Feminist Cringe Comedy: Dear Dick, The Joke Is on You

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-129
Author(s):  
Lori Marso
Keyword(s):  
Male Gaze ◽  
Female Desire ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Feminist Community

AbstractFeminist cringe comedies eschew the conventions of romance and sentimentality in favor of comedy that discomforts. Cringe comedies are one example of what I call feminism's visual realisms, so named for doing feminist political work by evoking laughter and the cringe. The cringe pulls us inward in our posture, while laughter opens us to others. This bodily response to cringe comedies interrupts the fantasies of the male gaze and makes space for spectators to acknowledge the excessive, complicated, and seemingly shameful realities of female desire. My primary example is Jill Soloway's television adaptation of Chris Kraus's I Love Dick, a series that builds on the feminist legacy of avant-garde director Catherine Breillat. Departing from politically correct narratives and comforting or sentimental affect, I Love Dick achieves feminist community through the appeal, the cringe, and the irruption of laughter.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Hester Ann Rogers, and the Textual/Sexual Enthusiasms of Women’s Life-Writing

2019 ◽  
pp. 110-141
Author(s):  
Andrew O. Winckles
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Female Desire ◽  
Print Publication ◽  
Writing Genres ◽  
Scribal Publication ◽  
Print Publications

Chapter Four examines women’s life-writing and the formation of an “erotic imagination” within life-writing as a genre. It begins by examining the Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers (1793), one of the most influential works of Methodist life-writing, and reads it as against her earlier manuscript versions of the work. This reading reveals some of the ways and reasons Methodist women navigated different publication platforms and life-writing genres (private diary, semi-public scribal publication, print publication) in order to reach different audiences. Specifically, it examines Rogers’ status as a Methodist “mystic” who, in her diaries and manuscript works, represents a deeply erotic female mysticism that is edited out of her print publications. The chapter then turns to Rogers’ contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, to consider how both women use the life-writing genre to re-write the terms and conditions of female desire while textually re-orienting this desire away from the male gaze.

Our Lady of Art

2020 ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Ferraro
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Sexual Intimacy ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Washington Square

Chapter 5 examines Willa Cather’s neglected story, “Coming, Aphrodite” in light of her fascination with the bodily presentation that Camille Paglia would later call “sexual personae”—for which Cather develops her own Marian interpretive sensibility, half Roman Catholic and half Pagan, as a deliberate counterforce to the Puritan heritage deflating U.S. artistic and expressive culture. In her twenties, Cather was a prodigious journalist fascinated by the radiant figurae of statuary, painting, drama, poetry, and fiction both home and abroad—which she interrogated in explicitly religious terms, with a particular affinity for both Marian-Catholic dissent from the Puritan denial of the senses and its alternative of graced intercession. Cather learns to invite readers to the redemptive power of forbidden love: sex for its own sake, adultery whether intermittent or sustained or only imagined, same-sex beatings of the heart and meetings of the mind. Then, in “Coming, Aphrodite!,” in a way more literal that her readers could possibly have expected, Cather stages the male gaze of an avant-garde, sexually disciplined and romantically impervious, young painter in Washington Square, Don Hedger, who finds himself in thrall—through a closet peephole!—to the artful exhibitionism in body and song of an equally ambitious, alternatively brilliant ingénue, Eden Bower. Their pas de deux produces a profound, profoundly mutual, yet never-to-be domesticated, sexual intimacy, non-reproductive but dually procreative—all of it conducted under signs of Roman Latinate and Indo-Latino Catholicism, including a story within the story entitled “The Forty Lovers of the Princess.”

Feminist theoretical and visual challenges to modernist representation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Modigliani
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Alternative Distribution ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Discourse Formation

The international and local feminist avant-garde of the 1970s is discussed in Chapter 6. Vancouver women’s rejection of canonical art history, their development of alternative distribution and exhibition systems for promoting artwork, and their psychoanalytic critique of the male gaze all implicitly challenged the legitimacy of the theoretical and historical project of Vancouver photo-conceptualism. These threats would thus be selectively integrated into the new male-authored photography. Historical and contemporary critical responses to Marian Penner Bancroft and Liz Magor’s work are also analysed, which through contrary-example further establishes the male-gendered character of avant-garde discourse formation in Vancouver.

scholarly journals A Bedroom Story

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (15) ◽  
pp. 8-24
Author(s):  
Arnau Vilaró Moncasí
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Female Desire ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Chantal Akerman ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Relationship

The films of Chantal Akerman explore one of the key issues in the representation of female desire: the debate about the mechanisms of a language which, according to Laura Mulvey, is based on a male gaze founded on scopophilia, voyeurism, and fetishism. This article uses the film La captive (2000) and the desire between its two protagonists, Ariane and Simon, to reconsider the link established in feminist theory between language, the gaze, and desire. My hypothesis is that the confinement of Akerman’s female protagonist, expressed through the two dimensions of submission and intimacy, takes an approach to female desire that constitutes an alternative to the forms of the gaze associated with the male tradition of representation. This approach engages in a close dialogue with the concept of desire posited by Emmanuel Levinas, whose ideas had a huge influence on Akerman’s understanding of how to film the Other, as well as the relationship between the image and its observer.

Gattorno, Antonio (1904–1980)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Holian
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cuban Art ◽  
Gustavo Gutierrez ◽  
Paul Gauguin ◽  
Political Work ◽  
The People ◽  
Vernacular Culture ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Teachers Training

Cuban painter and illustrator Antonio Gattorno is recognized as one of the founding members of the Cuban vanguardia (avant-garde) of the late 1920s to early 1930s in Havana; a movement that sought to define a national iconography through the people and landscape of Cuba. Like many of his colleagues in Cuba, Gattorno studied painting at the San Alejandro Academy before earning a scholarship to travel to Italy, Spain, and France between 1920–1927. During this period, Gattorno studied Italian classicism and works by Paul Gauguin, which he later used to formulate his own figurative style of portraying the guajiro (Cuban peasant) that dominated the subject matter of his work for the following decade. During the mid-1920s, he also joined the Grupo Minorista, a group of Cuban leftist critics, writers, and artists who cautioned of United States imperialist influence and promoted a Hispano-Cuban vernacular culture. Gattorno signed the group’s manifesto published in the avant-garde journal Revista de avance (1927–1930) that called for a rejection of academic art and a renewal of Cuban art. Inspired by the political work of the Mexican Muralists, Gattorno also painted a number of large-scale murals (many now lost) in Havana at the Teachers’ Training College, the Capitular Room of Town Hall, and the private residence of Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez.

Jane Austen’s Balls

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-447
Author(s):  
Meaghan Malone
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Female Desire ◽  
The Social ◽  
Female Gaze ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
Sexual Power

Meaghan Malone, “Jane Austen’s Balls: Emma’s Dance of Masculinity” (pp. 427–447) Jane Austen’s scenes of dance are at the narrative heart of each of her novels, places where heroine and hero meet and flirt according to rigid prescriptions for chaste courtship. In this essay, I argue that Austen develops her characters’ sexuality within these very conventions, and uses dance as her primary means for sexualized social interaction. Austen’s ballrooms are spaces of intense erotic intimacy, sites that foreground her characters’ bodies and allow women to gaze upon men. This inversion of the male gaze is especially pronounced in Emma (1816), a novel in which the male body is systemically filtered through the eyes of women. Men become objects of female scrutiny in the ballroom as Austen highlights the social and sexual power of the female gaze. The masculine ideal that Austen subsequently creates validates female desire and facilitates reciprocity between Mr. Knightley and Emma: ultimately, each adapts to the other’s expectations of what they “ought to be.”

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