La violencia de género como estética en la cultura visual de Europa y América desde el siglo XVI al XXI=Gender violence as aesthetics in European and American visual culture from the 16th to the 21st century

<p align="left"><strong>Resumen</strong></p><p>Esta investigación expone la estructura de un patrón de objetificación respecto al cuerpo femenino que responde a políticas capitalistas utilizando a la cultura visual e historia del arte como medio desde los siglos XVI al XXI. A partir de la recolección y análisis de los trabajos de artistas, directores de arte, fotógrafos, directores de cine y diseñadores de videojuegos se creó un archivo visual en formato digital. El archivo presenta las políticas estéticas dentro del marco geográfico de América y Europa que aún comercian con raza, género, etnia y clase. Se plantea además el problema de la difusión de este tipo de imágenes dentro del mercado global que continúa utilizando una estética que apela a la violencia de género. </p><p align="left"><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>This research exposes the structure of an objectification pattern regarding the female body which responds to capitalist policies using visual culture and art history as a medium from the 16th to the 21st centuries. From the collection and analysis of the works from artists, art directors, photographers, film directors and video game designers, a visual archive was created in digital format. The archive presents the aesthetic politics within the geographic frame of America and Europe which still trade with race, gender, ethnicity and class. The problem of the dissemination of this type of images within the global market is also mentioned because gender violence is still used as aesthetics.</p>

“The Nude Man’s City”: Flávio de Carvalho’s Anthropophagic Architecture as Cultural Criticism

Cannibalism is one of the most recognisable taboos of the West and a benchmark with which a supposedly civilised world has traditionally sought to differentiate itself from the radically “other” of the hinterlands. As such, cannibalism has made its way both into the vocabulary of the West’s pseudo-ethnographic self-reflection (e.g. Freud) and the imaginary of its literary culture (e.g. Grimm). A less-well-known strain in this narrative uses cannibalism as a critical postcolonial metaphor. In 1928, the Brazilian poet and agitator Oswald de Andrade published a short text entitled “Anthropophagic Manifesto.” The aim of the manifesto was to distance an emerging Brazilian modernism from the European ideals that the São Paulo bourgeoisie uncritically embraced, and to synthesise more avant-garde ideas with aspects from the cultures of the indigenous Amazonian peoples into a truly national cultural movement. This essay draws on various aspects of the anthropophagic movement and seeks to understand, whether (and how) it influenced Brazilian urban planning and architecture, and especially if it is detectable in the ways in which architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer designed and executed the legal and political institutions in Brasília, the country’s iconic federal capital. The ana-lysis, however, identifies a colonialist inclination in Costa and Niemeyer’s ideological debt to Le Corbusier. Instead, the radical potential of anthropophagic architecture is developed with reference to the less-known São Paulo architect and polymath Flávio de Carvalho whose aesthetic politics provide parallels with contemporary radical politics, as well. The essay suggests that such a notion of politics would be akin to a radical anti-instrumentalism that I have elsewhere, following Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, called a “politics of the impossible.”

Beyond Bias

“Bias” is a term that circulates frequently in the contemporary landscape of political media, a term intended to diagnose a failure when media outlets fail to maintain journalistic objectivity. Beyond Bias interrogates what would seem, at first glance, to be examples of utterly biased political media—contemporary conservative documentary films. However, rather than dismiss such cases of political representation as exemplars of ideological nonsense, reactionary propaganda, and so on, Beyond Bias locates in conservative media a mode of discourse central to contemporary democratic debate in the United States. Specifically, this book identifies conservative media as a mode of hysterical discourse. As the book makes clear, hysterical political discourse occurs when debate is simulated as a means to avoid a more substantive exchange. Drawing from psychoanalytic theories of hysteria and aesthetic politics, and likewise by placing conservative documentaries in the context of many concerns central to Documentary Studies (participation, observation, representation, the archive, etc.), Beyond Bias views conservative documentary, and conservative media and politics more generally, not as the biased excesses of the contemporary political landscape but rather as texts central to understanding the implicit, though sometimes affectively traumatic, antagonisms inevitable in democracy and constitutive of democratic debate.

Creational Politics

In this chapter we will seek to consider ‘creational politics’. In dialogue with the work of Frank Ankersmit, the chapter will review the aesthetic politics of representation, how this seems to eschew strong ethical identities and how it occupies a liminal territory of its own. As part of this discussion, the chapter also considers the idea of ‘comparative classic individual’ that may act as an interfaith exemplar through the work of David Tracy and David Clairmont. Finally, the chapter will consider the important creational theme of ‘the gift’ and consider the ways in which the logic of superabundance challenges how different communities might relate in their contested spaces.