Sexing the Look in Popular Visual Culture

Sexing the Look in Popular Visual Culture PDF Author: Kathy Justice Gentile
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527551490
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
With dramatic advances in media technology, the practice of sexing or erotically enhancing images has become an increasingly widespread phenomenon. The eroticized “look,” as both noun and verb, the thing or image that draws our look, and the look that we bestow on images that elicit our visual, physiological, and emotional attention, is the focus of the essays in this volume. Every day, whether we are out in the world or in the workplace or in the privacy of our homes, we enter visual fields that heighten and distort reality, distortions that often emphasize sexuality and erotic promise. The contributors for this collection look at the sexualization of visual culture from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including literature, film studies, history, philosophy, art history, and media studies, with gender and sexuality studies providing the encompassing critical framework that binds these essays into a coherent analytical project. The essays in this collection offer new theoretical conceptions of perception and representation, as well as rigorous reconsiderations of the polarized feminist debates over pornographic images. Essays on literature and film range from an interrogation of Baudrillard’s theory of seduction that posits femininity as a strategy of illusion and subversion to Bridget Jones’s challenge to the prevailing disciplinary regime that prescribes rigid standards for feminine beauty to a reevaluation of the subversive potential of sexy female robots. Other contributors consider the history of nudist images in US periodicals, the proliferation of eroticized images of girls in new digital technologies, gentlemanly masculinity in men’s fashion in late Victorian England, and a rape prevention campaign’s unintentional reinforcement of persistent heterosexist misconceptions about rape.

Sexing the Look in Popular Visual Culture

Sexing the Look in Popular Visual Culture PDF Author: Kathy Justice Gentile
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527551490
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
With dramatic advances in media technology, the practice of sexing or erotically enhancing images has become an increasingly widespread phenomenon. The eroticized “look,” as both noun and verb, the thing or image that draws our look, and the look that we bestow on images that elicit our visual, physiological, and emotional attention, is the focus of the essays in this volume. Every day, whether we are out in the world or in the workplace or in the privacy of our homes, we enter visual fields that heighten and distort reality, distortions that often emphasize sexuality and erotic promise. The contributors for this collection look at the sexualization of visual culture from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including literature, film studies, history, philosophy, art history, and media studies, with gender and sexuality studies providing the encompassing critical framework that binds these essays into a coherent analytical project. The essays in this collection offer new theoretical conceptions of perception and representation, as well as rigorous reconsiderations of the polarized feminist debates over pornographic images. Essays on literature and film range from an interrogation of Baudrillard’s theory of seduction that posits femininity as a strategy of illusion and subversion to Bridget Jones’s challenge to the prevailing disciplinary regime that prescribes rigid standards for feminine beauty to a reevaluation of the subversive potential of sexy female robots. Other contributors consider the history of nudist images in US periodicals, the proliferation of eroticized images of girls in new digital technologies, gentlemanly masculinity in men’s fashion in late Victorian England, and a rape prevention campaign’s unintentional reinforcement of persistent heterosexist misconceptions about rape.

Henry James and the Supernatural

Henry James and the Supernatural PDF Author: A. Despotopoulou
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230119840
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
This book is a collection of essays on ghostly fiction by Henry James. The contributors analyze James's use of the ghost story as a subgenre and the difficult theoretical issues that James's texts pose.

Naked at Lunch

Naked at Lunch PDF Author: Mark Haskell Smith
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802191789
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
“A delightful and informative look at nudism throughout history and around the world.” —The Seattle Times People have been getting naked in public for reasons other than sex for centuries. But as Mark Haskell Smith reveals, being a nudist is more complicated than simply dropping trou. “Nonsexual social nudism,” as it’s called, rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century. Intellectuals, outcasts, and health nuts from Victorian England and colonial India to Belle Époque France and Gilded Age Manhattan disrobed and wrote manifestos about the joys of going clothing-free. From stories of ancient Greek athletes slathered in olive oil to the millions of Germans who fled the cities for a naked frolic during the Weimar Republic to American soldiers given “naturist” magazines by the Pentagon in the interest of preventing sexually transmitted diseases, this book uncovers nudism’s amusing and provocative past. Coated in multiple layers of high SPF sunblock, Haskell Smith publicly disrobes for the first time in Palm Springs; observes the culture of family nudism in a clothing-free Spanish town; and travels to the largest nudist resort in the world, a hedonist’s paradise in the south of France. He reports on San Francisco’s controversial ban on public nudity, participates in a week of naked hiking in the Austrian Alps, and caps off his adventures with a week on a Caribbean cruise known as the Big Nude Boat. Equal parts cultural history and gonzo participatory journalism, Naked at Lunch is “an absolute hoot” (Los Angeles Magazine) and “a total joy” (Meghan Daum). “Smith puts on his reporter’s hat and takes off everything else as he explores the history and sociology of nudism.” —Los Angeles Times

Sexing War/Policing Gender

Sexing War/Policing Gender PDF Author: Linda Åhäll
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131796229X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Historically, there has been reluctance, from mainstream IR scholars as well as feminists, to seriously engage with women’s agency in warfare. Instead, scholarship has tended to focus on women’s activism for peace or to ignore women’s agency altogether. This book rectifies this omission by exploring the cultural understanding of actors, agents and structures of war and how can we make sense of attitudes towards women, agency and war today. By using a poststructuralist feminist perspective and by analysing empirical cases from a Western ‘war on terror’ cultural context, Ahall argues that all types of stories are informed by ideas about motherhood and maternal reproduction as the foundation of sexual difference. This does not only mean that women are judged/read/valued based on the shape of their, maternalised, bodies, rather than what they actually do, but, it means that ideas about motherhood, not motherhood itself, function to police contemporary gender norms and contemporary understandings of agency in war. Overall, this book argues that maternalist war stories function to reiterate traditional heteronormative gender roles. This is how a ‘body politics’ of war is not only policing gender norms but actually writing ‘sex’ itself. The body politics of war told through maternalist war stories is a process in which the sexing of war means the policing of gender borders, with motherhood acting as the border agent. This work will be of interest to students and scholars in areas such as gender, political violence and international relations.

Companion to Sexuality Studies

Companion to Sexuality Studies PDF Author: Nancy A. Naples
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119315050
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 535

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Book Description
An inclusive and accessible resource on the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality Companion to Sexuality Studies explores the significant theories, concepts, themes, events, and debates of the interdisciplinary study of sexuality in a broad range of cultural, social, and political contexts. Bringing together essays by an international team of experts from diverse academic backgrounds, this comprehensive volume provides original insights and fresh perspectives on the history and institutional regulatory processes that socially construct sex and sexuality and examines the movements for social justice that advance sexual citizenship and reproductive rights. Detailed yet accessible chapters explore the intersection of sexuality studies and fields such as science, health, psychology, economics, environmental studies, and social movements over different periods of time and in different social and national contexts. Divided into five parts, the Companion first discusses the theoretical and methodological diversity of sexuality studies.Subsequent chapters address the fields of health, science and psychology, religion, education and the economy. They also include attention to sexuality as constructed in popular culture, as well as global activism, sexual citizenship, policy, and law. An essential overview and an important addition to scholarship in the field, this book: Draws on international, postcolonial, intersectional, and interdisciplinary insights from scholars working on sexuality studies around the world Provides a comprehensive overview of the field of sexuality studies Offers a diverse range of topics, themes, and perspectives from leading authorities Focuses on the study of sexuality from the late nineteenth century to the present Includes an overview of the history and academic institutionalization of sexuality studies The Companion to Sexuality Studies is an indispensable resource for scholars, researchers, instructors, and students in gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, interdisciplinary programs in cultural studies, international studies, and human rights, as well as disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, history, education, human geography, political science, and sociology.

New Books on Women, Gender and Feminism

New Books on Women, Gender and Feminism PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description


New Books on Women and Feminism

New Books on Women and Feminism PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description


Elite Girls' Schooling, Social Class and Sexualised Popular Culture

Elite Girls' Schooling, Social Class and Sexualised Popular Culture PDF Author: Claire Charles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136195882
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Young women’s identities are an issue of public and academic interest across a number of western nations at the present time. This book explores how young women attending an elite school for girls understand and construct ‘empowerment’. It investigates the extent to which, and the ways in which, their constructions of empowerment and identity work to overturn, or resist, key regulations and normative expectations for girls in post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultural contexts. The book provides a succinct overview of feminist theorisations of normative femininities in young women’s lives in western cultural contexts. It includes familiar sexist discourses such as sexual double standards, as well as more recent commentary about the regulation of young women’s subjectivities in neoliberal, post-feminist, hyper-sexualised cultures. Drawing on ethnographic research in the context of an elite girls’ secondary school, the author explores how empowerment for young women is constructed and understood across a range of textual practices. From visual representations of young women in school promotional material, to students’ constructions of popular celebrities, the question of how girls’ resistance to normative femininities begins to develop is examined. This rich empirical work makes a unique contribution to the study of elite schooling within the sociology of education, drawing on important insights from the field of critical girlhood studies, and posing a challenge to popular feminist notions about media literacy, young women and empowerment. It will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in the areas of gender studies, sociology, education, youth studies and cultural studies.

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 PDF Author: Lyneise E. Williams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501332368
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 examines an understudied visual language used to portray Latin Americans in mid-19th to early 20th-century Parisian popular visual media. The term 'Latinize' is introduced to connect France's early 19th-century endeavors to create “Latin America,” an expansion of the French empire into the Latin-language based Spanish and Portuguese Americas, to its perception of this population. Latin-American elites traveler to Paris in the 1840s from their newly independent nations were denigrated in representations rather than depicted as equals in a developing global economy. Darkened skin, etched onto images of Latin Americans of European descent mitigated their ability to claim the privileges of their ancestral heritage. Whitened skin, among other codes, imposed on turn-of-the-20th-century Black Latin Americans in Paris tempered their Blackness and rendered them relatively assimilatable compared to colonial Africans, Blacks from the Caribbean, and African Americans. After identifying mid-to-late 19th-century Latinizing codes, the study focuses on shifts in latinizing visuality between 1890-1933 in three case studies: the depictions of popular Cuban circus entertainer Chocolat; representations of Panamanian World Bantamweight Champion boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown; and paintings of Black Uruguayans executed by Pedro Figari, a Uruguayan artist, during his residence in Paris between 1925-1933.

The Female Body in the Looking-Glass

The Female Body in the Looking-Glass PDF Author: Basia Sliwinska
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786730081
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
In his theory of the 'mirror stage', the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan argued that the female body is defined by its lack of male attributes. Within this framework, he described female sexuality primarily as an absence, and assumed female subordination to the male gaze. However, what happens if one follows Jean Baudrillard's advice to 'swallow the mirror' and go through the 'looking-glass' to explore the reflections and realities that we encounter in the cultural mirror, which reflects the culture in question: its norms, ideals and values? What if the beautiful is inverted and becomes ugly; and the ugly is considered beautiful or shape-shifts into something conventionally thought of as beautiful? These are the fundamental questions that Basia Sliwinska poses in this important new enquiry into gender identity and the politics of vision in contemporary women's art.Through an innovative discussion of the mirror as a metaphor, Sliwinska reveals how the post-1989 practices of woman artists from both sides of the former Iron Curtain - such as Joanna Rajkowska, Marina Abramovic, Boryana Rossa, Natalia LL and Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova - go beyond gender binaries and instead embrace otherness and difference by playing with visual tropes of femininity. Their provocative works offer alternative representations of the female body to those seen in the cultural mirror. Their art challenges and deconstructs patriarchal representations of the social and cultural 'other', associated with visual tropes of femininity such as Alice in Wonderland, Venus and Medusa. The Female Body in the Looking-Glass makes a refreshing, radical intervention into art theory and cultural studies by offering new theoretical concepts such as 'the mirror' and 'genderland' (inspired by Alice's adventures in Wonderland) as critical tools with which we can analyse and explain recent developments in women's art.