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Feminist and multiculturalist efforts to uncover the assumptions underpinning the production of art have transformed our understanding of visual culture. The field of art history, however, continues to downplay the race and gender politics informing its own interpretative practices. With Other Eyes brings together leading cultural theorists to demonstrate how feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist concerns can successfully and imaginatively be incorporated into the study of art. Rejecting strict definitions of “high art,” the contributors add photography, installation art, and film to the list of more conventional art forms to examine, for example, the construction of black femininity as influenced by Josephine Baker, Grace Jones, and the women depicted in Picasso’s Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon;the nationalist and class premises in nineteenth-century British Museum guidebooks; and the gendered visions of colonial discourse in advertisements for Ralph Lauren and the Body Shop.

This book explores the new performativity in art theory and practice, examining ways of rethinking interpretive processes in visual culture. Since the 1960s, visual art practices - from body art to minimalism - have taken contemporary art outside the museum and gallery; by embracing theatricality and performance and exploding the boundaries set by traditional art criticism. The contributors argue that interpretation needs to be recognised as much more dynamic and contingent. Offering its own performance script, and embracing both canonical fine artists such as Manet, De Kooning and Jasper Johns, and performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Gunter Brus, this book offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.

An examination of the social and cultural significance of body art by a major new voice. The past few years have seen an explosion of interest in body art, in which the artist's body is integral to the work of art. With the revoking of NEA funding for such artists as Karen Finley, Tim Miller, and others, public awareness and media coverage of body-oriented performances have increased. Yet the roots of body art extend to the 1960s and before. In this definitive book, Amelia Jones explores body art projects from the 1960s and 1970s and relates their impact to the work of body artists active today, providing a new conceptual framework for defining postmodernism in the visual arts. Jones begins with a discussion of the shifting intellectual terrain of the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the work of Ana Mendieta. Moving to an examination of the reception of Jackson Pollock's "performative" acts of painting, she argues that Pollock is a pivotal figure between modernism and postmodernism. The book continues with explorations of Vito Acconci and Hannah Wilke, whose practices exemplify a new kind of performance that arose in the late 1960s, one that represents a dramatic shift in the conception of the artistic subject. Jones then surveys the work of a younger generation of artists -- including Laurie Anderson, Orlan, Maureen Connor, Lyle Ashton Harris, Laura Aguilar, and Bob Flanagan -- whose recent work integrates technology and issues of identity to continue to expand the critique begun in earlier body art projects. Embracing an exhilarating mix of methodologies and perspectives (including feminism, queer theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary theory), this rigorous and elegantexamination of body art provides rich historical insight and essential context that rethinks the parameters of postmodern culture.

How have women artists taken possession of the female body? What is the relationship between looking and embodiment in art made by women? In a series of original readings of the work of artists from Kathe Kollwitz and Georgia O'Keeffe to Helen Chadwick and Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, Rosemary Betterton explores how women artists have addressed the changing relationship between women, the body and its representation in art. In detailed critical essays that range from the analysis of maternal imagery in the work of German artists at the turn of the century to the unrepresented body in contemporary abstract painting, Betterton argues that women's art practices offer new ways of engaging with our fascinations with and fears about the female body. Reflecting the shift within feminist art over the last decade, An Intimate Distance sets the reinscription of the body within women's art practice in the context of current debates on the body, including reproductive science, maternal subjectivity and the concept of 'body horror' in relation to food, ageing and sex. Drawing on recent theories of embodiment developed within feminist philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, the essays reveal how the permeable boundaries between nature and culture, the female body and technology are being crossed in the work of women artists.

Are bodies sexy? How? In what sorts of ways? Sexy Bodies investigates the production of sexual bodies and sexual practices, of sexualities which are dyke, bi, transracial, and even hetero. It celebrates lesbian and queer sexualities but also explores what runs underneath and within all sexualities, discovering what is fundamentally weird and strange about all bodies, all carnalities. Looking at a pleasurable variety of cultural forms and texts, the contributors consider the particular charms of girls and horses, from National Velvet to Marnie; discuss figures of the lesbian body from vampires to tribades to tomboys; uncover 'virtual' lesbians in the fiction of Jeanette Winterson; track desire in the music of legendary Blues singers; and investigate the ever-scrutinised and celebrated body of Elizabeth Taylor. The collection includes two important pieces of fiction by Mary Fallon and Nicole Brossard. Sexy Bodies makes new connections between and amongst bodies, cruising the borders of the obscene, the pleasurable, the desirable and the hitherto unspoken rethinking sexuality anew as deeply and strangely sexy.

This collection of essays explores the significant agreements and tensions between contemporary feminist and postmodern theories and practices. Having brought enormous changes to conceptions of the body, identity, and the media, postmodernity compels the rethinking of many feminist categories, including female experience, the self, and the notion that "the personal is political." Feminist analysis has been equally important, though not always equally acknowledged, as a force within postmodernism. Feminist writings on subjectivity, master narratives, and the socioeconomic underpinnings of the master narrative of theory itself have been particularly influential. This volume traces the crossings and mutual interrogations of these two traditions into the arenas of cultural production, legal discourse, and philosophical thought. Multidisciplinary and international in their collective focus, the essays range from a study of Madonna as an Italian American woman who is revising the cultural meanings of an ethnic feminism to a unique interview with Mairead Keane, the national head of the Women’s Department of the Irish political party Sinn Fein. Turning the prism of postmodern feminism onto such diverse cultural objects as literary and literary critical texts, contemporary film, and music, these essays intervene in debates regarding technology, sexuality, and politics. Challenging modern feminisms to articulate their inescapable relation to postmodern society, this expanded edition of a special issue of boundary 2 also explores ways in which feminism can work as the cutting edge of a global postmodernism. Contributors. Salwa Bakr, Claire Detels, Margaret Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Marjorie Garber, Barbara Harlow, Laura E. Lyons, Anne McClintock, Toril Moi, Linda Nicholson, Mary Poovey, Andrew Ross, David Simpson, Kathyrn Bond Stockton, Jennifer Wicke

Feminist film theory has made the psychic and political limitations of representational visibility abundantly clear. Yet the Left continues to promote visibility politics as a crucial aspect of progressive struggle. Unmarked examines the fraught relation between political and representational visibility and invisibility within both mainstream and avant-garde art. Suggesting that there may be some political power in an active disappearance from the visual field, Phelan looks carefully at examples of such absences in photography, film, theatre, the iconography of anti-abortion demonstrations, and performance art. A boldly specultative analysis of contemporary culture, Unmarked is a controversial study of the politics of performance. Situating performance theory within emerging theories of psychoanalysis, feminism, and cultural studies, Phelan argues that the non-reproductive power of performance offers a different way of thinking about cultural production and reproduction more generally. Written from and for the Left, Phelan's readings of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Mira Schor, Yvonne Rainer, Jennie Livingstone, Tom Stoppard, Angelika Festa and Operation Rescue radically rethink the politics of cultural representation.

L'étude de la campagne de criminalisation de la pornographie au Canada, dans les années 1980, pose un défi au savoir conventionnel qui s'est développé, en sociologie et en criminologie, sur la réforme du droit. Ce savoir est l'argumentation selon laquelle les réformes, en dispersant le contrôle social, ne font que légitimer le système sans le modifier fondamentalement. Afin d'éviter l'essentialisme de ce savoir, j'ai utilisé une approche reflexive qui pense la relation entre la réforme du droit et le pouvoir comme à la fois contraignante et facilitante. L'établissement d'un lien entre la pornographie et la déviance sociale n'apparaît pas comme une construction sociale unifiée, mais comme un terrain contesté dans lequel se produisent des rapports de pouvoir complexes, et une multiplicité de stratégies de résistance. C'est dans ce sens que la réforme apparaît comme un mécanisme générateur des pratiques.

The history of Western art is saturated with images of the female body. Lynda Nead's The Female Nude was the first book to critically examine this phenomenon from a feminist perspective and ask: how and why did the female nude acquire this status? In a deft and engaging manner, Lynda Nead explores the ways in which acceptable and unacceptable images of the female body are produced, issues which have been reignited by current controversies around the patriarchy, objectification and pornography. Nead brilliantly illustrates the two opposing poles occupied by the female nude in the history of art; at one extreme the visual culmination of enlightenment aesthetics; at the other, spilling over into the degraded and the obscene. What both have in common, however, is the aim of containing the female body. Drawing on examples of art and artists from the classical period to the 1980s, The Female Nude paints a devastating picture of the depiction of the female body and remains as fresh and invigorating today as it was at the time of its first publication.

"This book is a detailed study of the powerful and innovative role women artists played in the development and expansion of performance art. This hybrid art form, which combines the visual arts with ingredients drawn from experimental dance, theater, music, and poetry, emerged in the late 1960's at the same time as the women's movement. Many women artists turned to performance art in order to translate and capture visually the concerns, demands and visions of the women's movement; thus women led the way in performance art's explorations of autobiography, ritual, mass spectacle and the creation of characters and personae. The Amazing Decade, edited by Moira Roth, with an introduction by Mary Jan Jacob, culls the best from women's performance history, highlighting pivotal works, chronicling changes and projecting future directions: the book contains a major essay by Roth on the history and character of women's performance art; individual profiles on thirty-seven artists and collectives; an extensive bibliography; and a year-by-year chronology from 1956 onward in which women's performance art is set in the context of history and the women's movement. Profusely illustrated, The Amazing Decade is an indispensable reference book and an invaluable teaching tool"--