SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Studies
Contact
r.rodness@utoronto.ca
Education
PhD English, McMaster University
MA English, McGill University
BA Honours English, McGill University
Biography
I work at the intersection of cinema studies, queer theory and continental philosophy. My research looks specifically to the history of queer film and visual culture to explore radical and promissory forms of social being that are unexpectedly revealed by the film camera’s unique perceptive qualities. My dissertation, Queer Indifference: Solitude, Film, Dreams, developed a theory of the subversive power of recessive forms of social intimacy called queer indifference. By putting queer concerns with the normative politics of identity, visibility and inter-relationality in conversation with philosophical concepts of indifference, it drew attention to marginal forms of political agency found in queer culture and heath activism, and argued that recessive relations experienced in the fortuitous spaces of 'shared-separation' can be a source of justice rather than social deprivation.
Current Research
My current project explores the relationship between the film camera and diverse bodies in conflict. By asking how a non-human camera records human difference differently than humans perceive it, the project aims to develop an existential-aesthetic theory of the film camera’s automatism as a queer encounter with human activity. This research expands on work from my dissertation that theorizes film as a form of 'queer indifference,' and I hope to develop these initial insights by demonstrating how film’s indifferent gaze can produce queerly radical views of human conflict and the gendered, racialized and sexualized bodies within it.
Publications
“Capital Logic: Inception and Dream Labour in the Information Age.” World Picture, Summer 2016, vol. 11, http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_11/Rodness_11.html
“Cinema’s Queer Witness: Ira Sachs’s Last Address and the Indifferent View.” New Centennial Review, vol. 19, no. 2, 2019, pp. 163-202.
“Hard Road Ahead: Stone’s Queer Agency in Stone Butch Blues.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (forthcoming)
“On Dismantling the Master's House: François Laruelle's Theory (in) Practice.” Chiasma: A Site For Thought, vol. 1, 2014, pp. 64-98.
“Stutter and Phenomena: The Phenomenology and Deconstruction of Delayed Auditory Feedback.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (forthcoming)
“Thomas King's National Literary Celebrity and the Cultural Ambassadorship of a Native Canadian Writer.” Canadian Literature, vol. 220, Spring 2014, pp. 55-72.
Recent Awards
2020 Jeffery and Sandra Lyons Canadian Film Scholarship
Other Research Interests
Voice and dysfluency; non-human animals; dreams; Talmud; post-continental philosophy