Urban piss-ups: a parodic feminist geographic research film

Keywords: Film, Feminist Geography, Urban Geography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 43

Abstract

The paper aims to stimulate a methodological reflection on the making of parodic collective research films in feminist geography, through the case study of the short-film ‘Urban piss-ups’.
To study the relationship between women and the urban space, I organised a feminist workshop during which 10 women shared their spatial experiences to bring out some discriminatory conditions. We set up an amateur film-crew, wrote and produced three parodic and fictional short-films. The collective realisation of the films aims to generate an interacting research process, which produces a form of knowledge of spatial gender discrimination that is place-based (Jacobs, Palis 2021), situated (Ernwein 2020), decolonial and relational. The parodic style has been adopted as a critical tool for analysing, spatial meanings. Through parody master’s practices are imitated, altered (Hariman 2008), exaggerated and distorted to highlight their incoherences and weaknesses and shows the "possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself" (Butler 1990).
In Urban piss-ups we wrote and staged together a parallel scenario: a group of women take over the masculine practice of urinating in public space to make fun of it, revealing its discriminatory meaning and acting it out to symbolically “conquer” the city.
The realization of the parodic short-film constituted a shift away from the established practices of geography. It recognises and simultaneously denies discomfort, takes it on critically, transforms it by pillorying it, and then acts it out as a collective performance in front of the camera to materialise the discrimination.