An Analysis on Photographic & Cinematic Media with Heterotopian Characteristics : With Man Ray, Ralph Gibson, and the Film Parasite at the Center

“Seeing Stein’s Masculinity” analyses the shifting significance of visual images of and written texts about Stein. Driven by recent reinterpretations of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze, this chapter reads his theories against the grain to counter arguments about the visual that reproduce binary thinking about gender. Queering his account of the gaze makes it possible to register the expanded array of masculinities mobilized in photographs of Stein by George Platt Lynes, Henri Manuel, and Man Ray as well as in their recent reception during the 2011 Seeing Gertrude Stein exhibit in San Francisco. Moreover, Stein’s own comments in The Autobiography about being photographed by Man Ray queer the heteronormative gaze that drives James Agee’s review of that book in the September 11, 1933 issue of Time whose cover featured Lynes’s image of Stein in profile. Tracking changes that have taken place between the early twentieth century and the present in attitudes toward her queer sexuality and masculinity, this chapter argues that traces of abjection remain in contemporary reactions to Stein despite greater acceptance of her gender, sexuality, and innovative writing.

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Man Ray

The Visual Dictionary of Photography ◽

10.5040/9781350088733.0145 ◽

2010 ◽

pp. 159-159

Keyword(s):

Man Ray

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Man Ray and Aurélien

The Drowned Muse ◽

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198708629.003.0008 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 246-275

Author(s):

Anne-Gaëlle Saliot

Keyword(s):

Man Ray

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Actors’ Effigies and Photo-Portraits

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474470056.003.0005 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 115-161

Author(s):

Ron J. Popenhagen ◽

Ron J. Popenhagen

Keyword(s):

Human Body ◽

Women Artists ◽

Modern Dance ◽

Commedia Dell'arte ◽

Man Ray

Disguise and Masquerade in Chapter Five features body forms and constructions during the interwar years in Weimar, Paris, Moscow and Brussels. Instances of the human body as scenographic material increase in number and intensity as modern dance and theatre diminish the differences between and actor and the object. Experimentation at the Bauhaus, particularly by Oskar Schlemmer, is detailed in ‘Ballerina Objects and Mechanical Pierrots’. Further adaptations of figures from the commedia dell’arte push the concept of ‘kinetic painting’ and choreographic text to new levels (as with dancer-artist Akarova). Advances in self-portrait photography as identity study, particularly by women artists like Arndt, Cahun and Krull, engage masking in new interpretations of the être-objet (Dalí). Additional modernist photographs of Dora Maar, Man Ray and others are analysed. Elements of Dada, Expressionism and Futurism appear in this collection of masquerades. Magritte’s provocative images of woman and man with fabric-covered bodies and faces tilts modernist disguising to the heart of Surrealism.

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