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Misrecognition In Titanic, Ian Buchanan

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Something rather interesting is going on in Hollywood cinema today. Art is being used to deflect feminist inquiry; but more incredibly still, feminist self-assertion is being used to avert a critique of capitalism. I am thinking particularly of the nude scene in Titanic. Kate Winslett appears nude, but because it is for an artist, not us, as it were, that nudity is contained, recuperated in other words, by being made to seem other than it is. And since the scene is a peripeteia in the Hollywood sense of the word, namely a moment of self-discovery, the resulting artwork is coded …