Visual Pleasure and the Female Gaze: “Inter-Active” Cinema in the Film Writing of HD and Dorothy Richardson

2013 ◽  
pp. 38-49
Author(s):  
Laurel Harris
Keyword(s):  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Female Gaze ◽  
Visual Pleasure

Visual pleasure from motherhood: Alyssa Milano challenging the male gaze

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (8) ◽  
pp. 1281-1291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raeann Ritland
Keyword(s):  
Visual Design ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Female Gaze ◽  
Visual Pleasure ◽  
Mixed Responses ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Representations Of Women

Using male and female gaze theories as frameworks, this article analyzes the visual design and composition of four distinct breastfeeding (BF) photographs posted by Alyssa Milano to her Instagram in order to better understand the public’s mixed responses of support and criticism. I argue that Milano borrows visual elements from the male gaze and combines them with feminine content in an attempt to (1) challenge the dominant, patriarchal norm of deriving pleasure from viewing sexualized women and (2) instead encourage an understanding of the maternal woman as visually pleasing. In turn, Milano’s message supports the normalization of public BF. Milano’s position as firmly entrenched in the male-dominated world of television and film is key: it enables her to speak and promote change from within the system, for external oppositions often remain on the outside, as counterpoint. Using Instagram promotes this as well. Rather than dilute their power, intermingling BF images with those representing the dominant culture may prove more successful for its gradual progression to normalization. The end goal, of course, is to encourage not just acceptance but a sense of pleasure in seeing feminine representations of women, including those focused on aspects of motherhood, like BF.

On Platforms

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caetlin Benson-Allott
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Current Series ◽  
Female Gaze ◽  
Narrative Cinema ◽  
Visual Pleasure ◽  
Pass Through

Women-led serials have been getting a lot of attention lately for bringing “the female gaze” to the small screen. Jill Soloway—the television auteur behind Transparent (Amazon, 2014–) and the recent adaptation of Kraus's novel, I Love Dick (Amazon, 2017–)—even taught a class on “The Female Gaze” at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016, defining it as “an intersectional gaze” and “a SOCIOPOLITICAL justice-demanding way of art making.” But the female gaze is actually a very vexed concept. Since it was first invoked via exclusion in Laura Mulvey's foundational “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975, it has been haphazardly defined more often by what it is not than by what it is. Three current series—I Love Dick, GLOW, and Insecure—all explore how women empower themselves through experiences of abjection: states of vexation and alienation that disrupt their expectations of or participation in social life. All three shows demand respect for their characters by figuring defeat, failure, and desperation as stages women must pass through to challenge patriarchal cultures. While all three shows feature diverse casts and strong female leads, I Love Dick and GLOW introduce characters of color only in supporting roles that contest but never destabilize the white protagonists' racial solipsism. This strategic but facile gesture reveals how far these shows have to go to confront the entangled injustices of social inequality. To incorporate the experiences and insights of women of color meaningfully, their creators would have to abandon the narrative commitments and familiar pleasures of white feminist television, which still needs to decenter whiteness both narratively and figuratively. Insecure's trenchant comedy thus provides a model for future feminist television. Its self-critical but antiracist humor challenges white feminism's and television's historic neglect of black women.

Judaism and Heterogeneity in the Modernist Long Novel

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-379
Author(s):  
Jeremy Tambling
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Carlos Fuentes ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
Meaningful Category ◽  
Roberto Bolano

This paper explores how Judaism is represented in non-Jewish writers of the nineteenth-century (outstandingly, Walter Scott and George Eliot) and in modernist long novels, such as those by Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Alfred Döblin, Robert Musil, and Thomas Mann, and, in the Latin American novel, Carlos Fuentes and Roberto Bolaño. It finds a relationship between the length of the ‘long’ novel, as a meaningful category in itself (not to be absorbed into other modernist narratives), and the interest that these novels have in Judaism, and in anti-semitism (e.g. in the Dreyfus affair) as something which cannot be easily assimilated into the narratives which the writers mentioned are interested in. The paper investigates the implications of this claim for reading these texts.

Fin

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Gestalt Theory ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Final Work

This concluding chapter briefly turns to Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce’s cacophonous ‘book of the dark’, with its many references to cinema, forms the centre of a discussion of the emergence of sound film. The importance of touch in both silent and sound film is restated through reference to the film criticism of Bryher, Dorothy Richardson, and Gertrude Stein, and Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), a late silent film focusing on Chaplin’s relationship with a blind flower-seller. The complex interrelationship between sound and image in both film and Finnegans Wake is contemplated through gestalt theory and multi-perspectival ‘figure–ground images’. The chapter concludes by returning to Ulysses, to consider the never-produced Reisman–Zukofsky screenplay and the ways in which the film would, and would not, have affirmed a phenomenological reading of Joyce’s text.

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

What is a Rehearsal in Ballet?

2021 ◽  
pp. 808-824
Author(s):  
Janice Ross
Keyword(s):  
Reality Tv ◽  
Professional Lives ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Ballet Dancers ◽  
Video Cameras ◽  
Visual Pleasure ◽  
The Hours

This chapter explores rehearsals, asking what they represent practically and philosophically and when does practice in rehearsals yield to the finished product of a dance ready for public viewing. It considers the hours of labor, failure, and interruption that constitute life in the rehearsal studio as the dancer is shaped by the choreographer and rehearsal director. Rehearsals are considered in contrast to the rules of inviolability protecting a finished performance. Using Ballet 422 by Justin Peck as a case study and examples from reality TV and films to paintings, rehearsal rooms are explored as places of hidden preparation, visual pleasure, and the imaginary as well as fascination for audiences. Ballet dancers are taught to survey themselves through mirrors, the eyes of rehearsal directors, video cameras, and iPhones as ever-expanding systems of surveillance. Although ballet dancers spend the majority of their professional lives in rehearsals, the nature of what goes on in the rehearsal studio has too rarely been the focus of dance studies scholarship.

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