AMELIA JONES INTRODUCTION. Conceiving the intersection of feminism and visual culture, again WRITE THIS REVISED VERSION of my original introduction to the first edition of Feminism and Visual Culture Reader over half a decade later, on January 20, 2009, the day of Barack Obama's inauguration as President of the United States. In the face of global transformations after the bombings in the United States and United Kingdom in 2001 and 2005, the ineffectual and devastating “war on terror” waged primarily by the United States and United Kingdom in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US presidential election of 2008-09, unbelievably charged in terms of racial and gendered identifications, and the collapse of the global capitalist economy—everything has changed in terms of feminism’s relevance and visibility as a mode of thinking about power as it is enacted through bodies, institutions, and struc- tures of representation. Perhaps not coincidentally, too, the art world has seen a massive resurgence of interest in feminist art over the past three years, with international exhibitions addressing historical as well as recent feminist art. These recent events, particularly the battle between a black man and white woman for the presidency of the United States and this surge of exhibitions, conferences, and publications on feminist art, have put the final lie to the often fantastized “end of feminism” touted by both conservative cultural critics and the mass media in the 1990s. I have reconceived and reorganized the book accordingly, taking for granted how embedded and central a feminist point of view is to a critical visual analysis and history and focusing more on globalization, new technologies, and intersectional ways of thinking ‘gender and sexuality as inextricably interwoven with other forms of identification. Definitions The intersection of feminism and visual culture, two modes of thinking, making, doing, or strategizing which have their own historical trajectories and political reasons for being, is a volatile and immensely rich one!/ Feminism, in most of its forms, proposes or demands a political and/or ethical stance towards cultural experience; academic versions of feminism theorize the ways in | which all forms of culture condition, and are conditioned by, gender or “sexual difference.” In its most recent forms, reflecting the shift-towards increasingly globalized cultural, political, economic, and social relations in the past fifteen years, feminism insists on broadening models of analyzing the role of gender in cultural experience to accommodate the coextensivity of gender% onigent 2 INTRODUCTION and other modes of subjectivity —including aspects of sexual orientation, racial, ethnic, and faith- based identifications, nationality, class, and so on. - Visual culture is a rubric and a model of critical thinking about the world of images saturating contemporary life. Visual culture was initially developed by scholars frustrated by the limitations of art historical analysis (which insists upon the separation of “high” from “Jow’ cultural forms) and the separation of models of visual analysis according to disciplines based on media (for example film theory and television studies). Visual culture, from the beginning, has been aimed at breaking down disciplinary limitations defining what and how visual imagery is to" be analyzed within’a critical visual Practice. - Both modes of thinking—feminism and visual culture—are, in this way, driven by pol concerns and focus primarily on cultural forms as informing subjective experience. While feminism is a broader initiative encompassing all levels of cultural experience, its insights have become so central to our understanding of the world that it informs most modes of visual culture analysis at this point, whether this dependence is acknowledged or not. At the same time, feminism has long acknowledged that visuality (the conditions of how we see and make meaning of what we see) is one of the key modes by which gender is culturally inscribed in Western culture—and feminist visual theory and art practice rank among the most influential "and wide-ranging arms of feminism. Feminism and visual culture, then, deeply and mutually inform one another. This volume offers a selection of key texts that, in one way or another, theorize and historicize visual imagery and the issue_of visuali feminist lens. The volume is intended to be suggestive, leading the reader to further exploration, rather than definitive; it conceives (of) this complex intersection both in the sense of imagining or putting it into form and in the sense of attempting to understand it through the inclusion of numerous prepublished and six newly commissioned “provocations” or polemical short essays. Feminism is, of course, not a singular discourse to be easily defined or pinned down. Although its official emergences (from the burgeoning of the suffragette movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the rise of Women’s Lib in the 1960s and beyond) can be loosely mapped, its parameters and positions are under continual negotiation. This book takes feminism seriously but does not seek to patrol its borders by, for example, labeling authors or producers of images “feminist” or “not feminist.” This kind of strategy is, I believe, antithetical to the best impulses of feminism, which in some forms at least argues against attributing inherent meaning or value to people, texts, or objects in the world. In organizing this anthology, I worked from the logic that any argument (whether visual or verbal, embodied, virtual, or textual) which takes an interest in, or can be deployed to explore, the ways in which subjects take on, perform, or project gendered identities is, to some extent, feminist, or at least is useful for a feminist study of visual or other kinds of culture. Having arisen as a critical rubric relatively recently, visual culture is at once a clearer and a more elusive category, though as a body of objects it has existed as long (at least) as the human eye. The simplest place in which to situate visual culture as a cross-disciplinary set of _methods and 4 practices rather than a set of objects is in relation to the rise of cultural idies in Engl n late in the 1950s and beyond. Informed by the rise of the New Le 1950s Britain (itself sparked by the Soviet incursion into Hungary in 1956), cultural studies drew from myriad disciplines and methods of analysis but was most deeply marked, according to one of its foundational figures, Stuart Hall, by an abiding link to Marxism, with its commitment to analyze the deep structures of society and to focus on historical and cultural specificity.INTRODUCTION 3 While cilltural studies is a mode of thinking about culture of all kinds, until the rise of the specific discourse of visual culture in the 1980s its bias was towards textual analysis. This bias related to the fact that it took.much of its theoretical impetus not only from Marx but from the fields of linguistics and-semiotics, where the most sophisticated textual analyses were being practiced in the 1950s by writers such as French literary theorist Roland Barthes. Through a semiotics inflected by Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, British scholars Raymond Williams and then Hall thus developed cultural studies in 1964, the center for which was the cross- (or even anti-)disciplinary Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. Cultural studies, then, developed with the strong motivation to break down the conventional distinctions defining disciplines and privileging certain kinds of culture over those deemed “popular” or “mass” oriented. Visual culture takes on this democratizing impulse, but focuses »/ its attention specifically on visual imagery and on the problem of visuality. Like cultural studies, visual culture draws from several complementary models for examining sign systems, institutions, and other aspects of lived cultural experience—such as Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis— but visual culture, having developed as a mode of analysis in tandem with the rise of rights itics, also takes much of its defining political impetus from feminism, and postcolonial theory, and gay/lesbian or queer theory. Visual culture, naturally enough, is also deeply informed as well by the critical models of visual analysis developed in »/ the disciplines of art history (including photography history and theory) and film studies. Through these latter influences and pressures, visual culture has developed far beyond its initial x connection to cultural studies alone. While visual culture shares the impulse of cultural studies to reject disciplinary hierarchies — (art historical conceptions, for example, of “high” versus “low” culture) and to explore the uses and meanings of images across disciplines, its even more important offering, as Nicholas Mirzoeff and others have pointed out, is in its revision of the conception of how meaning takes place in the visual relation (Mirzoeff 1999: 3-4). In his epochal 1972 study of popular and fine art images, Ways of Seeing, John Berger (Chapter 7) noted “the 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 “way of seeing”) and the viewer, whose beliefs Inform the way she or he interprets the Work. Berger also offered an explicitly feminist critique visual imagery in mass cultural as well as high art forms. 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; as Keith Moxey has put it, “LtIhe sign systems of the past are invested with meaning by those of the present” (Bryson et al. 1994: xxvii). Along with Berger’s Ways of Seeing, one of the key moments in the articulation of a critical discourse of visual culture studies was the publication in 1975 of Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Chapter 9) in the important British film journal Screen. The publication of this essay and Berger’s emphasis on a feminist critique of visual — culture mark the centrality of feminism to the study of visual culture, as well as the importance of Visual analysis to a feminist theory of culture and meaning. Both authors marshal aspects4 INTRODUCTION of psychoanalysis, Marxism, semiotics, and feminist theory to argue compellingly that visual images not only orchestrate and reiterate patriarchal power relations (through the reiterative portrayal of naked women) but bear these relations within their very formal structure and in their conditions of production, distribution, and reception; both authors explore at some tength how these relations are explicitly gendered. ‘As Mulvey’s and Berger's texts confirm, feminism and visual culture have a reciprocally weighted relationship. Feminism has had a central role in the development of critical models of reading visual Imagery in visual culture and its related disciplines of art history, film theory, television studies, ‘dnd the visually oriented arms of media, new media, and cultural studies. Visual culture as a category of objects or images, or as a mode or strategy of interpretation, is always already determined in and through relations of sexual difference; it has offered some of the most useful possibilities for the development of a feminist model of critical cultural analysis. At the same time, cultural studies has not always embraced or even acknowledged the theoretical and political pressures of feminism in its critical practices (see Shiach 1999: 3). This volume counters this tendency within the cultural or media studies approach to relegate feminism to the sidelines as simply one way of thinking about textual or visual meaning.* It is the premise of this volume that feminism is not an adjunct to, or one critical model within, a larger umbrella of cultural or visual culture studies. Rather, feminism is one of the most important ways in which we can most usefully come to an understanding of the image culture in which we are suspended, not the least because feminism is one of the myriad discourses that arose in symbiotic relation to the rise of modernity —itself coincident with the development of the camera, media imagery and, in short, modern image culture—and arguably came to its highpoint with modernity’s dissolution or transformation into postmodernity. This collection makes clear, in addition, that the insights of feminism, as one of the most volatile and motivated of the rights movements, provided a crucial impetus for the broad political critique of structures of power and the more specific academic opening up of disciplines, which in turn ultimately resulted in the formation of new interdisciplinary strategies of interpretation such as visual culture studies. And it points to the fact that, since 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. Inclusion/exclusion: the logic of the Reader Far from pretending to be comprehensive, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader must admit its own partialities, the crucial political impulse behind feminism itself being a refusal of any claims of omnipotence, universalism, or comprehensiveness of point of view. The inevitable exclusions in this project are too many to name. My choices are marked by my own particular position within these intersecting fields of knowledge: I was trained in the United States as an art historian (with a Ph.D. in art history and a minor in film studies, with a growing expertise in performance studies) and I came of age as a feminist scholar in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when US/UK feminism dominated the scene. The logic of inclusion plays along several lines, all of which relate to my desire for the Reader to serve both as an introduction to feminism and visual culture for non-specialists and students and as a resource for those who have immersed themselves in its complex debatesPART TWO Representation T: E MODERN PERIOD (roughly the nineteenth up through the mid to late twentieth Centuries) is often characterized as having taken shape, precisely, through the rise of) a.particular kind of image culture. Modernity, in this view, is the culture of photographic | ‘oduction. While the photographic camera mimics the structure of Renaissance single-point , paradoxically, because of its production of copies, its ent signaled the | end of the ideology of individualism aligned with this very Renaissance of defining how | we see and make images (see John Berger 1972: 11-23). With the rise of image culture, the scramble to shore up the boundaries between so-called art and popular culture imagery became insistent, culminating—in the immediate post-World War II period in the United States in particular—with the reductivist modernist formalist arguments of Clement Greenberg and his followers. Key to Greenberg's method was the neo-Kantian argument that art works were’ autonomous from the political or social realm: their meaning was inherent to their structure and content, and inevitably aligned in some way with the assumed initiating intentionality of | the artists who produced them. Both feminism and, visual. culture studies, and especially both together, have had a great stake in over ing the assumptions of the modernist formalist model of determining meaning \’ and value for visual images. By the 1960s, with the rise of the rights, the student, and the antiwar movements and the burgeoning of global capitalism, new generations of artists and visual theorists drew on semiotic theory to question the viability of the notion of the image as autonomous, as containing within itself an inherent meaning and value. Coming to the fore during this period and after was the issue of representation; theorists began to interrogate the structures, psychic and social, motivating representation rather than accepting it as a given. Through the dismantling of epresentation (which poses the image } or text as having an unmediated, transparent relationship to the reai), in art history in particular ‘. theorists with a stake in critiquing dominant canons and definitions of the “genius” and the | “masterpiece” were given a space to assert alternative modes of making, seeing, and interpreting.) visual culture and its institutions (see Linda Nochlin, Chapter 29); Chadwick 1988). As well, the insights of rapidly expanding theories of subjectivity and power, developed out of philosophy and semiotics by poststructuralist theorists (primarily from France), furthered this impulse to question the underlying motivations behind the autonomy argument (see Irigaray46 AMELIA JONES 1974/85). Psychoanalysis, in particular, provided a model for unhinging the assumptions built into its hidden system of assigning privilege: Jackson Pollock's drip painting wasn’t intrinsically better than the abstract painting of his female partner Lee Krasner. It was produced as superior by a system motivated by the desire to continue to support white male subjects and to protect their domains in order to mask the fact that there is no inherent value in works of art or to particular subjects (see Wagner 1996). In psychoanalytic terms: the penis isn’t a phallus; it can be castrated, ‘and the male subject, like the female, is fundamentally based on lack, not plenitude. Unconscious desires motivate every cultural expression; by uncovering these, the visual theorist could psychoanalyze, as it were, not only the institutional and discursive privileges of the art world and image culture but the artist himself (viz., Mulvey’s wonderful psychoanalytical account of Alan Jones's castration-envy-palliating female phalli in “Fears, Fantasies and the Male Unconscious”). Alternatively, living in a psychoanalytically informed culture could support the contention that women necessarily tend to make a different kind of imagery, based on our particular psychic, and largely unconscious, experience of embodiment (this is the general idea behind the arguments about central core Imagery; see Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, Chapter 8). “These psychoanalytic models of identity and meaning formation in relation to representation were linked as well to a growing awareness of the effects of living in an increasingly image- saturated culture, as theorized by writers such as Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. Debord's eponymous 1967 book offered a Marxist critique of the West's “society of the spectacle,” while Baudrillard systematically analyzed the processes and effects of our culture of simulation (a postmodern term for representation, stressing its constructedness and opaqueness In relation to the “real,” whatever that could be understood to be). The authority of the Renaissance to Enlightenment model of the subject, based on the mythical construction of a singular omniscient point of view (a point from which the world could be seen and known) was thrown into question from these two directions: the rights movements (born, of course, out of the Enlightenment itself) and the destabilizing effects of media-saturated Image culture, chronicled in Debord’s and Baudrillard’s Marxist critiques. If the “original” image, or the “real” itself, no longer had any truth value, then neither did the centered (and implicitly white, masculine, and heterosexual) subject of modernism. The essays collected under the rubric “Representation” in this volume represent one aspect of this trajectory, intertwining the insights of semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis with the critical, feminist approach to image culture, Thavé chosen to include here a series of crucial essays written in the context of early to recent feminist debates about the relations of looking and empowerment proposed by the dominant regime of visuality in Western culture. A number Gf these essays, written by some of the major figures in feminist art and film theory (John Berger (Chapter 7), Laura Mulvey (Chapter 9),) and by the important cultural theorists bell hooks (Chapter 14) and Judith Halberstam (Chapter 18), offer explicit critiques of the culture of the “gaze’’; based on Freud's 1927 theory of fetishism, these critiques argue that the “gaze” is aligned with white, heterosexual, masculine subjectivity, producing images of women and Giher dominated subjects as fetishes to palliate male castration anxiety. In particular, hooks and Halberstam rework earlier straight white feminist versions of this model, which defined representations of women’s bodies as necessarily participating in the regime of fetishism but tended to assume these bodies to be white and heterosexual. hooks ends by arguing for “critical black female spectators,” who, identifying neither with the phallocentric gaze nor with the “construction of white womanhood as lack,” construct a theory of looking relations that turnsINTRODUCTION TO PART TWO 47 Sr delight in looking at films into “the pleasure of interrogation.” Halberstam focuses on cinema to theorize a “transgender look” which unhinges the very binaries still at play ‘earlier feminist “gaze” theory. Other classic essays in this section draw on more loosely psychoanalytic notions of the self ‘JB relation to representation in order to argue for alternativé strategies of theorizing and/or “istervening in this representational regime through the production of new kinds of images or ‘Seeries of Visuality (see Chicago and Schapiro, Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (Chapter ‘TD), Mary Ann Doane (Chapter 11), Mary Kelly (Chapter 12), and Griselda Pollock (Chapter 5)). Doane's classic essay draws on Joan Riviere’s famous 1929 article on female masquerade % theorize how women spectators may be able to distance themselves from heterosexist fim imagery by adopting femininity as a mask, refusing to ratify it as essential. While Chicago 208 Schapiro claim the possibility of creating and identifying a specifically “female” type of ‘imzcery, Kelly, Barry and Flitterman-Lewis, and Pollock argue strongly against such an assumed sannection. Barry and Flitterman-Lewis and Pollock insist that “textual strategies” or avant- Serdist, distancing tactics must be adopted by feminist artists who wish to counteract the invidious, and seeifingly inevitable, effects of the male gaze. This argument about representation was =stremely important in the development of feminist modeis for critiquing visual culture; it became ominant in the 1980s in anglophone feminist visual theory, art history, and film, television, and media theory. Kelly, whose art work is often argued to be the most successful at attaining such Gstancing strategies, here contributes an essay arguing for a nuanced view of these debates. Still making use of a Frétidian model of analysis, Kelly insists on complicating the idea that “fetishism &S an exclusively male perversion.” She counters the tendency to focus on critical strategies of sesisting the male gaze, raising the issue of the female spectator. French poststructuralism and particularly feminism, while not represented directly in this anthology due to its anglophone orientation, has also been deeply —indeed, centrally—important % feminist visual theory. Australian feminist Elizabeth Grosz, known for her capable and swanced syntheses of complex philosophies of embodiment and power, provides in this 1994 essay a useful synthesis of French theory (Chapter 16). In particular, Grosz highlights the work of French feminists Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, pointing to the relevance of their theories of meaning and difference to a nuanced study of visual imagery. ~ Performance theory has, since the 1990s, reinvigorated feminist theories of representation 2nd broader understandings of how meaning occurs in culture and human experience. Peggy Phelan’s groundbreaking book Unmarked interweaves performance theory with the analysis of Still images as well as moving and “live’’ artworks (Chapter 15). In her introductory chapter, excerpted here, Phelan debunks the assumptions behind early identity politics, which relied on sotions of “visibility” as conferring social power, noting wryly that “if representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture”. And Laura U. Marks’s important books Skin of the Film (2000) and Touch, the latter of which is excerpted here, deploys aspects of performance theory along with a complex array of postcolonial and feminist theories of embodiment, memory, and visuality (developing the notion of a feminist, “haptic” visuality) to reread films and visual artworks (Chapter 17). Like Grosz and Phelan, Marks brings an insistence on embodiment to the feminist study of visual culture. The work of scholars such as Grosz, Phelan, and Marks has contributed to the shifting of debates about representation away from the model of the male gaze to a new way of thinking gendered identity as referenced partly through visual cues but ultimately functioning beyond a simple model of visual power: and visibility.