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Visual Culture
Professor: Brian Goldfarb | Winter 2005 UCSD
Week 9 Gender and Visuality
"Seeing Sex" by Nick Mirzoeff
Sex disrupts culture. (We have studied the way in which sexual difference has been described as structuring culture, for example in Pollock's description of Modernity. Here we have an understanding as catagories of sexual difference as being unstable and threatening to social organization).
Fetishism and fetishistic looking:
From inversion to opposites and ambiguity:
- Theory of the sexual fetish has to do with the denial of castration (or imagined castration of the mother).
- Freud borrowed the term fetish from colonial context thereby fusing understanding of sexuality and race.
- Octavio Mannoni "I know...but none the less"
- In the fetishistic gaze reality exists but the viewers fantasy is superimposed over it.
- While clinical fetishists seem relatively, fetishistic looking (like neurosis, is the norm and part of every day looking.) while we look we keep incompatible approaches in play at once.
- Feminists argue that Freudian and Lacanian theory are organized around male sexuality (Luce Irigaray, The Sex that is Not One) .
- Early modern western medicine created a one-sex model of human species. The male and female organs were inverted versions of one another.
- Thomas Laqueur, who, in Making Sex, explores how sexuality from the ancients through the Renaissance was structured quite differently than it was in the nineteenth century or is today:
- Indeed, according to the scientists of the sixteenth century, anatomy itself "displayed, at many levels and with unprecedented vigor, the 'fact' that the vagina really is a penis, and the uterus a scrotum"
- By around 1800 there emerged a drive to see fundamental differences in biological differences. This was accompanied by a shift in understanding of the relation of orgasm or pleasure to conception.
- Essentialism
- Eakin's painting of the Gross Clinic shows the fetishistic response to the problem of sexual division of culture.
- Foucault's History of Sexuality: Piror to late modernity homosexuality didn't exist as such, though the preactices we associte with it did. (the smae might apply to other forms of deviance. Insanity, etc...)
- Intersex or Hermaphroditism
- example of Herculine Barbin and his autobiography.
- John Money
- 20000 girls a year have clitoris removal/ surgical reduction and hormonal treatment for genitalia greater than 2.5 cm
- Alice Walker and Prathibha Parmar
- Cosmetic surgery and attempts to make the body conform to social norms.
- Intersex genital Mutilation and Female Genital Mutilation.
- Intersection of race and sexual difference is displaced onto geographic and ethnic space.
- What is same sex practice in Africa or elsewhere?
- Saartje Bartmann (the Hottentot Venus), the Khoi woman who left Africa
- Foucault's theory of regimentation of sex as productive of deviance, and homosexuality, and sexuality as a whole (opposed to Freudian theory of repression).
- Queering of the gaze--undoing of the logic of positionality and binary catogories of heterosexuality.
- Eve Sedgewick's Epistimology of the closet: axiomatic.
- Enormous cultural and psychic work goes into elaborating a few binary catagories yet we have few theoretical tools for dealing with our basic experiences of diversity
Sex, Gender, and Perforamativity
Judith Butler goes far as to argue that gender, as an objective natural thing, does not exist: "Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed" ("Performative" 278). Gender, according to Butler, is by no means tied to material bodily facts but is solely and completely a social construction, a fiction, one that, therefore, is open to change and contestation: "Because there is neither an 'essence' that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis" ("Performative" 273).
Butler takes her formulations even further by questioning the very distinction between gender and sex. In the past, feminists regularly made a distinction between bodily sex (the corporeal facts of our existence) and gender (the social conventions that determine the differences between masculinity and femininity).
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Gustave Corbet
- Origin of the World 1866
- The Source
- The Sleepers, 1866
Thomas Eakins
- The Gross Clinic
Edward Weston
- Pepper, 1930
- Nude, 1926
- Torso of Neil
- Nude (through a window), 1945
- Master's of Photograph
Robert Maplethorpe
- Calla Lilly, 1984
- Untitled 1981
- Cedric, 1977
- Jessie McBride, 1976
- Susan Sarandon, 1988
- Brooke Sheields, 1988
- Larry and Boby Kissing, 1979
- Bondage, 1974
- Man in a Polyester Suite, 1980
- Black Jack 1982
- Masters of Photogarphy site
Leon Golub
- Interrogation, 1981
- Gigantomachy II, 1966
Viro Acconci
- High Rise, 1983
Laura Aguilar
- In Sandy's Room (self portrait) photograph, 14" x 18", 1989
- Three Eagles Flying, 1989
- Clothed, Unclothed, 1992
- Stillness
- Motion
Sally Mann
- Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia, 1989
- Emmett Asleep
- Dancer with Dog Scratches
- Nude Male torso
- Jessie, Age 6
- Hay Hook
- Eqivlent #1 Moon Fower
- Equivalent #2 Possum Tail
- Shiva at Whistle Creek 1992
Rita Ackerman
- We mastered the life of doing nothing...1994
- You Never gonna Get me You Fucking Jerk, 1994
- Get a Job, 1994
Catherine Opie
- Being and Having 1991
- Dyke, 1992
- Mitch
- Angela Scheirl, 1993
- Mike, cibachrome print 1993
- Sky, c-print 20"x16", 1993
Lyle Ashton Harris
- Sisterhood, 1994
- Untitled
- Untitled
Gilbert and George
- Naked Faith, 1982
- Naked Suits, 1994
- Naked Forest, 1982
- Queer, 1977
- Shitty Naked Human world, 1994
David Wajnaroicz
- America: Heads of Family, Heads of State 1989-90
- One Day this Kid 1990
- Installation
Andres Serrano
Joel-Peter Witkin
Cindy Sherman
Exhibition: In a Different Light
Katie Niles
