Contribution short abstract:

Lyrical Bodies follows visual anthropologist Vera Kruip as she joined the Dutch post-punk band Shaemless on tour to learn about how men ‘do their emotions’.

Contribution long abstract:

Lyrical Bodies follows visual anthropologist Vera Kruip as she joined the Dutch post-punk band Shaemless on tour to learn about how men ‘do their emotions’. The growing awareness of a discrepancy between Kruips’ personal way of emotional engagement – through verbalisation – and her male interlocutors' emotional habits became the film's red thread. Radical reflexivity helped her show how people can ‘do’ their emotions differently. Her characters, she concludes, do not need to be sensitised as emotional beings as a huge body of literature on the ‘emotional illiteracy’ of men suggests. Instead, she argues, that their emotional lives need to be studied on their own emotional terms.