Biography
Roshaya Rodness’s research and teaching focuses on queer cinema, the film and media of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and experimental film form. Her interests include queer theory and aesthetics, cinematic realism, dreams and sleep, continental philosophy, critical animal studies, and voice. Her work in film studies is drawn together by films that imagine themselves to be witnesses to human life and conflict – films that take up an ethical summons to be bearers of history and that explore the unique properties of the moving image to command our attention to what escaped our view. These films deeply desire to accomplish what their filmmakers cannot.
Rodness’s current project explores the film camera as a queer witness to human life in conflict. By asking how a non-human camera records human difference differently than humans perceive it, the project aims to develop an existential-aesthetic theory of the film camera’s automatism as a queer encounter with human activity. This research demonstrates how film’s indifferent gaze can produce queerly radical views of human conflict and the gendered, racialized, and sexualized bodies within it.
She also teaches courses in global cinema and film aesthetics.
Her work has been published in Canadian Literature, Chiasma, World Picture, New Centennial Review, Criticism, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies. She has also published in DisruptED, Salon.com, and The Conversation.
Courses
- CIN213H1S - Cinema and Sensation II: Sex
- CIN451H1F - Cinemas of HIV/AIDS