Feminist Visual Culture

Visual culture is all around us: television, dance, film, fashion, painting, sculpture, installation and fine art are only a few of its many faces. Feminist Visual Culture looks at feminist theory, the role of women, and the contribution of women artists to the world of visual culture. This substantial introduction provides an overview of visual culture and of the origins of feminist practice. In the volume's three sections--Fine Art, Design, and Mass Media--the authors discuss the visual media specific to that area, incorporating wider issues such as class, culture, and ethnicity. Each chapter is written by a woman working in a different field of visual culture. A topical and comprehensive introduction, Feminist Visual Culture will be a valuable tool for readers and students in women's studies, visual studies, and media studies.

Challenging the notion of feminism as a unified discourse, this book assembles writings that address art, film, architecture, popular culture, new media, and other visual fields from a feminist perspective. The book combines classic texts with six newly commissioned pieces. Articles are grouped into thematic sections, each introduced by the editor. Providing a framework within which to understand the shifts in feminist thinking in visual studies, as well as an overview of major feminist theories of the visual, this reader also explores how issues of race, class, nationality, and sexuality enter into debates about feminism in the field of the visual. -- book cover.

A timely intervention into debates on the representation of feminist and feminine identities in contemporary visual culture. The essays in this collection interrogate how and why certain formulations of feminism and femininity are currently prevalent in mainstream cinema and television, offering new insights into postfeminist media phenomena.

Feminism is one of the most important perspectives from which visual culture has been theorised and historicised over the past 30 years. This book brings together a wide array of writings, including classic texts and polemical new pieces.

Beyond the Frame rewrites the history of Victorian art to explore the relationships between feminism and visual culture in a period of heady excitement and political struggle. Artists were caught up in campaigns for women's enfranchisement, education and paid work, and many were drawn into controversies about sexuality. This richly documented and compelling study considers painting, sculpture, prints, photography, embroidery and comic drawings as well as major styles such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Neo-Classicism and Orientalism. Drawing on critical theory and post-colonial studies to analyse the links between visual media, modernity and imperialism, Deborah Cherry argues that visual culture and feminism were intimately connected to the relations of power.

This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body. Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, fine arts, women’s studies, gender studies, feminism and cultural studies.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Art today is an increasingly multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing transgressive works that intervene in war and ecological disasters, in inequalities and revolutionary changes in technology. Carnal Aesthetics is a fascinating, new examination of this aspect of contemporary visual culture. Employing recent theories of transgressive body imagery, trauma, affect and sensation, it provides a fresh look at the meeting point between the politics of representation and the politics of perception through the prismatic lens of feminist theory. Acclaimed scholars analyse a wide range of seminal case studies coming from different media: digital photography, painting, video, film and multimedia art. They explore here a number of transgressive movements that significantly reconfigure the relationship between the body and the image. Unlike other books on the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics, Carnal Aesthetics seeks to provide a novel approach to art and culture by challenging the primacy of vision and by injecting an intersectional perspective into the fields of visual studies, film and media studies, as well as trauma studies. It is a significant contribution across these dynamic fields of exploration for scholars who deal with the socio-political nature of contemporary visual culture in their work.