Body genres
Genres: comedy - melodrama - horror - erotica
Contrast: "mind" genres
Definition
Body genres in art, music and fiction refer to genres that have an effect on the audience's body. The body will display a physical reaction. The term was first brought forward by film scholar Linda Williams. Her definition did not include laughter. Generally, body genres are considered of lower value than "mind genres" (which appeal to the intellect rather than the body).
The reactions are:
- comedy: laughter
- melodrama: crying, tears
- horror: fear, trembling
- erotica: physical arousal, orgasm
Similarly, in music there are mind and body genres as well. The example of a musical genre with a focus towards the body is dance music. [Oct 2005]
A body caught in the grips of intense sensation or emotion
Body genres (1)
[Linda] Williams identifies three pertinent features shared by body genres (which she defines as porn, horror, and melodrama). "First," she writes, "there is the spectacle of a body caught in the grips of intense sensation or emotion" (142): the spectacle of orgasm in porn; of terror and violence in horror; of weeping in melodrama. Second, there is the related focus on ecstasy, "a direct or indirect sexual excitement and rapture," which borders on what the Greeks termed insanity or bewilderment (142-3). Visually this is signalled in films through what Williams calls the "involuntary convulsion or spasm--of the body `beside itself' in the grips of sexual pleasure, fear and terror, and overpowering sadness" (143). Aurally, ecstasy is marked by the inarticulate cry--of pleasure in porn, of terror in horror, and of grief or anguish in melodrama (143). --Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art, Film Quarterly, Winter, 1999 by Joan Hawkins
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1070/is_2_53/ai_59210751/pg_1 [Mar 2005]
editor's note: what about laughter ?
Body genres (2)
Finally, body genres directly address the spectator's body. And it is this last feature which, Williams argues, most noticeably characterizes body genres as degraded cultural forms. "What seems to bracket these particular genres from others," she writes, "is an apparent lack of proper aesthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion ... viewers feel too directly, too viscerally, manipulated by the text" (144). The body of the spectator involuntarily mimics "the emotion or sensation of the body onscreen" (143). The spectator cringes, becomes tense, screams, weeps, becomes aroused. This is such a pointed and calculated feature of body films that Mary Ann Doane, as Williams points out, "equates the violence of this emotion to a kind of `textual rape' of the targeted ... viewer" (144).(11) --Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art, Film Quarterly, Winter, 1999 by Joan Hawkins
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1070/is_2_53/ai_59210751/pg_1 [Mar 2005]
see also: Linda Williams - body - genre
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