Extreme Bodies: The Body as Represented and Experienced through Critical and Popular Visual Culture

The process of identifying the witch brought questions about emotions, gender, and selfhood to the fore. As witchcraft was a crime largely without evidence, legal and religious authorities had to employ their expertise in their attempts to uncover the truth about a person. The trial process reveals the overlapping and at times contradictory individual, communal, legal, and religious understandings of not only witchcraft, but more fundamental categories of sin, morality, free will, guilt, and innocence. The trial process further reveals how individual and communal narratives took on, and themselves shaped, understandings of witchcraft, gender, and emotions in popular media, visual culture, and intellectual treatises. The way in which people attempted to make sense of themselves and each other, how the body and emotions were ‘read’, and how this was gendered, was thus at the very heart of the struggle to identify the witch.

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Chapter 1: Representing the Body: The Visual Culture of Renaissance Anatomy

Medical History ◽

10.1017/s0025727300073087 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 43 (S19) ◽

pp. 5-45

Keyword(s):

Visual Culture ◽

The Body

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Ex-centric Cinema: Machinic Vision in the Powers of Ten and Electronic Cartography

Body & Society ◽

10.1177/1357034x11430963 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 18 (1) ◽

pp. 99-119 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Janet Harbord

Keyword(s):

Visual Culture ◽

Google Earth ◽

The Body ◽

Educational Film ◽

Space Travel ◽

Cultural Form ◽

Different Dimensions ◽

The Spectator ◽

The Relationship ◽

Made In

After a century of cinema, accounts of this cultural form see it as divided between documentation and animation (the real and the magical). Yet the challenge that cinema presented in terms of a relocation of perception from the eye to the machine has become occluded. The shock of cinema in its earliest manifestations resided in the body of the spectator, no longer the site of primary perception, but dependent on an other (the camera, the projector) lacking in human qualities. This article argues that the newly configured body–machine relationship provided by cinema became a marginalized feature of cinematic culture, an ex-centric cinema relegated to the sub-fields of science and educational film. In the mid-20th century the project surfaces spectacularly in the work of pioneering designers Charles and Ray Eames, most poignantly in their film Powers of Ten (first made in 1968, remade in 1977) , a journey into the cosmos and back again into the body of a man. Bringing together discourses of space travel, cartography, physics and cinema, the film moves us towards an understanding of visual culture as an apparatus of calculated possibilities, where visualization replaces representation. If we take the Powers of Ten as a non-representational film, an ex-centric cinematic practice, we uncover non-linear and non-representational ways of apprehending the relationship between bodies and matter. This literal line of flight is one path that cinema may have taken. Its presence, however, is detectable outside of the cinema, in the software programs of electronic cartography copyrighted as Google Earth. The human body is not made virtual by its engagement with calculated visualization but is in turn part of the field of enquiry, equally porous, and definable in various scales and in different dimensions.

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La fotografía móvil y la experiencia voyeur como marco de referencia para la representación artística del cuerpo humano

eari educación artística revista de investigación ◽

10.7203/eari.8.10044 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Encarnación Palazón

Keyword(s):

Visual Culture ◽

The Body ◽

Palabras Clave ◽

Mobile Cameras ◽

Visual Pleasure

Resumen: Partiendo de una línea de investigación anterior, este artículo de naturaleza analítica y especulativa, aborda las relaciones entre la fotografía realizada con las cámaras móviles y el tratamiento fotográfico del cuerpo. Esta relación se establece a partir del reconocimiento del placer visual en la actividad fotográfica, y más concretamente a través del voyeurismo y del fenómeno más amplio de la fragmentación corporal como un rasgo de la actual cultura visual. Este análisis y la especulación realizadas profundizan en los usos, limitaciones y posibilidades que las cámaras móviles nos plantean en términos sociales, culturales, y artísticos. Palabras clave: imágenes del cuerpo, fotografía, móviles, voyeur, inmediatez, representación artística. Abstract: Starting from a previous line of research, this analytical and speculative article deals with the relations between the photography made with the mobile cameras and the photographic treatment of the body. This relationship is established from the recognition of visual pleasure in the photographic activity, and more specifically through voyeurism and the broader phenomenon of body fragmentation as a feature of the current visual culture. This analysis and the speculation reflect the uses, limitations and possibilities that mobile cameras open in social, cultural, and artistic terms. Keywords: images of the body, photography, mobile, voyeur, immediacy, artistic representation.http://dx.doi.org/10.7203/eari.8.10044

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Sexing the Archive

Radical History Review ◽

10.1215/01636545-9397115 ◽

2022 ◽

Vol 2022 (142) ◽

pp. 133-141

Author(s):

João Florêncio ◽

Ben Miller

Keyword(s):

Visual Culture ◽

The Body ◽

Value Systems ◽

Ontological Status ◽

Historical Source ◽

Sexual Histories ◽

Queer Archives ◽

Low Culture ◽

Methodological Considerations

Abstract Despite being a widely consumed genre of visual culture, pornography remains a touchy subject in contemporary queer historiography. Queer archives overflow with it, but queer histories don’t. Historically associated with low culture and distrusted by value systems that have tended to privilege the “high” faculties of reason to the detriment of the “base” materiality of the body, its affects and appetites, porn is too rarely approached as a legitimate source with which to think cultural, affective, intellectual, and sexual histories. This article draws from porn studies and queer historiographies to draw some methodological considerations about the value, benefits, and challenges posed by porn archives to the writing of queer subcultural histories. Rather than trying to solve porn’s double ontological status as both documentary and fantasy, the authors locate in that defining feature of the genre porn’s value as a historical source. Simultaneously a document of sex cultures and of the edges of morality, and a historically and culturally situated speculation on what bodies and sex may become, porn offers both cultural critics and historians a rich archive for deepening their knowledge of the intersections of culture, morality, pleasure, community, embodiment, and the politics of belonging.

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Filipino American Visual Culture

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.867 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Sarita Echavez See

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Visual Culture ◽

Interior Design ◽

Visual Representation ◽

The United States ◽

The Philippines ◽

The Body ◽

Filipino American ◽

Wide Range ◽

Cultural Forms

The visual display of Filipinos in the United States temporally and ideologically coincides with the American military conquest of the Philippines at the end of the 19th century, a brutal and brutally forgotten war that some scholars have described as genocidal according to even the most conservative definitions of genocide. This intimacy between empire and vision in the Philippine case has shaped and sharpened the stakes of studying Filipino American visual culture and its history, aesthetics, and politics. As with other minoritized communities in the United States, Filipino American visual culture is a means and site of lively and often contentious debates about representation, which typically revolve around how to document absence and how to establish presence in America. However, because Filipino Americans historically have a doubled status as minoritized and colonized—Filipinos in the United States were legally categorized as “nationals” during the colonial period even as the Philippines was deemed “foreign in a domestic sense” by the US Supreme Court—the matter of legal and visual representation is particularly complex, distinct from that of other Asian Americans and comparable with that of Native Pacific Islanders and Native Americans. So, while the politics of Asian American representation generally can get mired in debates about the absence or presence of “voice” in literature and the stereotypical or authentic depiction of the “body” in visual culture, Filipino American studies scholars of visual culture have provided valuable, clarifying insights about the relationship between imperial spectacle and history. To wit, the hypervisible representation of the Filipino in American popular cultural forms in the early decades of the 20th century—from the newspaper cartoon to the photograph to the World’s Fair exhibition—ironically enabled the erasure of the extraordinarily violent historical circumstances surrounding the emergence of the Filipino’s visibility. This relationship between spectacle and history or, rather, between visual representation and historical erasure, continues to redound upon a wide range of Filipino American visual cultural forms in the 21st century, from the interior design of turo turo restaurants to multimedia art installations to community-based murals.

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Women, Art and Observant Franciscan Piety

10.5117/9789462984332 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Kathleen Giles Arthur

Keyword(s):

Visual Culture ◽

Early Modern ◽

Social History ◽

The Body ◽

Body Of Christ ◽

Archival Research ◽

Religious Women ◽

Art Objects ◽

History Of ◽

Women Patrons

Caterina Vigri (later Saint Catherine of Bologna) was a mystic, writer, teacher and nun-artist. Her first home, Corpus Domini, Ferrara, was a house of semi-religious women that became a Poor Clare convent and model of Franciscan Observant piety. Vigri's intensely spiritual decoration of her breviary, as well as convent altarpieces that formed a visual program of adoration for the Body of Christ, exemplify the Franciscan Observant visual culture. After Vigri's departure, it was transformed by d'Este women patrons, including Isabella da Aragona, Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia. While still preserving Observant ideals, it became a more elite noblewomen's retreat. Grounded in archival research and extant paintings, drawings, prints and art objects from Corpus Domini, this volume explores the art, visual culture, and social history of an early modern Franciscan women's community.

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