12 Art, Feminism and Visual Culture LISA CARTWRIGHT As art historian Amelia Jones notes, feminism is one of the most important theoretical perspectives from which visual culture has been theorized over the past forty years (Jones 2010). ‘The field of visual culture studies centres on the analysis of practices of looking and visual representation in a wide range of arenas: art, film, television and architecture; new, popular and alternative media forms and entertainment cultures; and everyday institutional contexts such as law, religion, science, medicine, information and educa- tion, Feminism has influenced this expansion of the field from its former and more conventional focus on works of art and film in a number of ways: through its critique of discourses of mastery and universal value; through its emphasis on embodied experi- ence; and through its attention to subjugated and situated forms of knowledge, experi- ence and pleasure as legitimate and important arcas of focus. The field of visual studies continues to encompass the study of fine art, however there is nor the assumption of its higher merit. Professional, institutional, everyday, populat, private, banal, diasporic and subculeure image and design cultures and visual practices are approached with equal se- riousness across the field, in keeping with the feminist viewpoint that regards s and subjugated forms of human practice as equally important to the canon of scholarly analysis as highly valued, broadly recognized forms of imaging and visual practice. Work in the field ranges widely across forms of visual or audiovisual expression and everyday ways of seeing, The objects of visual culture study range from works of fine art to popu- lar, sub-, and independent image cultures and to images and imaging technologies in science, technology, medicine and health. Importantly, visual studies has been innova tive in emphasizing the study of practice in institutions and with technologies through which visual culeure is organized and looking is practiced, covering settings that range from art galleries, museums and malls to laboratories, kitchens and the streets. Femi- nism’ contribution to this turn to diverse sites of visuality and visual practice has been uatedART, FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE 3il considerable, beginning with the feminist theory concept of the gaze as an important feature of the constitution of the human subject 's discursive context. The terms ‘practice’ (which emphasizes embodied social activity) and the ‘human subject, under- stood as a socially situated and constituted entity, derive directly from feminist theory. These are among the core concepts in visual studies work as distinct from art history and some areas of cultural analysis in which practice, the constitution of subjectivity, and the gaze are not primary organizing features. The study of collecting, curating and displaying has extended from its earlier focus on works of art and objects of ritual and science to everyday objects and the instruments and technologies used in the organi tion of things and the organization of spaces of practice in everyday work, study and leisure. Ways of seeing or practices of looking as they are organized around subject pos tions based in identity and realms of discourse has been a key aspect of work in the field In some cases the key organizing terms of work in visual studies draw from the familiar intersectional nexus of gender, sexuality, race, class and ability; however, to these terms have also been added subcultures and other intersectional identity groupings, as well as professional and institutional categories of identities such as that of the scientist or doc- tor, Associated with the latter sort of designation of identity is the idea that discursive fields constitute provisional and intersectional subject positions inflected by ways of sec- ing and ways of conducting one’s practice that are deeply situated in history, geography, nationality, political context and so forth. The relationship of feminism to visual culture’s field formation is important to note. Visual culture studies became institutionalized through college and university pro- grammes in the late 1980s and 1990s during the height of critical theory and continen- tal philosophy’s influence in the humanities, and its influence was felt primarily through and across departments of fine art, art history and film studies. However, the focus on aspects of life beyond the arts and entertainment brought visual studies into currency in other disciplines, most notably anthropology, history and sociology. A scholarly journal (the Journal of Visual Culture) was launched in 2002, and an international association (Visual Culture International) was formally inaugurated in 2010. ‘These two entities are marked by their interdisciplinarity and by lively controversy about such field-building questions as these: what is, and what should be, the place of art history (one of the foun- dational fields of visual culture study) and work on periods prior to the twentieth cen- tury in visual studies? This question is motivated by the fact that the field has tended to be concentrated around more recent periods and forms, though this is also increasingly the trend in art history, where attention to more recent periods outstrips work on earlier periods. Globalization, diaspoic cultural changes, and new media in relationship to art practice, collecting and display are all aspects of visual studies that have been influenced by feminist theory's emphases on intersectionality and subjective practice. Another key field question concerns methods and theories around which the field coheres, and where feminism continues to stand in this context. These are questions that arise as the field’s international network grows, and as scholarship identified as visual studies or visual cul- cure studies proliferated throughout the humanities in the 1990s and made headway in the social sciences in the 2000s. There has been significantly more work identified312 AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND VISUAL CULTURE, as being in visual studies coming from the fields of communication, anthropology and sociology journals and departments during the first decade of the 2000s as compared to the 1990s, Feminism has been an important approach in visual studies from the inception of the field, providing key methodological frameworks to the field in all of its aspects ranging from methodology to subject matter. Unlike other new disciplines emphasizing visuality in the late 1900s such as film and media studies and culeural studies, visual cul- ture studies emerged afver second-wave feminist theory had already established a pres- ence in more established academic disciplines such as art and art history, history, and after the turn to Marxism, psychoanalysis and semiotics were brought to- gether in feminist theory work within the women’s studies field, bringing into question the empirical designation of its key term (‘women’) and prompting some departments to change the key term to ‘sexuality’ and/or ‘gender’, terms that allowed for the inclusion of masculinity and femininity as luid terms of identification not fixed subject positions, and incorporating queer studies into the field. In this regard the relationship of feminist theory to visual culture studies is unique in that feminism—specifically, feminist theory through the psychoanalytic, Marxist and semiotic turn of the early 1980s—has had a formative influence on visual studies from the ground up. Whereas film studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, black stu plines at about the same time (from the 1970s forwards), visual culture studies emerged iterature and es and women’s studies programmes emerged as disci asa discipline designated by a name and programmes devoted to it about a decade after the institutionalization of these prior fields, and was significantly shaped by methods, theories and ideas about disciplinarity already at work in them—and particularly in feminist theory engaged in a semiotic theory of sexual psychology and identity. Inter estingly, though science and technology studies emerged as a disciplinary area during roughly the same period as film studies and has consistently generated work on represen- ation in scientific practice, that field has remained relatively less open to the paradigms and approaches that moved from film studies to visual studies, deriving instead more d rectly from social science-based information studies and, less strongly, through engage- ment with art history (though this engagement has more commonly been comparative rather than methodological). FEMINIST FILM THEORY AND PRACTICE Iwo works our of the British context are now legendary foundations for a kind of feminist visual theory that countered the empiricism of the American liberal feminist approach: Claire Johnston's 1973 essay drawing on Roland Barthes’ idea of myth to ex- amine, through an approach adapted from semiology, the concept of woman in classical Hollywood cinema; and ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) in which Laura Mulvey introduced psychoanalysis as a means through which to analyse male pleasure in looking and the representation of the female body as the passive object of the male look. Whereas Johnston's essay introduced the framework of semiotics to feminist analysis of film, Mulvey introduced key concepts from Freudian psychoanalysis to consider theART, FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE 313 relationship between sexuality and the gaze as a relational practice—an idea that remains, in use currently, though with significant revisions and variations. At the same time, 1970s second-wave feminist scholarship in the USA included widely read, now iconic critiques of gendered stereotype focusing on film (Haskell (1973) 1987; Rosen 1973). ‘The empirical and sociological approach represented in those works was the backdrop against which emerged the US feminist theory that would contribute to the ground- ing of visual studies. In the early 1980s, US scholars Constance Penley, Janet Walker, Flizabeth Lyons and Janet Bergstrom launched Camera Obscura, a journal of film and feminism to present an alternative to the empirical and sociologically based US femi film scholarship that was beginning to organize around the critique of stereotype and gender roles. ‘They had studied with or participated in dialogues with those engaged in the circles around Johnston and Mulvey’s works, some of them had trained in the semi- otic, psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches developed in Paris through the seminars of film theorists Christian Metz and Raymond Bellour, and they were engaged with ideas generated in the writings of the London-based m/f collective (a journal devoted to psy- choanalytic feminist theory with which film theorist E. Anne Kaplan was involved) and Screen (a film theory journal with which Mulvey was involved). An important aspect of the visual studies paradigm launched with Camera Obscura is the role of the feminist vi- sual theorist as curator of ideas and theories—a role occupied by this journal throughout the three decades of the field’s existence. Journal founder Contance Penley has played a st major role in shaping the field not only through her own writing on feminism and film theory, science, popular culture and new media, but also through her curator-like role as editor of contributions to a journal that has remained ar the centre of the visual cul- ture studies field. Penley also was a founding member of the first graduate programme in the United States devoted to the field: the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Another important aspect of film theory in its relationship to visual studies is the innovation there of the idea of the filmmaker as theorist, In her classic essay, which is widely reviewed in numerous sources, Mulvey, who is a filmmaker as well as a theorist, introduced the idea ofa feminist counter-cinema and, importantly, she herself was in fact a key practitioner in that mode, She identified feminist counter-cinema as being within the tradition of the avant-garde—a cinema that would ‘free the look of the camera in its materiality in time and space’ as well as offering the spectator a Brechtian stance of ‘pas sionate detachment’ as against the seductive masculine position of scopophilia offered in conventional mainstream narrative film. Feminist counter-cinema, which included the filmwork of Mulvey and her then collaborator Peter Wollen, presented an important model for the tradition in visual studies of production (or are, film and media) as a form of critical theory practice. Mulvey’s article made important contributions to the theory of the gaze as noted below, however, it also served as a kind of visual theory call to prac- tice, suggesting formally new ways to work the field aside from the tradition of critical writing and speaking. It is important to note that although Mulvey’s essay is typically noted as her foundational work in the field, in fact it was a theory that accompanied a vital film practice through which many of her ideas were articulated. ‘Visual Pleasure’314 AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND VISUAL CULTURE. was bracketed by the release of her films Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (produced with Wollen in 1974) and Riddles of the Sphinx (also produced with Wollen, 1977). Both represent a kind of theory through practice, a way of working that would become key in art and film practice from the 1980s onwards due in part to Mulvey’s founding influence on a generation of would-be scholars to become visual producers of critical theory works of art and film. FEMINISM AND THE THEORY OF THE GAZE ‘The working concept of ideology in visual culture studies initially drew on the writings of the political philosopher Louis Althusser, whose understanding of ideology derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis the idea that ideology cannot adequately be understood as false consciousness or as existing within a moral framework of right and wrong be- liefS and good and bad representations ot practices. Feminist writing in film studies of the 1970s offered models of critique that followed older paradigms including the pre-Althusserian Marxist understanding of ideology, the practice of deriding negative stereotypes, and the Frankfort School critique of mass culture. Althusserian notions of the subject and ideology were taken up widely by femi in the late 1970s and early 1980s interested in addressing the place of sexuality not simply as it is reflected in the contents of works of art and cinema (in projects arguing for ‘positive’ and against ‘negative’ representations of women, as in the works of 1973 by Rosen and Haskell, for example), but as structuring principles that shape a work of art or film, or that shape the reception of works in context and over time. Sexual dif- ference is understood to be enacted or articulated through these works at the formal theorists of visual culture level and in their reception context, rather than simply standing as ideology-generative themes or representations in the work. In the projects that centred around the journal mifin Britain, for example discussions shifted away from critique of images of women (or their absence in representations) to developing theories about desire and looking in the discursive field of the gave. The artist Mary Kelly was very much engaged in this dialogue when she produced her groundbreaking serial process artwork titled Post Partum Document between 1973 and 1979 (Kelly 1999). Entering the familiar ‘female’ subject matter of the mother-child relationship so familiar through the work of earlier women artists such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, this subject matter was a radi- cal challenge to conceptual art which during the petiod was still engaged in a pointed evacuation of content and culture in favour of form and structure. The subject mat- ter provided Kelly with a framework through which to stage questions raised in the feminist collective’s working through of concepts of female subjectivity and agency in Freudian and Lacanian writing. Rather than documenting the process of separation and development in her child, Kelly used the piece to stage key questions about subjectivity, the work of the mother, and the nature of marking, (with framed dirty pers as an interesting textual contribution to the then sterile field of conceptual art and to the then current range of familiar marking implements). Coming out of the same collective context regarding the field of the gaze, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986) terART, FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE 318 isa theory book by Jacqueline Rose, the noted British feminist theorist of literature and visual culture, who was also among this British network of feminists engaged in close reading of psychoanalytic theory of sexuality. Rose developed a theory of visuality and images and media texts, but also to the gaze as concepts that pertain not just to visu relationships of looking in the subject’s negotiation of the world. In the early 1980s the French writer Michel de Certeau wrote about the quotidian practices of looking in everyday life (de Certeau 1984), however, his account never directly and analytically engaged the dynamics of seeing or the role of the visual in constructing the world en- countered by the subject. Rose simultancously delved into visuality and the psychic life of the subject engaged in a networks of looks and looking practices, drawing on the psychoanalytic concept that the gaze is a constitutive aspect of human subjectivity, that sexual difference is a structuring aspect of the subject's emergence into the social order, and developing a theory of psychic interiority relative to the external world of looking—all aspects of looking practices missing from the account of everyday life offered by de Certeau at about the same time, Rose developed a concept of the gaze not as the looking practice of an individual, but as relational field in which subjects perform and interact with others and with objects, whether we are aware or not of our place within the dynamic. Drawing on Lacan, she described the field of vision as one that is always structured around and through desire and sexual difference. Understand- ing the ways in which desire and sexuality are not simply reflected in the concent of images or appearances, but also structure looking practices as a nexus of power, agency and the human subject's psychic life has been a fundamental aspect of visual culture scudies since the beginning of the field, and the model of power in looking is well theo- rized in Rose and other foundational texts from this period. THE CULTURAL TURN AND FEMINIST ART HISTORY In art history, visual culture studies emerged as a discipline most directly in conjunc- tion with changes that art historians described variously as a ‘cultural turn’ (Diko- vitskaya 2005) and a ‘new art history’ (Harris 2001). The ‘cultural turn’ refers to a shife among art historians towards an examination of the place of art in its broader cultures. This approach drew national, institutional, political, economic or materi from feminist methodology for models of thinking about culture in an interdisciplin- ary analytic framework. An important early contribution was the 1971 essay by the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin ironically titled ‘Why have there been no great that it repeated and reftamed a question women artists?” Nochlin’s title was ironi then being asked by art historians newly concerned with the status of women in the fine arts following the influence of second-wave feminists. Throughout the history of art, the studio system through which artists train had been largely a domain of men, Even in cases in which women were able to receive training, work by women was rarely exhibited and sold by major galleries. Dramatically under-represented in museum exhibitions and collections, art by women was largely ignored, dismissed as minor or derivative, or embraced in a patronizing manner by art critics and historians.316 AESTHETICS, POLITH 28 AND VISUAL CUI TURE Nochlin wrote that to resuscitate the handfull of under-considered female artists, as some art historians had begun to do, was a worthy task, however, this project tacitly reinforced a problem inherent in the very way in which the question was framed. ‘The problem is that the question failed to address the issue of the social conditions required for what counted as ‘greatness’. Instead of resuscitating and elevating women artists to the status of their male counterparts, she proposed that we analyse and ctitique the social and institutional conditions that made possible the production of what counts as ‘great art’, Nochlin noted that this approach has been dismissed for being too much in the domain of sociology and not art history. Buc it was exact! this kind of interdisciplinary, sociological approach to art history that she called for. Deriding the sore of art history that casts artistic greatness as a matter of genius, as ‘miraculous, nondetermined, [and] asocial’, she argued in favour of an arc history that is ‘dispassionate, impersonal, sociological, and institutionally oriented’; that takes into account the ‘total range of [art's] social and institutional structures’. Her challenge to the core of art history was bold and direct: She aimed to ‘reveal the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing substructure upon which the profession of art history is based’ (Nochlin 1971). Nochlin’s essay was published during the early years of sccond-wave feminism, a time when Marxist feminist analyses of labour and the cconomy were widely embraced by scholars in a range of fields, Even art historians who were not inclined to work within the Marxist critique of the economy took up this approach, because it posed an alterna tive to the romantic view of individual artistic genius. The lack of ‘great women artists was understood as a structural absence or absenting of women in art training, social networks and institutions. This was a set of conditions no simple ‘opening of the insti- cutional doors’ could change. Rather, what counted as art—its forms, its concerns, its media—needed to change The idea that women constituted a structural absence from the field opened the door to a range of approaches that allowed scholars to develop a more nuanced understanding of the paradox that whereas women were under-represented in art practice, they were over-represented as objects depicted in art by men. Writing shortly after Nochlin, the art historian Griselda Pollock considered among other things the social circumstances through which female artists such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot painted and drew the sorts of scenes representing female subjects in the home, as against their male counterparts who painted the landscapes and architecture of the public sphere, What distinguished the work of Pollock from art historians engaged in the reclamation of great women artists from the past was her sustained use of psychoanalytically informed Marxist feminist theories and her direct engagement with feminist film theories of the male and female gaze. Rather than valourizing he women artists she wrote about for working with distinction in a male-dominated field, and rather than arguing solely in favour of celebrating the overlooked importance of a female point of view reflected in these artists’ works, Pollock drew on the Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist theory of the Indian literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to ask her now-classic question,ART, FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE. 317 ‘can the subaltern [woman] speak?’ in order to address the sexual, racial and colonial structures of modernity in which these female artists practiced (Spivak 1988; Pollock 1997). She interpreted their work as being engaged in a critical dialogue with that mi- licu, expressed through the compositional forms of drawing and painting rather than strictly in representational iconography or literal meanings. Her analysis of the formal and esthetic aspects of the work suggested that we should consider elements such as framing and composition and the relationships of the male and female gaze both repre- sented, implied and invited in spectators as structural expressions and interventions in a discursive cultural sphere articulated at the level of the image. The concept of the gaze at play in Pollock's essay was very much tied co developments of the concept to feminist film theory, as discussed below. Janet Wolff's Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (1990) was another major contribution to feminist visual culture studies. She introduced an approach that offered sociological methods as means to addressing the gendering of culture as a struc- turing principle rather than as an added feature to the interpretation of art. Wolff trained n sociology at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, one of the key programmes in the foundation of cultural studies, with Stuart Hall (the pro- gramme was started in 1964). She combined British culcural studies and visual studies in the early 1990s when she joined the faculty in art and art history at the University of Rochester, where she helped to found one of the first graduate programmes in the field. Afier her groundbreaking The Social Production of Art was published, she consistently addressed issues of gender as well as class and culture in considering att from a sociologi- cal standpoint informed by British cultural studies methods, along the lines called for by Nochlin in her classic essay described above. Semiotics must be mentioned as an important component of feminist theory in- forming visual studies, and it cannot tightly be folded into a discussion of the cultural turn, Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey and Norman Bryson (1991) and Bryson and Micke Bal (1991), writing in the USA, brought semiotic theory from literary theory to c interpre- art history, opening up approaches to the work of art as a text open to sem tation. Rather than reading the work of art in linguistic terms they adapted semiotics to the study of the visual image, specifically painting in its historical context. Among this group, Mieke Bal brought the technique of close analytic to the study of the visual image in a manner informed by a feminist psychoanalytic view. The introduction of semiotics as a core component of visual studies, however, was also from film studies, dating back co the feminists who trained with Metz and the foundational essay of Johnston dis. above, Whereas in art history semiotics was adapted to the analysis of the static text and the nature of the gaze figured in it and in relation to it adapted to the analysis of serial frames, sequences and shots. The analysis of meaning in ussed in film studies semiotics was narrative became an important aspect filtering into visual studies through the generation. of film scholars trained through the Screen theory tradition and Camera Obscura, where works of narrative cinema tended to be featured more frequently than works of experi- mental or nonnarrative cinema.318 AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND VISUAL CULTURE, THE GAZE IN ART HISTORY AND FILM STUDIES Nochlin introduced the concept of a ‘feminine gaze’ as a counterpoint to the concept of a dominant ‘male gaze’ that organized the esthetic and formal aspects of the field. “The concept of the gaze was under discussion among feminists engaged in psycho- analytic theory in Britain, France and the United States during this period. It would become a comerstone of both feminist film and art theory following from Nochlin’s essay and an influential essay given as a paper at about the same time by the British filmmaker Laura Mulvey (1975). Mulvey introduced her highly influential critique of visual pleasure and narrative cinema in 1975, discussing not only the content of clas- sical film representations of women, but also formal elements such as framing, shot duration and camera position, She showed how formal elements organized the way spectators look, setting up a sexual dynamic of the gaze in which looking is associated with the active, masculine position and being looked at (being the object of the gize) is the feminine position, typically occupied by women. This formulation: women as object of the look, men as the subjects who look, has since held a central place in the field of visual culture studies, though often as a source that is critiqued (including by Mulvey herself), adapted and appropriated. The binary formula of the male spectator as an active figure who controls the look and the female body as the object of the look has been subject to extensive discussion. Theorists of the1980s and 1990s introduced the provisos that we can also speak of a female gaze (Doane 1987; Stacey 1987, 1994); that masculinity and femininity are fluid social and psychical positions which are not always attached to one’s biological status as cither male or female and are complex and subject to oscillation, making any singular identity position relatively untenable (Sedgwick 1990; Rodowick 1991); that the female position should be understood as one that can be maintained across all points of identification (de Lauretis 1984, 1987); that we must account for masculine, gay and lesbian subject positions among specta- tors and performers (Silverman 1992; White 1999); and that we must account for race and ethnicity as well as sexuality in discussing the female spectator (hooks 1992; Bobo 1995). Central to all of this work was the film journal Camera Obscura, which was the first English-language periodical devoted to feminist visual culture theory. Starting as a film journal, Camera Obscura evolved into a journal of media and culture. The book How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video (1991), edited by the Bad Object-Choices read- ing group, was an important collection of works introducing key issues in queer visual studies, including sociologist Cindy Patton's proposal of pornography as part of safe- sex vernacular in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, Kobena Mercer on racial dif- ference and the homoerotic imaginary, and Judith Mayne on female authorship in film, focusing on the US director Dorothy Arzner. How Do I Look? originated in a conference in 1989 focused upon the study of pornography, until then an under-consideted area of popular and subcultural visual media. In the same year, Linda Williams published the classic Hard Core: Power, Plea- sure and the Frenzy of the Visible (1989). ‘The book was a milestone in visual culture studies not only for applying the psychoanalytic, semiotic approach to the film genreART, FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE 319 of pornography, but also because it challenged some of the tenets of feminist critique by refusing to take a negative critical stance on a genre and a sector of the film indus- try that was heavily under fire from anti-pornography feminists for its depictions of women as passive objects of the gaze. The book grew out of an early moment in femi- nist politics, the so-called feminist sex wars famously associated with a 1983 Barnard conference at which feminists against pornography were faced with the critique from sex-positive feminists across the straight, lesbian, trans and S&M communities who argued that the feminist position against porn foreclosed on women's pleasure in im- ages of women and desire in relation to fantasy, and ruled out consideration of women as workers in the sex industry, confining feminists to a position of moral conservatism and mistakenly equating representation with violence. The launching of On Our Backs (1984-1994), the first women-run sex tabloid for a lesbian audience, was a direct response to the perceived prudery of the anti-porn stance embodied in the feminist newspaper Off Our Backs (1970-2008), which generally avoided discussion of sexu- ality to focus on politics and other aspects of lesbian feminist culture. Although the feminist sex wars were not a chapter in visual culture studies per se, they informed the field’s scholarship by playing out a public debate about representations of women and the place of lesbian desire in that issue in a way that profoundly influenced feminist scholarship in the field. ‘The sex wars also launched decades of work studying pornog- raphy with colleagues and students, generating studies of women in the industry and gay and lesbian subcultures—topics that upended the characterization of the field as solely exploitative and demeaning. This aspect of visual studies has been a critical area through which the field has gravitated away from the model of critique towards other modes of analytic practice. ART PRACTICE AND FEMINISM During the period that feminist film theory was emerging as a major aspect of intel- lectual work, a number of feminist photographers produced work that engaged with some similar ideas about visual culture and sexuality. Cindy Sherman's black-and- white photographic series “Untitled Film Stills’ (1977-1980) famously articulated a critical theory of the gaze through photographic form. In her self-portraits of the 1980s Sherman dressed and posed in settings evoking classical mid-century cinema to make ironic commentary about a period of visual culture known for its relegation of women to the position of object of the look. Sherman posed in clothing and sets reminiscent of and modeled on stills from films of the classical Hollywood cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, evoking scenes of female beauty and domesticity with subtle and ironic twists. Viewers could hardly fail to note the critique in these send-ups of the classical Hollywood cinema. Her work was never heavy-handed and condemning but rather came off as a wry critical embrace, allowing for a kind of double-edged ap- preciation of the culture of the ‘male’ gaze while making the viewer uncomfortably aware of the power dynamic behind the role of the woman who held and returned the look from the image or screen. Whereas old photographs of mid-century movie320 POLITICS AND VIS LL CULTURE stars appropriated and reused can make us appreciate the same ironies, the fact that Sherman herself appropriated, authored and also performed these roles in such stilted, highly mannered compositions lent a sharp, funny and smart edge to the critique, Photographer Catherine Opie’s large and colourful 1991 portraits of butch dykes were given a title that explicitly drew on Lacan’s notion of the phallus in relationship to power: ‘Being and Having’. Opie’s butch subjects use dress, pose and composition to perform types in a tongue-in-cheek and campy manner, confronting the camera face-on. Barbara Kruger, a commercial artist, used her graphic techniques and type: face to construct collage and print pieces commenting explicitly on ironies of sexuality and power, drawing on formats and themes of mass media concern and making ironic text statements in juxtaposition to the familiar iconography of magazine and newspa- pers advertisements. These are just a few of the artists of the period 1977 through the 1990s who were widely cited by visual studies scholars, and who also engaged in art practice as theor ‘The concern raised in the 1970s by Nochlin about the exclusion of women art ists from the canon continues to be brought to our attention through the work of the Guerrilla Girls, a feminist performance group of anonymous women who since 1985 have taken the name of dead artists (Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz, for example; see Guerrilla Girls 1998) to appear in public wearing masks and making interventions at muscum and gallery functions. Theit interventions draw attention to sexism in the ars, mostly through humor. Do women have to be naked to get into the Met museum’, one of their posters asks—and in their interventions at museums in person they have posed the same sorts of questions. Less than 5 per cent of the artists in the modern art section are women, the poster notes—but 85 per cent of the nudes are female. Although the Guerrilla Girls do not work in the theoretically dense frameworks of visual theory, they do engage in the sociological tradition of emphasizing that are is always in social context. In this they are very much within the field of visual culture, as well as in the tradition of institutional critique, an area of art practice in which artists’ work in installation and performance foregrounds questions about the institutional politics and policies of mu- scums, galleries, collecting and display. This performative tradition of critical theory was engaged in early on by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pefia (1995), whose ‘Couple in the Cage’ performance of 1997 was a hilarious and biting send-up of the colonial gaze and romantic notions of natives expounded in museums of man and art. The artists dressed as a ‘native’ couple housed in a cage for museum display, a living diaorama of racialized display and a reference back to the tradition of human displays in museums of man and in circus and freak shows. That their preposterous performance as members of a lost tribe was received at face value by museum and gallery visitors in 1997 was a frightening reflection on the place of critical thinking in the public sphere. Fusco was and remains an important contributor to visual culture studies as a figure who has con- sistently worked as a curator, a writer, and a performance artist in her practice. With Jennifer Gonzalez, Fusco is among a small but growing group of visual culture studi scholars working on questions of racial difference and postcolonialism in femi jist visual culture,ART, FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE 321 FEMINIST CRITICAL ART PRACTICE AND VISUAL CULTURE IN THE 2000S ‘The photographer Kimiko Yoshida, like Opie and Sherman, uses portraiture as a means of making critical political commentary about visual culture in a manner that is in- formed by visual culture theory. In a series that spanned seven years during the 2000s, Yoshida transformed herself into the brides of the world, making ironic commentary about globalization and the culture of femininity. Graduate programmes in visual cul- ture studies such as the one at the University of Rochester have tended to promote the strategy of combining practice and theory, resulting in the ability of practitioners to have careers such as that of Tina Takemoto, the San Francisco-based performance artist who works on questions of embodiment and illness and who also writes criticism and theory of visual culture, racial identity, the body and illness, Combined practice-theory has had a much stronger presence in visual culture studies since 2000, and work such as Take- s feminist, queer theory, critical race theory and disability studies across writing and performance is increasingly visible in the field. moto’ that spa NEW MEDIA, FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE New media studies has been a key area for the expansion of work in feminist visual cul- ture studies. One of the key scholars in this area is Anne Friedberg, one of the founders of an carly graduate programme in visual studies (ac the University of California at Ir- vine) and a film studies scholar whose work on the cinematic gaze in the context of win- dow shopping (1993) was one of the most influential books on the postmodern in visual culture studies, Her 2006 book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft synthe- sized thinking about visual culture in a world in which screens have proliferated, from the drawing devices of the Renaissance to the present-day world of computer, cell phone and GPS screens. In her book Digitizing Race, Lisa Nakahara (2007) extends ideas about visual culture into the domain of new media, taking into account the ways in which the Internet is structured through notions of racial difference even as it is touted for bridg- ing racial boundaries. Rather than condemning or bemoaning this fact, Nakamura uses visual culture studies methods to analyse and uncover the mechanisms through which racial identity is forged in the virtual space of the Web. EMBODIMENT Because the emphasis in visual studies remains with the human subject understood as a complex materially situated being, questions of embodiment and phenomenology of ex- perience have been important theoretical and methodological threads in the field, wich a turn to emphasis in the 2000s on intersubjective experience (a topic raised explicitly by Mary Kelly in her Post-Partum document but not widely investigated until recently) rather than the subject in the singular. Vivian Sobchack has made major contributions to theories of embodiment in film and new media visual culture with her Address of the322 AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND VISUAL CULTURE. Eye (1991) and her contribution to the study of embodiment and moving image cul- ture, the book Carnal Thoughts (2004). The latcer book brings to the fore the role of embodied experience in sense-making as a neglected concetn in the previous decades of visual theory, during which work on knowledge and visuality tended to be centred in the concepts of mind and thought without adequate attention to the body and embod- ied experience. Recent work in feminist affect studies has moved in this direction, fol- lowing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s introduction to the writings of Silvan ‘Tomkins (Sedgwick and Frank 1995) and Sedgwick’s book Touching Feeling (2004), in which Sedgwick writes about how people embody linguistic and nonlinguistic concepts through the concept of performativity. Though not a central figure in visual studies, Sedgwick has nonetheless been an important influence there in shaping fundamental approaches and theories of the relationship of the body to linguistic practice in the fields of practice and the gaze conceived as a multisensory space. ART, TECHNOLOGY AND VISUAL CULTURE Feminist science and technology studies has offered some important new work in visual culture studies. Ac about the same time that art historians cook the cultural turn, science and technology studies scholars were raising questions about womens standpoint and issues of race and cultural identity in science and technology studies. Donna Haraway, in her classic Cyborg Manifesto, offered an ‘ironic dream of a com- mon language for women in the integrated circuit’—a configuration of a network that emphasized a kind of crossing of media forms as well as borders between and fields (Haraway 1991). Anthropologist Rosalind Petchesky, using a different set of methods, proposed that we consider the sonogram and fetal imaging in terms of power and politics of the visual (Petchesky 1987). Her method is very much in keep- ing with the Alchusserian turn towards seeing culture and medicine as integral to the workings of the political economy. Scholars trained in an interdisciplinary framework across film and media studies and science and technology studies took up these con- cerns about scientific and medical imaging to produce critical accounts of represen- tation that addressed sexuality and gender (sce for example van Dijck 1995, 2005; Cartwright 1995). An early collection reflecting this convergence of science and tech- nology studies with visual studies through feminism can be found in the collection edited by Lisa Cartwright, Constance Penley and Paula A. Treichler (1998). A number of women artists working in the paradigms and practices of the scientific laboratory have taken up questions of visual culture from within this context. Notable among these artists are Kathy High, the New York-based media artist who since the 1980s has produced video and new media work raising critical questions at the intersection of science, sexuality and visual culture; Beatriz da Costa, the southern California based bioartist who works directly in tissue culture; and Natalie Jeremijenko, the New York-based performance artist who has included engineering technologies of vision and surveillance to track toxic chemicals and to re-engineer the environmental land- entities scapes of the everyday.ART, FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE 323 OVERVIEWS OF THE VISUAL CULTURE FIELD THAT EMPHASIZE FEMINISM AND ART Useful overviews of visual culture studies include Mirzocff (1999, 2000); Dikovitskaya (2005); and Sturken and Cartwright (2008). Mirzoeff, Scurken and Cartwright all give significant attention to feminist contributions to the field. Useful overviews of femi- nism and visual culture are Jones (2010) and Carson and Pajaczkowska (2001). Carson and Pajaczkowska frame the subject through the categories of fine art, design and mass media. Jones, who is an art historian, traces theoretical and historical aspects of femi- nism and visual culture study across a diverse range of fields and topics that closely map the fields and topics that informed the history of the field, with articles representing most of the key foundational work of feminist visual studies. Fields covered include art history, art practice, and science and technology studies. The volume includes work by activists and artists as well as scholars, highlighting questions of race, class, nationality and sexuality, and includes a very useful introduction that traces the development of the field, Jones’ book is a key text for anyone wishing to understand feminism’s place in the foundation of visual culture studies. FURTHER READING Fusco, Coco and Brian Wallis. 2003. Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Guerrilla Girls. 1998. The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Art. New York: Penguin, Jones, Amelia. 2010. Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Nakahara, Lisa, 2007. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sturken, Marita and Lisa Carewright. 2008. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. REFERENCES Bal, Mieke and Norman Bryson. 1991, ‘Semiotics and Art History’, The Art Bulletin, 73/2 (June): 174-208, Bobo, Jacqueline, 1995. Black Women as Cultural Readers. New York: Columbia University Press. Bryson, Norman, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey. 1991, Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation. New York: HarperCollins. Carson, Fiona and C jaczkowska. 2001. Feminist Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Carewright, Lisa. 1995. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicines Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Carewright, Lisa, Paula A. Treichler and Constance Penley. 1998. The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science, New York: New York: University Press. De Certeau, Michel. 1984, The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. ire P324 AESTHETICS, POLITICS AND VISUAL CULTURE De Lauretis, Teresa, 1984, Alice Doesn't. Feminism. Semiotics. Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. De Lauretis, Teresa, 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory Film, and Fiction. Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press. De Lauretis, Teresa. 1991. ‘Film and the Visible’, in Bad Object-Choices (eds), How Do I Look? Queer Filin and Video. Seattle: Bay Press, 223-64. Dikovitskaya, Margaret. 2005. Visual Cudsure: The Study of the Visual afier the Culeural Turn Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Doane, Mary Ann. 1987. The Desire o Desire: The Woman’ Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Friedberg, Anne. 1993. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press. Friedberg, Anne. 2006. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fusco, Coco and Guillermo Gomer-Peiia. 1995. English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York: New Press. illa Girls. 1998. The Guerrilla Girl? Bedide Companion 10 the History of Art. New York: Penguin, Haraway, Donna. 1991. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature New York: Routledge, 49-181, Harris, Jonathan. 2001. The New Art History: A Critical Introduction, New York: Routledge. Haskell, Molly. (1973) 1987. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, rev. ed, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. hooks, bell. 1992, Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press. Johnston, Claire. 1991. ‘Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema’, Notes on Women's Cinema (1973), Glasgow: Screen Reprint: 24-31. Jones, Amelia. 2010, Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn. Routledge. Kelly, Mary. 1999. Post-Partum Document. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 1999. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. 2002. The Visual Culeure Reader, Ind edn. London: Routledge. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. ‘Visual Pleasure and Nasrative Cinema’, Sereen 16/3: 6-18. Reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan, 1989, 14-26. Nakahara, Lisa. 2007. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nochlin, Linda. 1971. ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists’, Art News, 69. Reprinted in Linda Nochlin, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays. Bouldes, CO: Westview Press, 1988. Quotes are from this volume, pp. 147-58. Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. 1987. ‘Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction’, Feminist Studies, 13/2: 263-92. Pollock, Griselda. 1997. Differencing the Canon: Feminism and the Writing of Arts Histories London: Routledge Rodowick, David N. 1991. The Difficulty of Difference: Pychoanalyss, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory, London: Routledge. Rose, Jacqueline. 1986. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso. Rosen, M. 1973. Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream, New York: Avon. GueiART, FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE, 325 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990, ‘Introduction: Axiomatic’, in Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1-65. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2004. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Dutham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank, eds, 1995. Shame and les Sisters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press rman, Kaja. 1992. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York and London: Routledge. Sobchack, Vivian. 1991. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press Spivak, Gayatri, 1988, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 271-313. Stacey, Jackie. 1987. ‘Desperately Seeking Difference’, Sereen, 28/1: 48-61. Stacey, Jackie, 1994, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatoraship. London: Routledge. Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright, 2008. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van Dijck, Jose. 1995. /maglination: Popular images of Genetics, New York: New York University Press. Van Dijck, Jose. 2005. The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging, Seautle: University of Washington Press. White, Patricia. 1999. Uninvited: Classical Cinema and Hollywood Representability. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Williams, Linda. 1989. Hard Core: Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolff, Janet. 1990. Feminine Sentences: Esays on Women and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.