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Week Four: Feminist Research Practice - Carnal Aesthetics

Papenburg, Bettina & Zarzycka, Marta, Eds. 2013. Introduction: Carnal Aesthetics. Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics. London/New York: I.B. Tauris.

"what are the very recent strategies of artistic intervention into processes of perception?" p.1

"Aesthetics as it is outlined in this book becomes a kind of cultural politics, which has the potential for fostering alliances between current and future feminisms, lesbian and gay activism, race and AIDS activism, as well as scholarly efforts in postcolonial critique." p.2

Aesthetics

Aesthetics: "as perception, sensibility or sensation, emphasising the cultural formation of the sense." p.3

"aesthetics that relies upon sensory perception and underlines the significance of cultural valuing of certain sense impressions and the dismissal of others." p.3

"The inquiry into sense perception has been at the heart of aesthetic theory from its very beginning" p.3

The "collapse of distance between the viewer and the art object, fostering an immersive approach where the viewer is no longer only a viewer, but rather the subject of an embodied encounter." p.3

"importance of sensorial faculties and affective forces shaping our encounter with art as well as the various dimensions of embodied difference." p.3

Feminist aesthetics "a movement that took shape in the 1970s, which gives precedence to the encounter instead of the artwork, declaring the collapsing of the divide between 'art' and 'life' and thus emphasising the political commitment of art." p.4

Carnality

"Embodiment as it resurfaces in the notion of 'carnality' articulates various sources of inspiration which have shaped and continue to shape our thinking." p.4

Embodiment in regards to carnality: "taking the body as a 'process-in-practice' rather than as a fixed object" p.4

"With 'the carnal', Stoler refers to the representation of desire as it is implicated in complex configurations of power/knowledge." p.5

The 'colonised' body: "an object, subject and medium of representation and desire... the artistic subversion of stereotypical representations of the black female body. The theme of the female body as desiring and desired... how we may visually and theoretically conceive of female pleasure." p.5

"In line with the recent turn to affect in cultural and feminist studies, this entails a rethinking of the notion of and research on embodiment as it becomes open to multiple sensory modalities and fosters a conception of desire that takes the female body as its referent." p.5

Transgressive Imagery

Symbolic inversion: "any act of expressive behaviour which inverts, contradicts, abrogates or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values, and norms, be they linguistic, literary, or artistic, religious, social and political" p.5 (Barbara Babcock)

Liminal space and time: "a spacio-temporal limbo opening up in-between fixed states" p.5

Question: "how viewers can performatively engage with artworks in a process that is co-constitutive and co-emergent." p.6

"How can feminist research methodologies open up fresh perspectives on these artistic and cultural practices?" p.6

Feminist Politics

"long-standing feminist tradition aimed at politicising representations of the female body and claiming agency over (self)representation, in both the artistic as well as cultural and political arenas." p.7

"feminism can no longer be conceptualised as a unified movement of women’s empowerment, but evolves into multiple feminisms concerned with, among others, queer and postcolonial theory." p.7

Part 1

"To witness trauma in artistic/cultural artefacts is to be affected by the absence and the loss through which images fail to show rather than represent." p.8

"Art drawing on traumatic experiences ultimately challenges the split between the represented subjects, the artist, the art critic/art historian and the wider audience." p.8

"The bending of language to accommodate new spaces of understanding and experiencing outlines the processes taking place in art reception where art making and art viewing are intertwined in a relationship that oscillates between distance and proximity." p.8

"how can aesthetics, through the broadening of particular kinds of sensation in a gesture of conaisthesis, help us find ethics and, consequently, also politics?" p.9

Incommunicability: "perception wherein an encounter with the world does not begin by sorting the field into preconceived, general categories of either objects or subjects, images or sounds, humans or animals, but rather emphasises how new modes of attention are being activated which may counter established relations of power." p.9

Part 2

Affect: "a correspondence between the psychic and the somatic, between the cultural and the biological, between feeling and knowing, between its resistance to representation and its appropriation by aesthetic discourse." p.9

"Does our bodily response to images preclude thinking or, conversely, does affectivity facilitate a reflexive process?" p.10

"the affective power of smell, which through diffusion in and transmission via the air is capable of infecting and seasoning the social experience of an environment." p.10

"An aesthetic conception of air which entails the spatial, the invisible and the intrinsic challenges us to rethink the gap between sociocultural practices of framing and the embodied reactions in art and cultural practices." p.10

Part 3

"how the bodily entanglement of the viewer changes our understanding of the aesthetic encounter." p.11

An "instance of the blurring of sensory boundaries is the overlap of touch and vision" p.11

"smell is synaesthetically linked to vision and hearing." p.11

Film is able to "speak to our 'sense memory and sensory imagination' and to play on an 'affective tonality' effectively enveloping the spectator in the 'atmosphere' of the film." p.12

"the sense of smell, given its intimacy with emotion and memory, to mould our 'olfactory unconscious'." p.12

"the artist's ironical embrace of derogatory representations give transgressive imagery its force, effectively unsettling representational cliches of the racialised and gendered body." p.12

Patricia MacCormack - "female desire emerges as an expression of, but also as a disturbance to, male sexual paradigms." p.14

"How can artists and theorists disrupt the conventional (mis)representations of the female body and female desire as they are persistently rearticulated in artistic and cultural productions?" p.14

"how a focus on affect and on alternative sensory modalities can shatter traditional frames of looking." p.14

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