College: Churchill
Email: ljp60@cam.ac.uk
Supervisor: Prof Emma Wilson
Research Topic: Relationality and Opacity: Approaching Trans in Cinema
About:
Lili is a PhD student at the Centre for Film and Screen, and handed in their PhD thesis in September 2021.
Lili studied for an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies at Cambridge (2016-2017). Their MPhil thesis was an exploration of queer relational potential in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Other essays included a study of masculinity and technology in Buster Keaton's The Playhouse; autobiography and the maternal in Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie and Maniac Shadows; and labour and architecture in Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love. As an undergraduate, Lili studied a Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2012-2015).
Research
Lili’s PhD thesis, titled Relationality and Opacity: Approaching Trans in Cinema, seeks to attend to modes of trans relationality in cinema. Surveying a range of European films from 1970s–present, the thesis approaches cinema as a medium that abstracts and instrumentalizes trans bodies as metaphors for mutability and transformation, a tendency that has been shaped by histories of racialization and pathologization. A complementing strand argues that such abstractions cleave imperfectly to the lived complexity of trans experience, leaving room for manoeuvre and offering measures of opacity. Reading for opacity, they propose, offers ways to read for forms of trans relationality that persist in excess of the abstractions that have put trans towards other purposes.
Scholarships/Prizes
Isaac Newton Trust Studentship, University of Cambridge, AHRC – 2018-2021
Demy Fellowship and Bursary, Magdalen College, University of Oxford – 2013-2015
Teaching
In 2019-2020, Lili taught students on the CS6 European Film Module, including a dissertation student, whose project focused on gendered violence in feminist filmmaking.
Conference papers
June 2021 – ‘Fungible and Fugitive: Rethinking Transness and Blackness in The Crying Game’
Screen Conference, University of Glasgow, Screen Journal
June 2021 – ‘Screening Trans Childhood in Sébastien Lifshitz’s Petite Fille’
Queer Cultures Symposium, University of Cambridge
September 2019 – ‘A Creaturely Cinema of the Everyday: Maggie in Wonderland’
Slices of Everyday Life Conference, University of Cambridge, Cinemuse Space
June 2019 – ‘Resisting Abstractions: Trans Embodiments and History of Medicine in She Male Snails’
Body and Embodiment Conference, University of Oxford
Publications
Published:
'Ethical Listening: Discovering Non-normative Forms of Intimacy in Pojktanten (2012) and Wild Side (2004)', Another Gaze, Issue 2, (2018)
'Masculinity and the Mechanical: Ambiguous Identities in Buster Keaton's The Playhouse', HARTS & Minds Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2, (2017)
Accepted pending minor revisions:
‘Form Without Optimism: Queer Relations in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’, in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture
