Advisor/tutor: Rachel O’Reilly

Arnhem, June 2016

Abstract

A Negative Genealogy: Invagination as Feminist Film Treatment is a critical, political, dramaturgy of a film treatment of a yet to be realised autobiographical film made from an archive I have been collecting since 2012. Using an invaginated form, that is, a process of turning inside out, reorganising, or folding inwards to create a cavity, I experiment by intertwining a theoretical thesis with a screenplay created from recorded and (re)produced testimonial, performative acts with women in my family. The resulting cacophony of female voices creating conflicting narratives is used to examine a complex, recent history of violence in Argentina.

Challenging, refuting, and complicating the male-centred narratives that already-existing ancestral research produced within my family has uncovered, this text investigates and unpacks historical and formal/bodily demarcations, Cartesian modalities, and relationships between femininity and ideology. A Negative Genealogy… slides between the territories of autobiographical performativity, negativity in ethical fiction, and Lacanian alienation, alluding to the body as a site for memory and metaphorical history, documentary as artform, and the perpetuation of ideological mythologies. This thesis provides a reflexive site where a ‘negative genealogy’ is examined, contradicted, and complicated.