Refiguring animated bodies: feminist perspectives on the body in animation

Recent years have seen a renewed focus within animation studies regarding women in animation, particularly in terms of their histories and representations. However, despite various examples of scholarship that take up a feminist position or engage in feminist critique and analysis in their examinations of animated film, animation studies has been slow to engage with feminist philosophical frameworks in a rigorous manner. This is particularly evidenced by the lack of engagement with feminist theories of corporeality and materiality. In their re-examination of the mind/body dualism - which nevertheless continues to reassert itself - feminist theorists have long sought to displace and refigure this dichotomy and its associated pairings. This theoretical grappling with corporeality has led to deeper considerations regarding the ontologies of life, of difference, and of becomings, as the complexities of bodies as material entities, the interactions between body and mind, and the interactions between different bodies are revealed and delineated. The focus of this thesis is the ways in which feminist conceptions of the body, materiality, and becoming can work through animation, and in turn, suggest ways in which animation may open up and reinvigorate feminist understandings of the body and modes of materiality.<br><br>The thesis posits that animation is a site through which such complexities can be productively explored and argues that animation and materialist feminism provide mutually generative ways of thinking the material nature of embodiment as necessarily animated. The thesis illustrates this claim with a specific focus on the animated films of Michèle Cournoyer, who takes the body as a central focus in her work to show how animation may actualise the lived experience of, particularly, women's embodiment. The thesis also argues for a genealogical continuity between the ink-on-paper animations of Cournoyer with her female colleagues in the animation industry where the embodied practices of early women (as well as contemporary) animators has enabled this medium's genesis and development.