Thornham, Sue: “Fixing into Images” in Women, Feminism, and Media. Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
- Feminist critiques were concerned with images of women that were "inaccurate stereotypes that damage women's self-perceptions and limit their social roles." p.23
Attempts to change this have been limited by the statistical techniques used: first is content analysis: "examines the frequency of specific categories of words and images within media texts, and it has tended, after what Jaddou and Williams (1981: 106) call `a long and tedious process of statistical compilation', to conclude merely by confirming that women are represented in a limited and stereotypical range of roles" p.24
Second is effect studies, which "seeks to trace direct behavioural or attitudinal outcomes from exposure to specific media images, has produced equally limited conclusions." p.24
"If we are really to understand how media images of women operate, we must have a more theoretically informed understanding of the work that images do, of their functioning within media texts and social discourses, of their relationship to `ways of seeing the world' and of seeing ourselves, to power, and to what she calls `the unconscious passions'" p.25
The word 'image' can mean a literary trope, or a visual image in multiple contexts (painting, music, folklore, video). It is an expansive term.
"Mary Jacobus, writing about literature, discusses the way in which `woman or womanhood' is both `image' and `sign', the silent and subordinate object that is both foundation of, and other to, masculine discourse and the male subject, and so `becomes the site of both contradiction and repression' (1979: 13)" p.26
1977 Griselda Pollack: "The dominant assumption underpinning writing on `images of women' is, she writes, that they merely reflect meanings that originate elsewhere (in the intentions of media producers, or in social structures). They can therefore be divided into `bad' (distorted or glamorised) and `good' images (`"realist'' photographs, of women working, housewives, older women, etc'). This idea, she argues, needs to be challenged and replaced by more adequate theoretical models. Images are never direct or unmediated reflections" p.27
The "construction of sexual difference, argues Pollock, has determined `both what and how men and women painted', excluding women from the academies which trained great artists whilst rendering them over-present as spectacle." p.27
Because of women's exclusion from academies, and over-representation as the subject of art, they were deemed unable to find the distance from the art in order to be a true artist. "Since women are the material of art, their own work can only be a form of limited selfexpression, an extension of themselves." p.28
Modernity in the 19th century - urbanisation and mass cities. Also, the flâneur: "Watching and browsing but not interacting, his gaze is the gaze of modernity. It is also the gaze of masculine privilege, since this freedom of access to the city's spaces of visual pleasure - its arcades, exhibitions, galleries, museums and leisure gardens - was a freedom denied to women, who were confined by the doctrine of separate spheres to the domestic." p.28
Woman as image from Baudelaire: "In the male subject who gazes, it evokes fantasies of sexual pleasure but also contempt: it is an image of an inferior. It is entirely constructed by and for that subject." p.29
Pollock on how Rosetti painted women: "In this process of construction of a gendered field of visual pleasure, the work of construction is effaced. Not only is the category of woman-as-image naturalised in this way. So, too, is what Celia Lury calls the `gendered technique of objectification' (1993: 181): the ways in which this image is constructed for our gaze. This is seen to be quite simply a matter of art, of aesthetics; the regime of sexual difference constructed in these paintings is offered - and received - as a selfevident aspect of art, truth and beauty." p.29
These images of perfect women basically show what kind of women are not being represented: black and lower-class women. "In other words, these images in their very blankness and white perfection bear uncomfortable traces - whether visible or repressed - of those women who cannot be contained within the category of woman-as-image" p.29
"Despite the over-visibility of her body as spectacle and surface, the woman as individual presence is, as we have seen, absent. What is offered instead in this encounter with the work of art is the experience of transcendence: the image, as rendered by the artist, is seen to transcend its historical moment in order to express eternal truths." p.30 In this way, the woman is both seen and not seen because there is nothing of an actual individual in the image, just an empty representation of her.
"For Pollock, the nineteenth-century paintings which she discusses trace the establishment of the new order of sexuality that appears with modernity. In them woman functions as the sign of `that Other in whose mirror masculinity must define itself' (1988: 153). But it is a mirror haunted by anxiety: anxieties about absence and loss, about sameness and difference, about desire and death." p.30
Images of Venus and Lilith: "Self-absorbed and often fragmented, these images of women offer to their spectator an idealised beauty, one whose lack of a return gaze guarantees both possession of the image and its function as mirror, reflecting back that sense of the eternal and sublime which confirms his sense of self. At the same time, they bring anxiety. As his sexual other, the imaged woman embodies the threat of sexual difference, a threat both allayed and potentially increased by her self-absorption, which excludes him" p.33
The photograph freezes the woman in time, causing a sort of death. "Confirming McGrath's view of the fetishistic quality of his photographs, Weston adds that `the beholder may find the created image more real and comprehensible than the actual object' (Weston 2003: 107)." p.34
"photographs serve the desire for possession of the object-image. Nor are they neutral depictions: photography's alliance with advertising and fashion and its use of captions turns it into a meaning system, a kind of `literature' (Benjamin 1979: 244, 250, 256)." p.34
"Frozen in time in this way, the photograph also functions for each of us as both the mirror of our own ageing and its disavowal." p.34
Question - how does the photograph become a fetish? Info on page 34
"the photographic image is also the source of anxiety. We can never truly possess the image; as we contemplate it; it `as it were, avoids our gaze', leaving us anxious and uneasy." p.35
Unlike paintings, photographs are lauded as documents, evidence, infallible reproductions of the truth. "And they circulate as the commodities of mass culture: as advertisements, magazine features or pornography." p.35
The medicalisation of women's body and the triumph of man over nature (and therefore man over the feminine): "the woman's body, now pathologised, is dismembered and dissected, rendered transparent and legible." p.36 - technology as subjective and truth - reproduces idea that visibility is truth and power - if something is not visible, it cannot be truth
"In the case of pornography, the truth that is sought is the `truth' of femininity, which it equates with the physical markers of sexual difference" p.37
"the power of photography was from the start bound up with the emergence of mass circulation and the production of the photographic image as commodity." p.38
"What distinguishes the commodified images of advertising, therefore, is their combination of the simultaneous invitation and display which we saw in painting and pornography, with an appeal to an imagined female consumer." p.38
The advertising images of women are not portraits of the actual women pictured, rather they are fantasy, and the individual woman has been erased. Pollack writes: "her image functions as a `screen across which masculine fantasies of knowledge, power and possession can be enjoyed in a ceaseless play on the visible obviousness of woman and the puzzling enigmas reassuringly disguised behind that mask of beauty' (1988: 123)." p.39
"as Bowlby points out, as the public space of the shop window replaced the domestic setting of the mirror for the modern woman, the image reflected back became that of herself as commodity" p.40
The fashion magazine has no narrative structure, rather it reflects the distractable nature of the impulse shopper p.40 "Yet within this structure, the magazine's fragmented sections each work to produce an intensity of imaging which interpellates the consumer in terms of a series of ideal images: images of `the woman to whom the readers [are assumed to] aspire' (Radner 1995: 131" p.40
"Invited to produce herself in the image of the magazine's `cover star' or fashion pages through careful application of a range of specified products, the woman who browses through the contents of the magazine (or store) is asked to construct herself as image through the work of consumption." p.41
"As women, adds Winship, our pleasures in cultural forms such as the women's magazine are constructed always within the terms of masculine fantasy and desire... `what appears to be central' to the magazine and its appeal, the relation of women to women, `is simultaneously defined in relation to absent men/masculinity'. It is his gaze that is important; this woman, in her perfection, `is a man's woman'" p.41
"Above all, she argues, the ad offers us, as object of desire, ourselves as coherent and unified subject. It thus acts, like Lacan's mirror-image, as ideal ego, offering to bind our `fragmented' selves into unity via the product" p.42
Jackie Stacey on the production of 'woman': "Like other writers, she argues that the `work of femininity' requires consumption ± of both commodities and images ± so that women are both subjects and objects of exchange, their sense of identity bound up with a sense of `woman as image', forever unattainable, always invoking a sense of lack... Identities, she argues, are partial, provisional and constantly `in process', but they are also fixed ± however unsuccessfully, temporarily or contradictorily ± by particular discourses." p.43
Reflexive ads - advertisements that are ironic "This is an advertisement" and position the reader as 'knowing'. More often targeted at men. "Viewers of these ads, that is, are interpellated precisely as knowing consumers of popular culture; their possible modes of interpretation are incorporated into the ad's structure, thus reducing the potential for critical distance" p.45
Unreflexive ads - offer 'self-actualisation' through the advertisement. More often targeted at women.
"As historical beings, we cannot be outside representation: we are constructed by and in relation to its images and discourses... Nor, however, can we be entirely contained by it: those fetishised `masks of beauty' described by Griselda Pollock, with their obliteration of all traces of individuality and presence, leave us outside as well as shaped in part by them." p.45
"As a position, the femininity offered by woman-as-image cannot be occupied or lived; it can only be worn or performed." p.46
"the writings of contemporary `postmodern' philosophers, in which advertising and `the feminine' come together in a concept of `simulation' in which the image is seen to lose all grounding in reality" p.46
"In Baudrillard's chronology of the image, its four phasestakeitfrom having been `the reflectionof a profound reality',through phases in which it `masks and denatures a profound reality', and then `masks the absence of a basic reality', and finally to the point of having `no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum' (1994: 6)" p.46
"Baudrillard, then, opposes the power of production (masculine) to the power of seduction (feminine). Woman `is but appearance. And it is the feminine as appearance that thwarts masculine depth' (1990: 10±11)." p.46
"Ann Kibbey writes of the `longheld fears of the power of images to overwhelm the viewer, to bypass the conscious mind, to render the viewer helpless and unable to think ± even to imagine . . . that the image was somehow alive' (2005: 35)" p.48
"The `flattening out' of women's images to produce the pleasures of a constructed visual field, therefore, a process which should act to contain woman's troubling difference, can produce the reverse effect. She remains opaque, mysterious, deceptive; her desire, which should be effaced, becomes merely veiled and unreadable (Doane 1991)." p.48
"The act of viewing/interpreting these visual signs, that is, produces not only knowledge and pleasure, but also the sense of ourselves as knowing and desiring subjects. The advertisements in turn, through their textual strategies, authorise certain forms of understanding and pleasure, certain modes of subjecthood." p.48
"Femininity may be a matter of commodification and performance, but for women without access to other modes of self-empowerment ± other forms of `cultural capital' ± it also confers legitimacy." p.49
In philosophy, the woman is presented as a foil of the male in order to legitimise the position of the philosopher: "the passive, virtuous woman who is man's (and the philosopher's) willing subordinate." p.49-50
How to unfix the images? See the inconsistencies and relate our lived-experience in order to unpick and create alternative discourse.
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