Johanna Isaacson – författare

Our moment has seen the resurgence of an anarchist sensibility, from the uprisings in Seattle in 1999 to the Occupy movement of 2011. Against the vacuity and drift of financialized capitalism, proclaiming there is no alternative, these insurgent movements have insisted that an alternative is possible. In The Ballerina and the Bull Johanna Isaacson explores the occult history of US punk, hardcore, queercore, and riot grrrl, DIY culture, and alternative subcultures to trace a new politics of expressive negation that both contests the present order and gives us a sense of the impasses of politics in an age of depoliticization. Expressive negation registers the contradictory politics at the heart of these projects: the desire for negation that must be positively expressed. Drawing on first- hand experience, interviews, and discussion of the ludic, spatial, and sexual politics of anarchist subcultures, Isaacson maps an underground utopian politics of style and develops a radically new history of the present moment.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Capitalism and patriarchy create monsters—but inside the darkness there lurks a strange utopia. In Stepford Daughters, Johanna Isaacson explores an emerging wave of horror films that get why class horror and gender horror must be understood together. In doing so, Isaacson makes the case that this often-maligned genre is in fact a place where oppressed people can understand, navigate and confront an increasingly ugly and horrifying world.What happens when your smile is no longer yours? Films like Hereditary and The Babadook show women coming apart at the seams as the promises of both the family and waged work fail them. In Get Out, we see how poor women and women of color perform the invisible labor that makes society run while experiencing domestic work as a kind of possession. In “coming of rage” films such as Assassination Nation and Teeth, we see the ways social reproduction leads to a futureless horizon. Robbed of their dreams but not their power to resist, these heroines emerge as the monsters and avengers we need..

A minute-by-minute analysis of Brian De Palma’s 1972 horror film, Sisters, weaving in Marxist feminist theory to foreground an appreciation of the film and bid for its enduring relevance for feminists, despite controversy surrounding its director.Sisters is one of De Palma’s most extraordinary and important films, and yet it is often disregarded, misunderstood, or underestimated. The two main characters, Grace and Danielle, represent the second-wave feminist desire for professional autonomy and women’s psychosexual oppression, respectively. Yet, this reading seems at odds with the abundant accusations of misogyny and transphobia De Palma has drawn throughout his directing career. Each of this book’s 100 vignette chapters makes the case that whatever De Palma’s attitudes and intents, Sisters is a revelatory film for feminists, both for its formal diagnosis and estrangement of conventional gendered relationships under capitalism and for its absorption and reflection of the social contradictions of its moment.The book also asks important, related questions, including: How does Sisters mark the transition from De Palma’s earlier “Godardian” phase to his signature “Hitchcockian” style? How does De Palma’s Hitchcockian phase inaugurated in Sisters intertwine with 1970s’ psychoanalytic feminist theory? How do the contributions of women both as performers and behind the scenes decenter the auteurist rhetoric that is so frequently applied to De Palma’s work? This book is a means to appreciate and understand one of the most important films of the 1970s while reassessing the assumptions at the heart of contemporary feminist evaluations.