Presented by the Centre for Cinema Studies and Cinema Thinks the World, the Critical Thinkers Series features research talks by notable and emerging scholars in Cinema and Media Studies. Join us for the second talk in the Spring 2026 Series by Dr. Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf, Associate Professor of Film Studies at Ohio University.
Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma
Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf’s recent book, Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma (SUNY Press, 2025), analyzes cases of what she terms feminist refusal in cinematic, literary, and intermedial texts that were produced after the 1940-1944 German Occupation of France and, forty-five years later, after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in China. The book argues that strategies of feminist refusal can be found in the ways that these texts enact a series of affective response to the historical and social erasure of traumatic history: melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion. Taken together, these affective responses resist the social imperative to move on from trauma and leave the past in silence. The book forwards the idea that feminist refusal invents new forms and styles aimed at the reclamation and extension of an unmourned past into a future. By making a claim for the importance of these three affective conditions, Remnants of Refusal posits a new way of understanding the relationship between texts and history, as well as for a renewed attention to the experiences of melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion within film and literary theory. This talk will introduce the ideas in Schlumpf’s book through a reading of Emily Xiaobai Tang’s 2001 film Conjugation, in which a Chinese couple tries to make sense of their lives in Beijing under martial law during the winter of 1989.
About Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf
Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Ohio University. She is the author of the book Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma (SUNY Press, 2025). Her work has also been published in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Critique and CR: The New Centennial Review among other journals and edited volumes. Her current book project, Reproducing: Horror in Impossible Times, looks at films from North America, Europe, Africa, and China that, working across multiple temporalities (or, impossible times), birth new monsters (or, reproduce horror) as a response to the global rise of theocratic, authoritarian rule, the growing divide between rich and poor, and climate collapse. As a whole, Reproducing reveals how older forms of genre cinema (the Gothic, horror, and dystopian science fiction) are reappearing today in queer feminist works, thereby allowing for a reconsideration of historical traumas and their uncanny repetition.
This event is free and there is no need to RSVP.