Ecotourism as Leisure and Labor in the Experience of the “Great” Outdoors

Ecotourism as an international concept promotes foreign and domestic tourism to locations in forests, oceans, and other forms of the natural world. National parks and other preserved ecosystems are popular destinations, usually located in the so-called developing countries or Global South countries, such as South and Southeast Asia, Central and South America, and Africa. This paper examines the construction of labor and leisure as forms of experience of the “Great” Outdoors for both ecotourists and local peoples. We argue that ecotourism is a form of colonial/racialized/gendered gaze, in which power imbalances are reflected in people’s experiences of ecotourism as labor and leisure. We use case studies in Indonesia and India, based on our long standing field research in each respective country.

Postcolonial Theory in Film

Postcolonial theory has hardly been a defining paradigm in the field of film studies. Postcolonial theory originally emerged from comparative literature departments and film from film and media studies departments, and despite the many intersections postcolonial theory has not been explicitly foregrounded. However, there are more similarities and natural points of intersections between the two areas than it would at first appear. For example, both postcolonial theory and film studies emerged at the end of the 1970s with the development of semiotic theory and poststructuralist thought. Both areas engage intensively with the field of representation, implying the ways in which a language, be it cinematic or otherwise, manages to convey reality as “mediated” and “discursive,” and therefore influenced by power relations. An example could be the notion of the gendered gaze by Laura Mulvey and her concept of looked-at-ness and how it also applies to the screening and representation of black and colonized bodies in films, which bell hooks later theorized as black looks, to which she proposed the response of an oppositional gaze. Despite their different genealogies, it is therefore not only very natural but also necessary to combine postcolonial theory and film in order to unearth how the visual field is inherently hegemonizing and hierarchical and therefore in need of critical appraisal and a deconstructive take, such as postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory has critically contributed to revisiting the representation of the Other, addressing long-standing tropes and stereotypes about cultural difference and racial otherness. This implies new interventions on how visual representations are implicated in the policing of boundaries between East and West, between Europe and the Rest, the self and the other, undoing or rethinking the ways in which the visual field conveys operation of a mastery that needs to be undone and decoded. For example, empire cinema contributed to specific ways of seeing, making films that legitimated the domination of colonies by the colonial powers. Colonial images of gender, race, and class carried ideological connotations that confirmed imperial epistemologies and racial taxonomies, depicting natives, in documentary or fictional films, as savages, primitive, and outside modernity. More recent cinema genres such as border cinema, transnational cinema, accented cinema, haptic cinema, migrant cinema, diasporic cinema, and world cinema can be considered affiliated with the postcolonial paradigm as they all embrace ethnic, immigrant, hyphenated counter-narratives. Yet the field of postcolonial cinema studies, which relates postcolonial theory to film, is a false friend to all these categories as it connects with but also departs from the projects they name in order to pursue the tense power asymmetries generated by the legacies of conquest and colonialism.

The Gendered Gaze: Torrellas’ Sadistic “Martyrdom” in Grisel y Mirabella

La escena del “martirio” antropófago de Torrellas en Grisel y Mirabella está cargada de significado simbólico que los críticos han interpretado de diferentes maneras. Sin embargo, se ha ignorado el papel que desempeñan las teorías visuales para establecer sistemas de poder en la interacción óptica entre las ejecutoras y el ejecutado. Este estudio sostiene que la reina y sus damas usurpan la mirada masculina y convierten a Torrellas en un(a) “mártir” virginizada que recuerda las narraciones martiriológicas y cristológicas, transformándolo en un fetiche erótico para satisfacer su placer voyerístico. Palabras clave: mirada, sadismo, martirio, voyeurismo, Grisel y Mirabella The scene of Torrellas’ cannibalistic “martyrdom” in Flores’s Grisel y Mirabella is fraught with symbolic meaning, which scholars have interpreted in sundry ways. Critics have neglected the role visual theories play in establishing systems of power in the optic interaction between the executrixes and the victim. This analysis aims at showing the role-inversion of the male, objectifying gaze. This essay argues that the queen and her ladies usurp the male gaze and turn Torrellas into a virgin-like “martyr” in a way that resembles martyrological and Christological narratives, turning him into an erotic fetish for the sake of their voyeuristic pleasure. Keywords: gaze, sadism, martyrdom, voyeurism, Grisel y Mirabella

Patriarchal Regime of the Spectacle: Racial and Gendered Gaze in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

This article attempts to evince the political, cultural and affective consequences of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic writings and their particular enunciations of the literary gaze. To do so, it details the manner in which the stories’ exercise of visual operations rigidly corresponds with those of the Panopticon. The essay argues that Lahiri’s narrative produces a kind of panoptic machine that underpins the ‘modes of social regulation and control’ that Foucault has explained as disciplinary technologies. By situating Lahiri’s stories, “A Real Durwan” and “Only Goodness,” within a historical-political context, this essay aims at identifying the way in which panopticism defines her fiction as both a record of and a participant in the social, sexual and political ‘paranoia’ behind the propaganda of America’s self-image as the land of freedom. We maintain that Lahiri’s fiction situates itself in complex relation to the postcolonial concerns of the late twentieth century, suggesting that through their fascination with a visual literalization of the panoptic machine, and by privileging the masculine gaze, the stories legitimate the perpetuation of socially prescribed notion of sexual difference. Keywords: Gaze, Sexual difference, Panopticon, A Real Durwan, Only Goodness

Introduction: Critical Visual Theory

The studies selected for publication in this special issue on Critical Visual Theory can be divided into three thematic groups: (1) image making as power making, (2) commodification and recanonization, and (3) approaches to critical visual theory. The approaches to critical visual theory adopted by the authors of this issue may be subsumed under the following headings (3.1) critical visual discourse and visual memes in general and Anonymous visual discourse in particular, (3.2) collective memory and gendered gaze, and (3.3) visual capitalism, global north and south.

Introduction: Critical Visual Theory

The studies selected for publication in this special issue on Critical Visual Theory can be divided into three thematic groups: (1) image making as power making, (2) commodification and recanonization, and (3) approaches to critical visual theory. The approaches to critical visual theory adopted by the authors of this issue may be subsumed under the following headings (3.1) critical visual discourse and visual memes in general and Anonymous visual discourse in particular, (3.2) collective memory and gendered gaze, and (3.3) visual capitalism, global north and south.