Grains of Resonance: Affect, Pornography and Visual Sensation

Somatechnics ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Paasonen
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Power Control ◽  
Visual Sensation ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Methodological Challenges

In studies of pornography to date, feminist theorisations of looking have largely focused on issues of power, control and the gaze. Much, however, remains to be said of being impressed by images and sounds beyond conceptualisations of the gaze. This article investigates the possibilities of resonance as an analytical concept in and for addressing affective intensities in encounters with pornography and, with some reservations, with visual culture more generally. The article argues for the need of tactile concepts for tackling the force of images and our myriad ways of engaging with them – not as mere surfaces but as material entities that we are drawn to and impressed by. Rather than defining resonance as impersonal affective potentiality or force, the article addresses it as dynamic encounters between images, media technologies and the particular, historically layered sensoria of the viewing bodies. By doing so, the article explores both connections and differences between theorisations of affect and the methodological challenges that these distinctions pose.

The crystal reveals the whole: medieval dreamscapes and cinematic space as virtual media

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-112
Author(s):  
Alison Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Roman De La Rose ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Cinematic Space ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article examines the rich visual culture of the medieval period in order to better understand dreaming as a kind of visual thought experiment, one in which ideas associated with cinema, such as embodied viewing, narrative sequencing, projection, and sensory engagement, are palpable in a range of visual and literary works. The author explores the theoretical connections between the oneiric qualities of cinema and the visual culture of medieval dreams, dealing in turn with the following themes: (i) media and mediation; (ii) projection and premonition; (iii) virtual spatiality; and (iv) automata and other animated objects. The wide swath of medieval literary dream texts, with their mobile perspectives, sensory plentitude, and gnostic mission, resonate with the cinematic in the structuring of the gaze. Investigating the codes of medieval culture provides us with an unusually rich episteme for thinking about how the dreamscapes of the Middle Ages evoke media dispositifs. Opening up these thought lines across distinct eras can help us extrapolate similarities around ways of imagining objects, spaces, sensations of embodied viewing or immersion, reminding us that our contemporary cinematic and digital landscapes are not divorced from earlier ways of seeing and believing. Whether stoking religious fear and veneration or providing sensual pleasure as in Le Roman de la Rose, the dreamworlds of the Middle Ages have bequeathed us a number of an extraordinarily rich creative works that are the imaginative building blocks of media worlds-in-the-making, as speculative in many ways as current discourses around new media.

Pop Culture/Visual Culture

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Wanzo
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Art History ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Feminist Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

Feminist scholars in fields as varied as art history, film studies, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, communications, and performance studies have made important contributions to discussions about representations of gender and sexuality in everyday life. This chapter examines themes and issues in the feminist study of popular culture and visual culture, including: the history of sexist representation; the gendered nature of the “gaze” and the instability of that concept; the question of whether or not representation has effects; the anxieties surrounding consumption of “women’s texts”; and the challenges in deciphering women’s agency and authorship given constraints produced by institutions and ideology.

Shop Signs and Visual Culture in Republican Beijing

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-128
Author(s):  
Feng Yi
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Visual Record ◽  
The City ◽  
Textual Records

AbstractDuring her stay in Beijing (1933–1946), Hedda Hammer (later known as Hedda Morrison) made a visual record of shop signs with her camera. In this paper I rely on this visual record to examine what shop signs represented in Chinese material culture and their function in the urban setting. I argue that Morrison's photographic record reveals a fascinating element of street culture in the capital city that the textual records cannot document. I also contend that shop signs worked as genuine urban markers of the various trades and crafts in the city. As such, these artefacts constituted an expression of Chinese material culture, but were also a form of visual language to guide the gaze and pace of Beijing urbanites. This paper supports the idea that photographs have a particular relevance and value for the exploration of the Chinese urban setting in the Republican period. The use of photography goes beyond the record of disincarnated artefacts. It allows us to perceive and understand a fascinating dimension of visual culture in Republican Beijing, one of the numerous layers of signs that were displayed quite extensively through the city.

scholarly journals Escaped from the Harem, Trapped in the Orient: An analysis of the multiple gazes in Nadine Labaki’s movie Where Do We Go Now?

1970 ◽  
pp. 87-92
Author(s):  
Anna Kokko
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Broad Array

Throughout history, the majority of artists have been men, and quite often the women in their works have been featured as passive objects of male sexual desire. This sort of one-sided dynamic is ubiquitous; it can be detected in the vast majority of Western nude paintings, and even modern advertisements tend to conform to the same pattern (Berger, 1977). As a consequence, feminist discourse of the representation of women in visual culture has focused on the concept of male gaze. However, the proliferation of images in modern times has given rise to a “broad array of gazes and implied viewers” (Sturken, 2005, p. 87). Women are no longer simply objectified, nor is the business of directing the gaze relegated to solely a male domain.

scholarly journals VISUALIDADE E POLÍTICA A PARTIR DE FOUCAULT / Visuality and politics from Foucault

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (40) ◽  
pp. 283-295
Author(s):  
Marcos Namba Beccari
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Visual Cultures

O artigo delineia algumas coordenadas, a partir de Foucault, para o estudo da relação entre visualidade e política. Embora Foucault não tenha dedicado nenhum estudo a este respeito, é notável a sua influência em alguns dos autores envolvidos nos chamados estudos em cultura visual. Pressupõe-se, aqui, que as culturas visuais são indissociáveis de uma esfera político-discursiva que torna possível a visualidade. Esta, por sua vez, é encarada como um campo de batalha no qual a verdade é disputada. Sob esse prisma, são pontuadas as seguintes coordenadas: política como agonismo, exterioridade constitutiva, verdade como organização do olhar, arqueologia e genealogia da visualidade.Palavras-chave: Foucault; Visualidade; Política; Discurso.AbstractThis paper outlines some coordinates, from Foucault, for the study of the relationship between visuality and politics. Although Foucault has not dedicated any work about this, his influence on some of the authors involved in so-called studies in visual culture is remarkable. Here, it is assumed that visual cultures are inseparable from a political-discursive sphere that makes visuality possible. Visuality, in turn, is defined as a battlefield in which the truth is disputed. Under this bias, the following coordinates are highlighted: politics as agonism, constitutive exteriority, truth as the organization of the gaze, archeology and genealogy of visuality.Keywords: Foucault; Visuality; Politics; Discourse.

scholarly journals THE IN(TER)DEPENDENCIES OF MOBILE ONLINE AND OFFLINE SPACES: REFLECTIONS ON METHODS, PRACTICES, ETHICS

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Kaufmann ◽  
Monika Palmberger ◽  
Carolina Parreiras ◽  
Arianna Bussoletti ◽  
Francesca Belotti ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Practical Implications

Mobile media technologies place users in digital (online) as well as physical (offline) spaces in novel ways, opening up new environments of affordances. In everyday life these mobile online and offline spaces are increasingly interdependent and interwoven in manifold ways. Practices, experiences, meanings and expectations are negotiated across these spaces, while at the same time they are bound by the respective logics and limitations, leading to new interrelations and contradictions. The mobile, interlocking but non-converging nature of these spaces involves issues of access and power in struggles over in(ter)dependencies and leads to significant method(odolog)ical, practical and ethical challenges for researchers, to which the current COVID-19 pandemic only adds complexity. Researchers are confronted with questions such as: What are appropriate designs to study mobile online and offline spaces and their intersections? Do interdependent spaces call for likewise interdependent methodological approaches? In what ways can elaborated mixed and multi-method designs capture complexity adequately without the researchers losing sight of the specifics? And what are the ethical and practical implications for the parties involved? Meanwhile, in the methodological literature, the specific challenges associated with researching the intersections of online and offline spaces, especially under mobile conditions, are rarely explicitly addressed. For this reason, the panel presents a thought-provoking range of five examples of research into phenomena at the intersections of mobile online and offline spaces and the associated experiences as well as methodological challenges of researchers in dealing with issues of in(ter)dependence at all levels.

Dress for Success

2020 ◽  
pp. 93-119
Author(s):  
Manata Hashemi
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Moral Worth ◽  
Personal Networks ◽  
Symbolic Boundaries ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Know How ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The World

This chapter examines the physical dimension of facework. As the risk of losing face hinges primarily on being exposed as poor, youth manipulate their mannerisms and appearance to present a middle-class front to others. Fashionable tweaks to their appearance project kelas(class) and a certain cultural know-how that can subsequently help face-savers extend their personal networks to encompass the type of people who can facilitate their entrée into the world of the well-heeled. The imperative to appear classy and knowledgeable of global fashions finds precedence in Iran’s historical preoccupation with modern fashions and is cultivated in the present day through mediums including billboards, officially sanctioned cultural productions, and new media technologies. Face-savers’ bodily capital is used not only by community members to decide which youth are most worthy of incentives, but also by face-savers to provide justification for their own sense of moral worth. Internalization of the gaze thus creates symbolic boundaries between youth that reproduce cycles of micro-stratification within communities.

The Iconostasis and Darśan in Orthodox Christianity and Mahāyāna Buddhism

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 38-64
Author(s):  
Junhyoung Michael Shin
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Russian Orthodox ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Orthodox Christianity ◽  
Mahayana Buddhism ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Esoteric Buddhism ◽  
Mahāyāna Buddhism

Abstract This essay discusses how Orthodox Christianity and Mahāyāna Buddhism understood the acts of both seeing and being seen by the divine, and how such ideas affected the making and use of icons in these two religious traditions. I focus on the visual culture of the Byzantine and Russian Orthodox churches between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, and that of the East Asian Pure Land and Esoteric schools between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, respectively. I interpret the function of the iconostasis as an enduring remnant of the Jewish veil used to obstruct God’s vision. Here, Jacques Lacan’s concepts of the gaze and the screen provide a thought-provoking rationale. In turn, I investigate the mandala and icon in Japanese Esoteric Buddhism, in which both seeing and being seen by the divine were deemed spiritual blessings granted by the divine being. This thematic comparison brings to light the less discussed aspects of Christian and Buddhist visual experiences.

Brutalist Wallpaper and the Independent Group

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Social Life ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Discussion Group ◽  
Independent Group ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Visual Poetics ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
The Social

One of the difficulties facing cultural historians studying the Independent Group (IG) is to gauge its significance in the production of visual culture by those who attended the meetings. As a loose discussion group the IG can be seen as emerging from the same cultural forces that would, a little later, produce the academic counter-discipline of cultural studies. With its interests in consumer culture and in the social life of new technologies (particularly mass media technologies) and with a voracious appetite for the latest trends in science and art, the IG constituted a semi-formal extra-mural group of autodidacts filling-in the significant gaps of an official art education that was still framed by 19th-century values. A pedagogic agenda, though, does not necessarily generate a coherent project of aesthetic exploration and result in a consistent visual poetics. In this article the author argues that there is still value in attending to the IG as a cultural research group that produced a visual culture that was simultaneously pluralist (and perhaps contradictory and conflicting) in style but collective in orientation and sensibility.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document