“May beauty be returned to us”: Postpornographic Proposals of María Cañas

Abstract

This paper studies the use of the pornographic image in the work of María Cañas (1972), one of the great figures of appropriationism in Spanish experimental cinema. Based on the analysis of feminist film theory and criticism, as well as philosophers and sociologists who provide a gender perspective, we will consider whether the films of the self-styled Archivist of Seville —El perfecto cerdo (2005), La cosa nuestra (2006), Down with Reality (2006), Fuera de serie (2012), Sé villana. La Sevilla del diablo (2013), La mano que trina (2015), Expo’Lio 92 (2017), La cosa vuestra (2018) and Padre no nuestro (2019)—  can be understood, beyond images stolen from industrial pornography, as examples of a post-pornographic stand that questions the representations and the socioeconomic structures that determine them, denouncing a form of capitalism based on violence and proposing an anti-speciesist feminism that goes through the reappropriation of vulnerable bodies.