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Since form cannot be separated from content-the form of the story being (integral to) the story itself-there is no other way to say it without reforming it (that is, unintentionally modifying, augmenting, or narrowing it).
-Trinh T Minh-ha
Introduction
Our analysis of the 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter explores the formal techniques employed by director Atom Egoyan in his "retelling" of Russell Banks's 1991 novel of the same title. We focus on how Egoyan's use of interruption, haunting, and visual and aural simultaneity does more than push viewers to acknowledge their active role in meaning-- making-these formal techniques also allow space within the narrative for oppositional consciousness and for reconfigured power relationships. Our interpretation combines insights from both women's studies and disability studies to enable us to attend to the political and theoretical implications of the film's form and content and thus explore one of the central paradoxes of subjection and power-that each contains the seeds of its own undoing. More specifically, we focus upon this possibility, even necessity, for agency within constraint in connection with the character Nichole, who self-consciously moves "from object to subject" (hooks 9) by the film's end.
Our reading of The Sweet Hereafter, which highlights the simultaneity of the politics of knowledge and the politics of disability and gender, engages a "both/and" epistemology because it challenges binary thought and "additive models of oppression" (Collins, 1st ed. 225). In addition, we draw upon psychoanalytic theories of "constitutive" parameters of subjectivity (Butler, "Imitation" 15) and, from disability studies, theories of "extraordinary bodies" that prompt "double responses" of fascination and repulsion (Thomson 115). Without a both/and framework that focuses on both gender and disability as loci of abjection, Nichole-a character who experiences both incest and disability-might simply be interpreted as a victim, an object of pity.
We are not suggesting that Nichole is unaffected by or does not suffer from disempowering, oppressive relationships within her family and her community. However, we do want to emphasize that Nichole does not simply survive "experiences with intersecting oppressions [;] ... she clearly rejects their ideological justification" (Collins, 2nd ed. 201). Our goal is to underscore the potential of intersectional political and analytical frameworks not only because they help us to understand the nuances of Nichole's subjectivity,...