Bodily States on Screen: Gendering Spheres of Influence inHouse of Cards

Abstract

This article elaborates how the political television drama House of Cards presents the state as a gendered human body, anthropomorphised in the United States' presidential couple Frank and Claire Underwood and Russia's President Viktor Petrov for popular consumption. In an attempt to bring gender into conversation with the concept of sphere of influence, the article shows the tensions between militarist masculinity and queer subjectivity. In House of Cards, the viewer can identify statecraft as mancraft, and see how nonnormative behaviour is written off statecraft. The article focuses on bodily performances as signs of different approaches to power, and argues that House of Cards reinforces a militarised ideal of power over in the everyday practices in and around the White House, as well as in the form of spheres of influence. The series produces a choreography of militarist performance, an imagery which reinforces the understanding of world politics as a terrain for establishing spheres of influence. In the series, spheres of influence become manifest through the exacerbating of patriarchal conduct and centralisation of power, as well as in the premise of building security on the basis of enmities and influence. Sphere of influence, thus, represents a form of masculinised order, pinned against feminised anarchy, leading not only to the subordination of the influenced state, but nonnormative subjectivities, in particular.

Pissing On the Past: The Highland Clearances, Effigial Resistance and the Everyday Politics of the Urinal

“…11 Yet, in its focus on 'guying' these enemies, 12 our analysis retains, and furthers the feminist critique of effigial practices by linking such performance to (male) genitalia through the act of politicised micturition, affirming Hast's argument that urination can be a political 'bodily statement', where the urinator has power 'over others'. 13 In this article, we aim to push IR to consider the most banal aspects of the human condition as part of its remit, while also delving into an as-yet-unexplored area of resistance, namely linking (textually and visually-influenced) alterations to the internal state of the body to political agency. Our case study serves as an explicit and provocative political intervention, one which through its geographic/geopolitical scales (urinal, men's toilet, [Scottish] pub, Glasgow, Scotland, Great Britain) makes an argument for engaging with the mundane, vernacular and vulgar in everyday IR.…”

Diálogo transmedia de las series de televisión. La superación de la Quinta Pared en House of Cards

“…Narra la historia de Frank Underwood, un congresista demócrata del distrito de Carolina del Sur. Junto a su esposa, Claire Underwood, hace todo lo que está a su alcance para lograr ser el presidente de los Estados Unidos y mantenerse en el poder (Keller, 2015;Palmen, Dertssen y Kolthoff, 2018;Hast, 2018). La serie fue producida por Media Rights Capital (MRC), Panic Pictures (II) y Trigger Street Productions para Netflix Inc., que la han difundido en la televisión web y en vídeo bajo demanda.…”