Research Catalog

Sexing the look in popular visual culture

Title: Sexing the look in popular visual culture / edited by Kathy Justice Gentile.
Publication: Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars, 2010.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	HQ460 .S494 2010	Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Gentile, Kathy Justice.

Description

viii, 251 pages, 7 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color); 22 cm

Summary

"With dramatic advances in media technology, the practice of sexing or erotically enhancing images has become an increasingly widespread phenomenon. The eroticized "look," as both noun and verb, the thing or image that draws our look, and the look that we bestow on images that elicit our visual, physiological, and emotional attention, is the focus of the essays in this volume. Every day, whether we are out in the world or in the workplace or in the privacy of our homes, we enter visual fields that heighten and distort reality, distortions that often emphasize sexuality and erotic promise. The contributors for this collection look at the sexualization of visual culture from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including literature, film studies, history, philosophy, art history, and media studies, with gender and sexuality studies providing the encompassing critical framework that binds these essays into a coherent analytical project. These essays direct our critical attention to increasingly widespread and sometimes insidiously pervasive eroticizing practices, practices which aim to entertain, impress, solicit, threaten, and/or delude targeted audiences, viewers who may be savvy and complicit, delighted and stimulated, or naive and vulnerable. The essays in this collection offer new theoretical conceptions of perception and representation, as well as rigorous reconsiderations of the polarized feminist debates over pornographic images. Essays on literature and film range from an interrogation of Baudrillard's theory of "seduction" that posits femininity as a strategy of illusion and subversion to Bridget Jones's challenge to the prevailing disciplinary regime that prescribes rigid standards for feminine beauty to a reevaluation of the subversive potential of sexy female robots. Other contributors consider the history of nudist images in U.S. periodicals, the proliferation of eroticized images of girls in new digital technologies, gentlemanly masculinity in men's fashion in late Victorian England, and a rape prevention campaign's unintentional reinforcement of persistent heterosexist misconceptions about rape."--Publisher's information.

Alternative Title

Popular visual culture

Subject

Genre/Form

Aufsatzsammlung.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: Sexing the Look / Kathy Justice Gentile -- Part I: Theorizing the Look -- 1. Encountering the Sexuality of Images: with Debord and Merleau-Ponty / Kathy Justice Gentile -- 2. Arousing Suspicions: The Visual Culture of Contemporary Anti-Pornography Feminism / Brad Houston Lane -- Part II: The Pornographic Look -- 3. Challenging the Look: Nudist Magazines, Sexual Representation, and the Second World War / Brian Hoffman -- 4. Arguing with an Orgasm: The Politics and Pedagogy of the Anti-Pornography Slideshow / Jennifer Maher -- 5. Post-Pornography: Visual Obscenity, Female Sexuality, and the Woman Artist in Jack O'Connell's The Skin Palace / Eleanor Beal -- Part III: Icons of Femininity -- 6. Discipline and the Female Grotesque: The Reception and Rejection of Bridget Jones / Ezra Claverie -- 7. Sexing the Female Robot / Minsoo Kang -- 8. The Predator and the Poptart: Framed / Kathleen Butterly Nigro -- Part IV: Looking like a Man -- 9. The Victorian Gentleman and the Pleasures of Dress / Christopher Kent -- 10. Can "Men" Stop Rape?: Visualizing Gender in the My Strength is Not for Hurting Rape Prevention Campaign / Michael J. Murphy.

ISBN

9781443824088
1443824089

LCCN

2011379179

OCLC

ocn656784516
656784516
SCSB-14687423

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library