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Agnieszka Piotrowska reminds us -via the work of Jean Luc Nancy - of the complexity of speaking about and exploring touch, as it is ‘something that is indeed very difficult, if possible at all, to talk about’. Yet, ‘the connections of the body, the language and the touching are worth considering from a different perspective’ (Piotrowksa, 2016: 74). Inspired by this idea, this article seeks to contribute to important global, contemporary feminist discussions around the body and violence, offering a timely intervention into feminist, film-philosophical debates. Furthermore, I argue, via two selected cinematic works, namely Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men (Zanan-e Bedun-e Mardan, 2009) and Claudia Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada, 2009), that their female authorial voices offer a compelling and diverse audio-visual representation of violence and brutality against women through the eyes of the main female protagonists.
There is a long history of violence in relation to the image, including the cinematic image. Steven Shaviro (1993) - via the work of Jacques Lacan and Walter Benjamin - draws attention to the way in which an engagement with cinematic texts affects us as viewers, foregrounding an embodied experience of viewing that is inherently violent. He explains:
Cinema allows me and forces me to see what I cannot assimilate or grasp. It assaults the eye and ear, it touches and it wounds. It foregrounds the body, apart from the comforting representations that I use to keep it at a distance. This touch, this contact, is excessive: it threatens my very sense of self. (Shaviro, 1993: 258-259)
Because of the feeling of threat to the self, the viewer cannot simply turn away - but instead is ‘forced’ to watch. This physical and violent relationship with cinematic images chimes with Barbara Creed's argument concerning horror movies, where common expressions such as ‘“It scared the shit out of me”; “It made me feel sick”; [and] “It gave me the creeps”’ underline th