Professor Jackie Stacey (Manchester) will present a talk entitled ‘A Paler Shade of White: Tilda Swinton, David Bowie and the Legibility of Whiteness’

This talk will present some new research on Tilda Swinton’s whiteness, linking it to her twinning with David Bowie. In dialogue with Richard Dyer’s work on the history of whiteness, this paper will explore questions of affect, embodiment and humanness through some close readings of Swinton’s visual presence. Moving between her work in cinema, music video, fashion photography and live performance, I shall trace the ways in which her particular embodiment of whiteness raises questions about legibility and interpretation.

Biographical note: Jackie Stacey is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester where she is currently co-director of the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture. She is a co-editor of Screen. Her publications include: Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (1994); Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997); Queer Screen: A Screen Reader (co-edited with Sarah Street, 2006), The Cinematic Life of the Gene (2010); Writing Otherwise: Experiments in Cultural Criticism (co-edited with Janet Wolff, 2013). She is now working on a new research project on Tilda Swinton.