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Week Four: Feminist Research Practice - Seminar

Deconstruction through art/visuality: How can art serve as a political, critical and deconstructive tool in feminism?

What informs us when looking at art? (Situated knowledges, Politics of location)

"I want to counter the dominant, repressive modes of visual interpretation... I want to offer a new way of reading pictures then, that involves deliciously relinquishing our power as viewing subjects and revelling in our own otherness" (Jones 2002, 952)

Duality of the photographic representation of the body - death v life

Death:

"The photograph after all, is a death-dealing apparatus in its capacity to fetishize and congeal time." (Jones 2002, 949)

Life:

"At the same time in their exxaggerated theatricality, these works foreground the fact that the self-portrait photograph is eminently performative and so life giving." (Jones 2002, 949)

Hierarchy of senses - seeing is believing, a photograph is not a document of truth

Gadsby 2018 - "The history of Western art is just the history of men painting women like they're flesh cases for their dick flowers."

Punctum: Barthes says "that detail in the image that opens it to the depths of our fully embodied subjectivity by pricking our memory" (Jones 2002, 961) - Something that we can't turn away from

Studium: Barthes says it's "documentary evidence of something simply that has happened" (Sturken & Cartwright, 2009, 18) - A more objective response

Affect: an unconscious personal, bodily reaction that comes before the conscious acknowledgment of a feeling or emotion.



Art as a political critical deconstructive tool in feminism
-Reinstates power dynamics - looking as an engagement
-Confronts the spectator
-Diminishes the distance between the seer and the seen

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