The Proximity of Other Skins

Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinema

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by Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Type

Studies

Subject

Sociology

Keywords

sexuality, globalization

Publishing date

2020

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 264 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-0-19-086586-3

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Book Presentation:
• Provides a reappraisal of pivotal films and filmmakers
• Links historical and sociopolitical concerns with critical-theoretical assessments
• Tackles the question of how we should represent each other

Transnational films that represent intimacy and inequality produce new experiences that result in the displacement of the universal spectator, in a redefinition of the power of cinema for today's global audiences. The Proximity of Other Skins examines transnational films that achieve global prominence in presenting a different cinematic language of love and sex. Author Celine Parreñas Shimizu traverses independent films by Gina Kim and Ramona Diaz to the global cinema of Laurent Cantet, Park Chan-wook and Cannes award-winning director Brilliante Mendoza and their representations of transnational intimacies. In doing so, she addresses unexpected encounters in the global movement of people and goods within their geopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts. In these celebrated films that move across continents, she finds ways to expand our definition of intimacy, including explicit sex and relations that go beyond sex, enabling us the opportunity to theorize how people now live together in many spheres of contemporary life. Readers can then better understand how intimacy can affirm and express love, but also alienate and oppress, revealing the loneliness, pain, and suffering within transnational, national, and personal relations of power and hierarchy. In studying representations of intimacy, the book calls to expand our vocabulary of moving images and its role in redefining care work and affective relations between people across difference and inequality. The book addresses cinematic intimacies between husbands/wives/lovers, understanding between sex workers and clients, close familiarity between rich and poor, and new affinities between citizen and refugee and laborer and capitalist.

About the Author:
Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies, San Francisco State University Professor Celine Parreñas Shimizu is Director of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the author of The Hypersexuality of Race (2007), Straitjacket Sexualities (2012) and co-editor of The Feminist Porn Book (2013) and The Unwatchability of Whiteness, a special issue of Asian Diasporas and Visual Cultures of the Americas (2018). Her films include The Celine Archive (2019), The Fact of Asian Women (2004) and Birthright: Mothering Across Difference (2009). She has written numerous peer-reviewed articles in the top journals in the fields of cinema, performance, ethnic, feminist, sexuality studies and transnational popular culture in Asia and Asian America including Cinema Journal, Concentric, Film Quarterly, Frontiers, Journal of Asian American Studies, positions, Sexualities, Signs, Theater Journal, and Yale Journal of Law and Feminism.

Press Reviews:
"In The Proximity of Other Skins, Celine Parreñas Shimizu offers a powerful model of ethical intimacy that demands a global understanding of cinema, sexuality, and otherness. Through a series of insightful and passionate readings, she challenges us to see movies — and ourselves — with greater rigor and political complexity. As with her other books, I come away from this one with a finer grasp of how cinema, seen through her illuminating vision, can provoke and unsettle in the best ways." - Viet Thanh Nguyen, Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winner The Sympathizer

"Contemporary Asian and world cinemas are replete with narratives of self-shattering encounters with otherness. In this fascinating study, Celine Parreñas Shimizu illuminates the fraught intimacies conjured by the movies, revealing their ethico-political insights into some of our era's murkiest dilemmas." - José B. Capino, author of Martial Law Melodrama: Lino Brocka's Cinema Politics

"This thought-provoking book examines efforts by contemporary filmmakers from the Philippines, Korea, and elsewhere to portray inequality within scenes of intimacy in ways designed to make viewers uncomfortable. Her highly original study grapples impressively with the challenges of forging empathy, compassion, and understanding across borders, and offers fresh insight into how film can illuminate the dynamics of power, privilege, and pleasure in global contexts." - Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University

"Dr. Shimizu's work has always been attuned to the potential of cinema to not only represent the social, but produce it. The Proximity of Other Skins is no exception and constitutes a profound and necessary continuation of her ongoing feminist inquiry. In this timely and vital text, Shimizu ambitions beyond the sensorial gridlock of the Western cinematic apparatus toward another way of seeing and living under the neocolonial visual regime." - Alok Vaid-Menon

See the publisher website: Oxford University Press