Creative reflections on embodied filmmaking: in, through and between the senses and spaces of the medicalized body

TL;DR

This paper explores how filmmaking can offer new ways of understanding the medicalized body through sensory and embodied experiences.

Contribution

It introduces 'corporeal parenthesis' as a creative method to challenge conventional medical narratives.

Findings

The visceral body is a site for imaginative and intuitive knowledge-making.

Medical spaces alter sensory experiences of pleasure and non-pleasure.

Creative practice reveals spatial and sensorial boundaries of the medicalized body.

Abstract

This artist’s reflection further explores the imagined and sensorial encounters of the body in medicine through a creative practice-led feminist, embodied, and intersubjective approach to filmmaking. It uses “corporeal parenthesis” as form and content to destabilize conventional readings associated with medicalization. The sensations we feel on the inside of the body shape our imagined anatomical understanding. This extension of proprioception is a sensorial way of seeing and experiencing the inside of one’s own body. The visceral body, which entwines our real and imagined bodily inside, is positioned as a site for sense-making. This emphasizes knowledge as imaginative, intuitive, and lived to resist the standardization experienced within medicine. However, the passive horizontal body in the clinical encounter and the presumed intimacy of the therapeutic space, assumes the body to be accessible and consenting. This alters the ways in which we experience senses associated with pleasure and non-pleasure. By focusing on the artist’s moving image work O (Symptom), creative practice is used to examine in, through, and between the spatial and sensorial boundaries of the medicalized body.

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