The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader

Jones, A. (Ed.). (2003). The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York and London: Routledge.

Introduction (pp. 1-7)

Amelia Jones writes that visual culture is a rubric and a model of critical thinking about the world of images saturating contemporary life. According to her, visual culture studies, which originated from cultural studies in the 1950s, became a new genre of studies in the 80s, moving cultural studies beyond textual analysis, with a strong influence from feminism and other disciplines, such as anti-racist theory, art history, queer studies and film studies.

Defining visuality as “the conditions of how we see and make meaning of what we see” (p.1), Jones argues that feminism has acknowledged visuality as a key mode of gender inscription in Western culture, therefore feminism and visual culture deeply inform each other.

In particular Jones points out John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing and Laura Mulvey’s (1975) “Visual Pleasure and narrative Cinama” as two seminal essays that marshal visual culture studies with feminism. She writes about the first author:

"In his epochal 1972 study of popular and fine art images, Ways of Seeing, John Berger noted ‘ [t]he way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe’(Berger , 1972, 3). Berger (among others) opened the way for conceiving the meaning of visual images as taking place in a process of exchange between the image (with its proposed ‘ways of seeing’) and the viewer, whose beliefs inform the way she or he interprets the work. Visual Culture, then, cuts through the conventional art-historical notion of meaning as inherent in an image, as presumably embedded there in perpetuity by the willful intentions of the artist…”(p.3)

Jones contests that visual culture studies became more complex with the influence of feminism since around 1970s.

"[S]ince around 1970, it has been feminist responses and approaches to visual images that have provided some of the strongest, most polemical, and most productive theories and critical strategies to come out of any of the disciplines or modes of analysis associated with visual culture. (p.3)"

Introduction to Part Two: Representation (pp. 33-36)
Jones asserts that both feminism and visual culture contribute to overturning (or dismantling) ‘reductivist (reductionist?)’ ‘modernist’ ‘formalist’ ‘neo-Kantian’ assumption that art works are AUTONOMOUS from the sociopolitical realm and their meaning is inherent to their structure and content created by the artist. This challenge, she argues, revolved around the notion of representation. While modernists regard representation as transparent and unmediated to the reality, visual culture and feminism studies interrogated the representation in relation to power and subjectivity.

[This dismantling process is aligned with multivocality, which is one of the critical notions of participatory (action) research and participatory video.]

From Ways of Seeing (J. Berger, 1972)
Regarding the nude of women as the principal European paining, Berger points out that, while men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at, thus turning themselves into an object of vision, a sight. Berger contrasts this cultural aspect with arts in non-European traditions, where women are as active as men within art works the theme of which is a sexual attraction.

[This signifies the ways in which women has been gazed within Western culture. Also, his comparison insinuates that the representation is a value-added cultural product, which continues to reify the existing cultural preferences embedded in power structure.]

Textual Strategies: The politics of art-making (Judith Barry & Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, pp. 53-59)
Barry and Flitterman attempt to theorize the practice of feminist art-making. They maintain that the initial feminists’ perspective that emphasized the importance of giving voice to women’s personal experience is facing a radical reconceptualization, which sees the personal experience within social and unconscious forces. They classify feminist art-making into four categories: 1) emphasizing female experiences and bodily processes, 2) viewing neglected women’s art as a sub-culture, 3) [I don’t understand] and 4) textual practice exploiting existing social contradiction, which emphasizes the constructedness of feminity by calling critical awareness for both the artist herself and her spectators. The authors argue that the fourth type can transform the spectator from a passive consumer to an active meaning producer. One exemplary art work, they mention in this article, is Mary Kelly’s (1975) Post-Partum Document.
[This fourth type resonates well in feminist PV perspective.]

The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female spectators (pp. 94-105).
(also appears in bell hooks (1992) In Black Looks: Race and Representation (pp. 115-131). Boston: South End Press.
Criticizing that mainstream feminist film criticism does not acknowledge black female spectatorship, hooks asserts that feminist film theories rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework suppress recognition of race and abstracts women. Thus, she argues that feminist film theories structure the discourse of women only within the perspective of white women. In particular, hooks develops the notion of cinematic negation, which means the absence of black female in cinema as a means of perpetuating white supremacy: in other words, the woman to be looked at and desired is white. Therefore, hooks argues that black women may develop an oppositional/critical gaze, which brings the pleasure of deconstructing films.

Hooks emphasizes active resistance that transcends beyond awareness:

"Many black women do not “see differently” precisely because their perceptions of reality are so profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing…Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking. While every black woman I talked to was aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze… We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions." (pp. 102-103)

Stressing the creation of space for the construction of radical black female subjectivity, hooks calls attention to film as a powerful site for critical intervention. Citing Illusions, Daughters of the Dust and Passion of Remembrance, hooks writes, “Opening up a space for the assertion of a critical black female spectatorship, they do not simply offer diverse representations, they imagine new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity. Hooks argues that identity begins from recognition of difference, which is suppressed in mainstream cinema in the form of cinematic negation.

Difference, “A special third world women issue” (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 151-174)
Speaking that, as if sexism dehumanizes men, racism dehumanizes herself to the extent that it allows her to feel free from her neighbors’ troubles, Minh-ha argues that hegemony and racism are a pressing feminist issue.

In her discussion of authenticity, Minh-ha states that, “Today, planned authenticity is rife; as a product of hegemony and a remarkable counterpart of universal standardization, it constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression” (p.158). She argues, on the other hand, that identity should be understood as multiple presences such that ‘I’ is infinite layers.

One theme that reoccurs is subjectivity in feminist theory. What does it mean exactly?
judgment based on individual personal impressions and feelings and opinions rather than external facts -word reference. com