Subversion, sensation, and reorientation: filmic experience as embodied resource in Promising Young Woman

In this essay, I demonstrate how the material-symbolic nature of certain filmic experiences can provide rhetorical resources for reorientation, using the film Promising Young Woman as a case study. I argue that the film invites perceptual and cognitive-embodied reorientation through perspective by incongruity in two primary ways. First, the film’s subversive aesthetics invite reorientation of perceptual structures governed by a binary gender logic that devalues the feminine. Second, the film’s subversive narrative-affective structure invites cognitive-embodied reorientation to postfeminist solutions to sexual violence. Together, these filmic subversions illustrate how embodied filmic experience can function as a uniquely powerful personal and political resource for orienting ourselves differently in relation to gender and sexual violence at a time when reorientation is desperately needed.