The Analysis of Beauty, II

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-144
Author(s):  
Abigail Zitin
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Female Beauty ◽  
Visual Pleasure ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Female Bodies

This chapter explores the role of gender in The Analysis of Beauty. Many critics have focused on the fact that Hogarth associates the line of beauty with the female body. According to this way of thinking, Hogarth’s focus on the beauty of female bodies is the ground for his democratic aesthetics (female beauty is the kind of beauty “everyone” already knows how to recognize). But Hogarth explicitly addresses his treatise to female as well as male readers, setting women’s attunement to visual experience on a par with the technical expertise of the artisan, and thereby understanding women as subjects as well as objects of visual pleasure.

Dead but not gone: Female body, surveillance and serial-killing in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
Subarna Mondal
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Body Surveillance ◽  
Serial Killing ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Way

Abstract Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho (1960) makes the corpse of an ordinary woman both an object of surveillance and a source of active watching. Mrs Bates and Marion in Psycho, Brenda and Babs in Frenzy (1972) may be seen as predecessors to the series of dead women figuratively staring back in films such as The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991) and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tykwer, 2006). The corpses do not merely offer themselves up as ciphers to be decoded. They reveal the lack in the perpetrators. Hitchcock's Frenzy relies on female bodies for clues to the murders. Hitchcock plays the vital role of bringing about a transition in the way in which women's bodies are to be treated in films, a transition from bodies shrouded by mist and darkness of the noirs to the exhibitionism of naked corpses in brightly lit settings. This article shows that abandonment of the usual tropes of visual impediments such as darkness and fog in Hitchcock's later films suggests a continually developing process of urban surveillance that aids in dehumanizing the victims. Further the post-murder masculinist investigative gaze forces a kind of mock-life on the victims through the relentless search of a killer's live signs on their dead flesh.

‘I saw a knock-out’: Fatness, (In)visibility, and Desire in Shallow Hal

Somatechnics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Wykes
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Fat Body ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Knock Out ◽  
Dominant Meaning ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Fat Bodies ◽  
Sexual Body

When the Farrelly brothers' movie Shallow Hal (2001) was released, one reviewer suggested that the film ‘might have been more honest if [it] had simply made Hal have a thing about fat women’ ( Kerr 2002 : 44). In this paper, I argue that Kerr hits the mark but misses the point. While the film's treatment of fat is undoubtedly problematic, I propose a ‘queer’ reading of the film, borrowing the idea of ‘double coding’ to show a text about desire for fat (female) bodies. I am not, however, seeking to position Shallow Hal as a fat-positive text; rather, I use it as a starting point to explore the legibility of the fat female body as a sexual body. In contemporary mainstream Western culture, fat is regarded as the antithesis of desire. This meaning is so deeply ingrained that representations of fat women as sexual are typically framed as a joke because desire for fat bodies is unimaginable; this is the logic by which Shallow Hal operates. The dominant meaning of fatness precludes recognition of the fat body as a sexual body. What is at issue is therefore not simply the lack of certain images, but a question of intelligibility: if the meaning of fat is antithetical to desire, how can the desire for – and of – fat bodies be intelligible as desire? This question goes beyond the realm of representation and into the embodied experience of fat sexuality.

‘Does Law Matter to Anthropology?’

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-91
Author(s):  
Sally Engle Merry
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Anthropology ◽  
American Anthropological Association ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Relevant Question ◽  
Law Faculty ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Legal Training

This provocative question became the basis for a spirited discussion at the 2017 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. My first reaction, on hearing the question, was to ask, does anthropology care whether it matters to law? As a discipline, anthropology and the anthropology of law are producing excellent scholarship and have an active scholarly life. But in response to this forum’s provocation article, which clearly outlines the lack of courses on law and anthropology in law schools, I decided that the relevant question was, why doesn’t anthropology matter more to law than it does? The particular, most serious concern appears to be, why are there not more law and anthropology courses being offered in law schools? It is increasingly common for law faculty in the United States to have PhDs as well as JDs, so why are there so few anthropology/law PhD/JD faculty? Moreover, as there is growing consensus that law schools instil a certain way of thinking but lack preparation for the practice of law in reality and there is an explosion of interest in clinical legal training, why does this educational turn fail to provide a new role of legal anthropology, which focuses on the practice of law, in clinical legal training?

BODY PRACTICES OF WOMEN IN THE LIGHT OF FEMINIST DEBATES

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-156 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Phenomenological Tradition ◽  
Academic Feminism ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Body Practices

The paper provides an analysis of the structuralist and phenomenological traditions in interpretation of female body practices. The structuralist intellectual tradition bases its methodology on concepts from social anthropology and philosophy that see the body as ‘ordered’ by social institutions. Structuralist approaches within academic feminism are focused on critical study of the social regulation of female bodies with respect to reproduction and sexualisation (health and beauty practices). The author focuses on the dominant physical ideal of femininity and the means for body pedagogics that have been constructed by patriarchal authority. In contrast to theories of the ordered body, the phenomenological tradition is focused on the “lived” body, embodied experience, and the personal motivation and values attached to body practices. This tradition has been influenced by a variety of schools of thought including philosophical anthropology, phenomenology and action theories in sociology. Within academic feminism, there are at least three phenomenologically oriented strategies of interpretation of female body practices. The first one is centred around women’s individual situation and bodily socialization; the second one studies interrelation between body practices and the sense of the self; and the third one postulates the potential of body practices to destabilize the dominant ideals of femininity and thus provides a theoretical basis for feminist activism. The phenomenological tradition primarily analyses the motivational, symbolic and value-based components of body practices as they interact with women’s corporeality and sense of self. In general, both structuralist and phenomenological traditions complement each other by focusing on different levels of analysis of female embodiment.

Becoming Zarathustra

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Kellens
Keyword(s):  
Complex Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Way Of Thinking

This chapter examines the role of ritual and sacrifice in the most sacred Zoroastrian literature, the Gâthâs in order to explore the complex relationship between the figure of Zarathustra and the human ritual officiant. The chapter presents a very Lincoln-ian sort of history of the field of Zoroastrian studies itself, interrogating the contexts and biases of particular scholars in their various readings and misreadings of the tradition. At the same time, it offers a new way of thinking about the figure of Zarathustra himself, who is best understood not as the semi-historical “founder” of Zoroastrianism but rather as the mythical personality into which the human officiant is himself transfigured through the ritual operations.

Theology and the Knowledge of Persons

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleonore Stump
Keyword(s):  
Propositional Knowledge ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Knowledge Of Persons

This chapter is concerned with the question of the difference between philosophy and theology. It rejects certain prevalent ways of thinking about this difference. It argues that a more promising way of thinking about these disciplines is to be found in their names: “philosophy” in its etymology means something like the love of wisdom; “theology” in its etymology means something like the word with regard to God. God, unlike wisdom, is not an abstract universal. Rather, and by virtue of being characterized by mind and will, God is more nearly a person. The chapter spells out the implications of this difference, arguing that the knowledge at issue when we do theology is irreducible to propositional knowledge. Rather, it is a knowledge of persons. The chapter illuminates the role of the knowledge of persons in theological discussion and draws some conclusions about the methodology which will be useful to theology.

scholarly journals Collicular Vision Guides Nonconscious Behavior

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 888-902 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Tamietto ◽  
Franco Cauda ◽  
Luca Latini Corazzini ◽  
Silvia Savazzi ◽  
Carlo A. Marzi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Striate Cortex ◽  
Visual Signals ◽  
Visually Guided ◽  
Visuomotor Integration ◽  
Motor Processing ◽  
Pupillary Responses ◽  
Cortex Area ◽  
Extrastriate Areas

Following destruction or deafferentation of primary visual cortex (area V1, striate cortex), clinical blindness ensues, but residual visual functions may, nevertheless, persist without perceptual consciousness (a condition termed blindsight). The study of patients with such lesions thus offers a unique opportunity to investigate what visual capacities are mediated by the extrastriate pathways that bypass V1. Here we provide evidence for a crucial role of the collicular–extrastriate pathway in nonconscious visuomotor integration by showing that, in the absence of V1, the superior colliculus (SC) is essential to translate visual signals that cannot be consciously perceived into motor outputs. We found that a gray stimulus presented in the blind field of a patient with unilateral V1 loss, although not consciously seen, can influence his behavioral and pupillary responses to consciously perceived stimuli in the intact field (implicit bilateral summation). Notably, this effect was accompanied by selective activations in the SC and in occipito-temporal extrastriate areas. However, when instead of gray stimuli we presented purple stimuli, which predominantly draw on S-cones and are thus invisible to the SC, any evidence of implicit visuomotor integration disappeared and activations in the SC dropped significantly. The present findings show that the SC acts as an interface between sensory and motor processing in the human brain, thereby providing a contribution to visually guided behavior that may remain functionally and anatomically segregated from the geniculo-striate pathway and entirely outside conscious visual experience.

The role of visual experience for spatial numerical associations

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Proulx ◽  
Achille Pasqualotto ◽  
Shuichiro Taya
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Opposite Effect ◽  
Random Number Generation ◽  
Number Line ◽  
Mental Number Line ◽  
Generation Task ◽  
Congenitally Blind ◽  
Left And Right ◽  
The Right

The topographic representation of space interacts with the mental representation of number. Evidence for such number–space relations have been reported in both synaesthetic and non-synaesthetic participants. Thus far most studies have only examined related effects in sighted participants. For example, the mental number line increases in magnitude from left to right in sighted individuals (Loetscher et al., 2008, Curr. Biol.). What is unclear is whether this association arises from innate mechanisms or requires visual experience early in life to develop in this way. Here we investigated the role of visual experience for the left to right spatial numerical association using a random number generation task in congenitally blind, late blind, and blindfolded sighted participants. Participants orally generated numbers randomly whilst turning their head to the left and right. Sighted participants generated smaller numbers when they turned their head to the left than to the right, consistent with past results. In contrast, congenitally blind participants generated smaller numbers when they turned their head to the right than to the left, exhibiting the opposite effect. The results of the late blind participants showed an intermediate profile between that of the sighted and congenitally blind participants. Visual experience early in life is therefore necessary for the development of the spatial numerical association of the mental number line.

scholarly journals News-Driven Business Cycles: Insights and Challenges

2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 993-1074 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Beaudry ◽  
Franck Portier
Keyword(s):  
Business Cycles ◽  
Business Cycle ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Economic Fluctuations ◽  
Aggregate Fluctuations ◽  
Business Cycle Fluctuations ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Many

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in agents' information, due to the arrival of news, can cause business cycle fluctuations driven by expectational change, and we review the empirical evidence aimed at evaluating their relevance. In particular, we highlight how the literature on news and business cycles offers a coherent way of thinking about aggregate fluctuations, while at the same time we emphasize the many challenges that must be addressed before a proper assessment of the role of news in business cycles can be established. (JEL D83, D84, E13, E32, O33)

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document