offscreen” (71, emphasis in original).
Sobchack suggests that a communion takes place between representation
on screen and the spectator, which is visceral rather than (merely) visual.
This visceral relation is constituted between bodies rather than between
gaze and screen. “[T]he cinesthetic subject feels his or her literal body as
only one side of an irreducible and dynamic relational structure of reversibil-
ity and reciprocity that has as its other side the figural objects of bodily
provocation on the screen” (ibid., 79, emphasis in original). The body is
thus brought into the operation of cinema, where once the disembodied
gaze stood unchallenged. When the standards of propriety explicitly
encourage the regimentation of the senses to avoid physical impact on an
unknown other, the women who lend their bodies to the screen strategize
how to withdraw from the sticky claws of an unknown audience.
Jenny and Shima’s bodily strategies can be understood as a withdrawal
from the visceral relation that is established between the audience and the
“bodily provocation on screen” that they combine to become. The palpa-
ble relationship between screen and viewers was an immediately tangible
reality for women in the film industry, who at every turn were aware of the
interlocking of their bodily selves with the audience, which was thought to
consist almost exclusively of working-class men. The management of this
relationship is also part of porda. On the one hand porda consists of the
visual form that women are encouraged to take up to indicate and signify
their social position. This is porda as the collective strictures placed on
women to be representative of their moral community or shomaj. On the
other hand, porda is also about the management of relations between

women and unfamiliar others. While the former element of porda relates
to the community within which individual women are embedded, the lat-
ter form of porda relates to the management with what can be called “the
public.”
It is from this public, in the form of the mass audience of action films,
that Jenny and Shima shielded themselves by being available to them only
in a particular, abstracted form. By moving between different forms of
visibility, Jenny was able to remain “out of touch” with the audience while