Gaze and Representation

El artículo examina las representaciones que la revista National Geographic construyó acerca de la Revolución haitiana durante los años de la Ocupación norteamericana a Haití. Se propone que el discurso editorial parece identificar a cada uno de los tres protagonistas con una etapa de la Revolución. Contribuye a conocer cómo esta revista ha construido esas representaciones y las ha (re)circulado.

Indonesia's private television industry blossomed into a powerful source of national, mass culture production in the 1990's and early 2000's. This essay examines the ways in which producers' subject position, in relation to global media form and narrative, is transformed, through production processes and conventions, into a distinctive 'way of looking'. By focusing on the example of a travel program, issues related to the representation of elements classified as 'traditional' or 'ethnic' is explored. Grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the country's TV producers, programmers and station executives, the essay puts forward the notion that the use of global forms and narratives leads to the encoding of a particular 'gaze' in popular programming, which positions viewers as foreign to symbols of traditional culture.

This essay examines Rineke Dijkstra’s photograph Hilton Head Island, S.C., USA, June 24, 1992, and the relationship between the female photographer and her young subject. Dijkstra’s series Beaches demonstrates that even when the photographer is female, the male gaze is still evident in the photographs of young female and male beach goers.

El azar quiso que me correspondiera introducir la fotografía de ciegos en México. En 1994 propuse a las escuelas de diseño que, para diversificar su repertorio didáctico, incorporaran a estudiantes ciegos. Posteriormente, impulsé la primera exposición fotográfica de un ciego en el país, de Evgen Bavcar. En este texto narro la secuencia general del desarrollo de la fotografía de ciegos en el país a lo largo de los últimos 25 años.

The Veil and the Complicated Gaze Body art can "never be known purely as a totalizable, fleshy whole that rests outside of the arena of the symbolic" as the body gains meaning through the "contextualization within the codes of identity" ascribed on to the artist's body when the "interpreter or viewer" interacts with the body (Jones, 1997, pp. 13-14). Amelia Jones (1997, p. 14) looks at this dialectical relationship as a "receptive context" where the body-in-performance is contingent on the interpretation of it. This essay engages with video clip featuring a collection of performances done by Negin Vaziri, namely "Crushing Stones", "Veil is Obligatory" and "The Eternity Woman". These performance pieces are discussed in relation to various viewpoints presented in the academia on the "gaze", while critiquing these views by looking at the complex functioning of the "gaze" in the context of the "veil" which can be seen to be dismantling the subject-object

Dawoud Bey: Constructing Nature, Decolonizing Landscape

Inspired by the work of African American photographer Roy DeCarava and the poetry of Langston Hughes, Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly Black series provides a blueprint for the kind of political art our time truly needs. The series of darkened gelatine silver prints visualizes the Underground Railroad – a network of safe houses and locations across the Cleveland and Hudson, Ohio landscapes in which fugitive slaves could find shelter on their way towards Lake Erie and the final fifty-mile passage to freedom in Canada.

            Leaving people entirely out of the picture, Bey makes his political statement through images of an often eerie and ambiguous American landscape at twilight. Across the series, non-affirmative aesthetics are entrusted with the task of revealing the inherent white supremacist power-structures that have defined three hundred years of European and American landscape painting.

Laura Mulvey's notion of male gaze leaves us in a midtrack as it denies the possibility of a female sexual agency. We need to understand how do the women/female viewers perceive the male body on screen? Furthermore, can we not possibly talk about a queer gaze as well? The presentation limits itself to such debates in the context of Hindi Cinema.

Oltre a un complesso sistema di rapporti di potere di natura sociale, politica ed economica, il colonialismo ha prodotto anche un apparato di costruzioni discorsive relative alla nerezza e ha svolto una funzione centrale nel processo di strutturazione dell’identità italiana come bianca in modo omogeneo. Tali costruzioni hanno plasmato uno specifico immaginario ancora oggi pervasivo che reifica specifici processi di razzializzazione.
Attraverso una prospettiva intersezionale, il volume rintraccia l’articolazione delle categorie sociali del genere e della razza in relazione alla cultura visuale contemporanea. In particolare, l’indagine si focalizza sul modo in cui la razza viene visualizzata e, dunque, sulla stretta relazione tra la perce-zione delle categorie razziali e i processi visuali. Attraverso l’analisi di una serie di immagini proprie della cultura di massa italiana contemporanea (pubblicità e fotografie), viene mostrato come tali fonti ripropongano un immaginario coloniale relativo alle rappresentazioni delle donne nere, che pone i soggetti all’interno di specifici processi di ipersessualizzazione e di negazione dell’agency. La visualità è dunque un campo all’interno del quale si riproducono le costruzioni razziali e di genere, ma si configura anche come uno spazio in cui tali costruzioni possono essere contestate. In quest’ultima direzione si situano pratiche artistiche “controvisuali”, come il progetto di Karima 2G, cantante italiana di origine liberiana che sviluppa un’autorappresentazione dirompente e oppositiva della nerezza.

This paper proposes a new gaze: the refractive gaze. To provide a contextual framework for it, this paper explores Foucault's (1963) physicians gaze; Urry's (1999) tourist gaze; Maoz's (2006) mutual gaze and Bell's (2005) prescriptive and nervous gazes. We introduce the refractive gaze by examining how tourist-gastronomes negotiate food risk and how this fuels their culinary and cultural capital. The refractive gaze incorporates the subjectively experienced cognitive and sensuous elements that tourist-gastronomes encounter in their quest for 'out of the ordinary' food experiences. Our research is based on secondary case sources that illuminate the articulated theory; in particular, the work of Bell (2010) – who noted how tourist-gastronomes negotiate horse milk consumption in rural Mongolia – which emphasised the internal thought processes followed in deciding to override a fear/risk nexus in order to gain the bragging rights of cultural and culinary capital. Interpretation of Bell's (2010) case material indicates the refractive gaze has potentially broad generalisability vis-à-vis academic understanding of touristic food experience, as well as in areas beyond this domain.

Publikation der Dissertation "Fotografie und das Dispositiv Perspektive". Link zum Verlag: https://www.kulturverlag-kadmos.de/buch/perspektive-in-der-fotografie.html


Perspective in photography.
Studies on the naturalisation of the camera image, Berlin: Kadmos 2018. Publication of my Dissertation "Fotografie und das Dispositiv Perspektive" in German with an english summary and table of contents.


This book explores the significance of the tradition of linear perspective for the medium of photography. As a paradigmatic apparatus (in French: dispositif), perspective plays a central role in Western cultural traditions. In the pictorial tradition, perspective defines the iconic representation of a picture as a symbolic gaze through a window that confronts a reality. In perspective, the flat two-dimensional surface of a picture symbolizes a three-dimensional space, as well as a subject, in the form of a ‘natural’ gaze as the organizing instance of the pictorial space. It is here that the symbolic function of the perspectival apparatus emerges: The subject inside this structure claims a true and autonomous representation and interpretation of the world. Through such a claim, the holistic, theocratic world view was brought into question and multiple anthropocentric views with universal validity came into being. These formal and symbolic functions of perspective can also be traced within the medium of photography. Because of the special realism of photography, perspective was often understood as a natural and obvious effect of the camera. This belief strengthened confidence in the mechanical objectivity of photographic images. By contrast, this study does not take the neutrality and obviousness of perspective in photography for granted; instead, it tries to show that, in the medium of photography, perspective functions as a cultural substructure. On this basis, there were two questions that oriented the work. The first asks how perspective functions as an apparatus in photography, the second how perspective determines the iconic structure of the photographic index.
Prehistories of photography usually understood perspective as a fundamental historical origin of photography. Through the invention of linear perspective during the Renaissance, in around 1420, a long causal history was set in motion. As Heinrich Schwarz proposed, the realism that perspective introduced to painting was to culminate in the invention of photography in the 1830s. The first chapter of my work is a critical examination of such macro-historical interpretations of perspective. Through this I develop a different working method, one which was implied by some remarks of the scholars of perspective Erwin Panofsky and Hubert Damisch. The core of these remarks bears the idea that perspective was incorporated in the internal geometry of the photographic camera, or to put it in other words: The projection of light that takes place inside the camera works according to the system of perspective.

Ein Panorama verbindet in einem Bildraum mehrere Szenen, die eine Handlung erzählen. Zeitlich nacheinander stattfindende Ereignisse werden in einem Bildraum dargestellt. Die ersten Passionspanoramen entstehen im 15. Jahrhundert, vor allem im Medium der Tafelmalerei, als Tapisserie und in kleineren Formaten. Für dieselbe Zeit werden auch eine Zunahme perspektivischer Darstellungsmodi, das genaue Studium von Naturphänomenen und ein wachsendes Interesse an naturalistischen Darstellungsformen nachgewiesen. Diese Darstellungsmodi scheinen auf eine grösstmögliche Einheit von dargestelltem Raum und dargestellter Zeit zu zielen. Diese Einheit scheint zunächst im Widerspruch zu der im Scherzliger Panorama dargestellten Handlungsabfolge zu stehen. Das Passionspanorama in Scherz- ligen ist jedoch ein Schlüsselwerk, um diesen Widerspruch aufzulösen und die Verbindungen zwischen imaginierten Ereignissen, ihren Bezügen zu den dargestellten Bildräumen, den historischen Orten und der Raumwahrneh- mung in der Gegenwart des Betrachters besser zu verstehen.

Adaptive Human-Machine Interfaces and Interactions (HMI2) are closed-loop cyber-physical systems comprising a network of sensors for measuring human, environmental and mission parameters, in conjunction with suitable software for adapting the HMI2 (command, control and display functions) in response to these real-time measurements. Cognitive HMI2 are a particular subclass of these systems, which support dynamic HMI2 adaptations based on the user's cognitive states. These states are estimated in real-time based on various neuro-physiological parameters from gaze, cardiorespiratory and brain activity measurements, which can be fused using suitable models. However, these measurements are affected by a variety of environmental factors and therefore their accuracy and precision need to be accurately characterised prior to operational use. This paper describes the characterisation activities performed on two types of eye tracking devices being used to support the development of cognitive human-machine systems. To classify the user's cognitive states, eye-tracking features are processed by a machine learning classifier based on fuzzy logic. This paper describes how the uncertainty associated with the classified outputs is quantified by propagating the uncertainty of the input features, through the classifier. This process is detailed in the paper due to its growing relevance because machine learning classifiers are now in common use.

Nel corso degli ultimi trent'anni la rapida evoluzione delle tecnologie digitali ha determinato la comparsa di nuove tipologie di immagini e di nuovi dispositivi di visione, introducendo forme inedite di visualizzazione e di spettatorialità. A fronte di un panorama iconico e mediale in continua trasformazione, diventa sempre piú urgente elaborare una serie di concetti e di strumenti in grado di aiutarci a comprendere la dimensione culturale -tecnicamente, socialmente e storicamente determinata -delle immagini e dello sguardo. Il volume ricostruisce innanzitutto le origini del concetto di «cultura visuale» e lo sviluppo di quell'ampio campo di studi che si è affermato a livello internazionale con i nomi di visual culture studies e Bildwissenschaft, determinando una vera e propria svolta iconica nelle scienze umane e sociali (e persino in settori rilevanti delle scienze naturali). Vengono quindi presentate le coordinate teoriche e metodologiche essenziali per affrontare un'analisi critica delle culture visuali del presente e del passato. Sommario: Introduzione. i. Un campo di studi transdisciplinare. ii. Genealogie. iii. Occhi, sguardi, spettatori. iv. Supporti, media, dispositivi. v. Alta e bassa definizione. vi. Gli usi sociali delle immagini. -Bibliografia. -Indice dei nomi.

Tracing the journey of artistic engagements with the Indian Modernist artist Benode Behari Mukherjee's works, starting from Satyajit Ray's 1982 documentary 'Inner Eye' to a 2020 exhibition 'After Sight' in London, this article reassesses scholarly and artistic encounters with Benode Behari's artistic consciousness in the light of international Modernist art movements and the artist's lifelong search for an ideal form. The role of nature in the development of his artistic uniqueness and ingenuity is discussed; as Benode Behari has often been erroneously imagined as a metropolis-centric Modernist artist, thereby also bringing to focus the broad subject of the significance of nature and the pastoral idyll in the development of Bengali Modernism and modern South Asian artistic consciousness. In this piece, a trajectory of the reception of his works is also drawn.

In this paper, I argue for an interpretation of A Time to Kill as an unreliable, yet narrator-less, cinematic narrative. In my view, unreliable narration is an aesthetic and ethical flaw of the film rather than of the narrator. Thus, the film’s aesthetic structure represents the director’s storytelling intentions, and influences its meaning and empathic affect. As cinematic narrative evolves, rules of inference become increasingly complex. Still, filmic convention establishes a context and sets identifiable boundaries for interpretation. A poorly told story inhibits the viewer’s imaginative reconstruction of narrative causation and characters’ motives. Thus, narrative quality is essential to narrative reasoning and aesthetic empathy. If narrative provides an understanding of the world and other people that is otherwise inaccessible, and if the form or style of narrative determines its effectiveness, then the forms our stories take have epistemological consequences.
Keywords : aesthetics, ethics, identification, narrative, race, unreliable narrative

This article aims to address the social meaning of representing female body in photography 1 . In contemporary art, particularly in conceptual photography, body is politicized and becomes a discursive text that is encoded with social criticism. Focusing on the relationship between artist and city space, this article examines how a photographer explores the hidden corners in public space and examines how the artist explores the identity of female sex workers through representing their bodies. The artist that discussed in this article is a Montreal based emerging photographer, Mia Donovan, whose exploration focuses on the women who work in the sex industry and focuses on the issue of female body and identity. Approaching Donovan's art, in this article, I employ some post-Freudian psychoanalytic concepts of D.W. Winnicott and Jacques Lacan to form a theoretical framework. My intention is to shed some light on the issue of city space, body, and identity in the context of contemporary art and critical theory.

'Paul Gauguin and the complexity of the primitivist gaze', as appeared in Journal of Art Historiography (12: Jun15: The European scholarly reception of ‘primitive art’ in the decades around 1900: guest edited by Wilfried Van Damme and Raymond Corbey)
Ruud Welten

This Pentecost iconography shows an excess of optical dynamism. Just as
the story mentions wind, the stylistic result is an exceptionally mobile surface
that blows in all directions. This makes it hard for our eyes to rest on any one
spot, but is counterbalanced by the geometrical anchoring of the composition
on the central axis. The gaze is cast back and forth between stability and being
overwhelmed, between the visual registration of a Gestalt and being lost in the
details. It is as though the miniaturist would make us aware of the mysterious
meaning of Pentecost by means of this double visual affect. The Holy Spirit is
not only iconographically present in the form of the dove, the whole formal
approach within the optical framework suggests a dynamic breathing out of his
power.

The purpose of this chapter is to develop ideas about photography as a consumer behavior and as a researcher practice, by examining social science research traditions,
photographers, and consumer research that utilizes photography. Photography is one stream of many in representing consumers. Interactions between photography and identity – personal identity, gender identity, ethnic identity -- are analyzed to demonstrate the functions of photography as an important site for discussing issues of representation. Through a selective, personal review of photography focused on the production and consumption of photographic representation I develop a framework for incorporating photography into consumer research that bears on questions of consumption, identity, and representation. The paper draws on photography writings, consumer research, social science research, and personal narrative to discuss the role photography plays in the construction and representation of identity. Mass media photography -- popular magazine photography, art photography, books, and popular film – is analyzed, employing concepts of the gaze, identity, and representation. Throughout, travel photography will provide illustrative examples. Consumer researchers might be considered 'tourists' in these matters, casting the 'tourist gaze' upon other methods, other fields, and research 'subjects' in our quest for new scholarly resources and frontiers. This metaphor will be explored through an analysis of travel photography, theories of tourism, and personal reflection. Through a discussion of photography and identity, I intend to sketch an outline of a theory of consuming representation.

"El gato", como la mayoría de la obra de García Ponce, es un relato intimista (como el mismo autor dijo: "Soy un autor de lugares privados, de interiores" (Rosado Z. , 2007, p. 105)) en el que los espacios significan la interioridad del ser y la búsqueda de identidad. En su obra la mirada es un elemento fundamental para comprender a sus personajes, así como la focalización de quien narra, quien mira y quien es mirado. "El gato" es un cuento medular en la literatura garciaponceana, de ahí la importancia de hacer este acercamiento que pretende evidenciar pulsiones que resultan resonantes y fundamentales en textos posteriores del autor.

The aim of this study is to examine in what ways the movie Carol (2015) as well as Patricia Highsmith’s original novel subverts Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze as she theorises in her work “Visual and Other Pleasures”.  The movie’s representation of the controlling male gaze is explored as well as the emergence of the female gaze. The argument of the essay is that in Carol the women are allowed to look, and their gaze is significantly different in nature from that of the male.  The essay also studies the significance of the road narrative in the movie, following the ideas of Nicole Seymour.  In Carol, the road represents a change of Therese Belivet’s identity. Finally, the role of symbolism is discussed, paying particular attention to the meaning of the photographs taken by Therese Belivet.

The straight gaze relies on cultural script. The script does not include a ‘reading’ of images depicting women in less feminine circumstances, or nude males. Another aspect of creating the straight gaze in photography lies in the historical circumstances of the invention and development of that medium. Queer photography is deconstruction and demystification of the cultural script and tradition.

This book investigates the origins and transformations of medieval image culture and its reflections in theology, hagiography, historiography and art. It deals with a remarkable phenomenon: the fact that, after a period of 500 years of absence, the tenth century sees a revival of monumental sculpture in the Latin West. Since the end of Antiquity and the "pagan" use of free-standing, life-size sculptures in public and private ritual, Christians were obedient to the Second Commandment forbidding the making and use of graven images. Contrary to the West, in Byzantium, such a revival never occurred: only relief sculpture – mostly integrated within an architectural context – was used. However, Eastern theologians are the authors of highly fascinating and outstanding original theoretical reflections about the nature and efficacy of images. How can this difference be explained? Why do we find the most fascinating theoretical concepts of images in a culture that sticks to two-dimensional icons often venerated as cult-images that are copied and repeated, but only randomly varied? And why does a groundbreaking change in the culture of images – the "revival" of monumental sculpture – happen in a context that provides more restrained theoretical reflections upon images in their immediate theological, liturgical and artistic contexts? These are some of the questions that this book seeks to answer.The analysis and contextualization of the revival of monumental sculpture includes reflections on liturgy, architecture, materiality of minor arts and reliquaries, medieval theories of perception, and gift exchange and its impact upon practices of image veneration, aesthetics and political participation. Drawing on the historical investigation of specific objects and texts between the ninth and the eleventh century, the book outlines an occidental history of image culture, visuality and fiction, claiming that only images possess modes of visualizing what in the discourse of medieval theology can never be addressed and revealed.

This paper analyzes J. Halberstam’s interpretation of the transgender gaze as it applies to the character portrayal of Brandon Teena in the film Boys Don’t Cry. An oppositional approach examines the idea of a cisgender gaze that compromises the subjectivity of not only the character of Brandon but extending to dismissiveness towards trans identity as a whole. Dissecting the reveal scene from the film highlights Halberstam’s process of the transgender gaze and allows for a focus on cisgender interpretation and demands that illustrate cisnormative expectations on trans bodies and behaviors. Connecting these demands is the concept of abjection as described by feminist-philosopher Julia Kristeva, and how this liminal placement further erodes Brandon’s subjectivity in the eyes of a cisgender audience.

This article addresses landscape as the way we perceive a place, more specifically as the way we perceive our environment, our habitat. When looking into a place one not only recognizes the world in its true form, but also transforms this environment into landscapes. Selecting a location to observe from, to experience in its totality, adapt and transform according to our perception, that in itself is building a landscape. Through architecture, and using that as a basis, we are able to recreate the world that surrounds us and to mark our position in it. Thus, the collection of design strategies that are used to address the relationship with a place and its traces are nothing more than ways of seeing, ways of building, not only an architectural object but also a landscape. This article aims to demonstrate that in Spain, these strategies result from the ideology of the so-called Generation of ’98. The members of this group built landscapes over places through a lyrical gaze that transformed places into phenomenological landscapes and through a symbolic gaze that built metaphorical landscapes.

Filtered faces are some of the most heavily engaged photos on social media. The vast majority of literature on selfies have focused on self-reported practices of creating and posting selfies and how subjects view themselves, but research on using filters and the kinds of looking filter provoke is underexplored. Part of a larger project, this analysis draws from a study using photo-elicitation techniques to discuss selfie filters with 12 focus groups, exploring the dominant discourses of cis-gendered looking within digital sociality. We explore how participants edit their selfies, imagine potential audiences, interact with, and perceive the filtering behaviors of others, asking what the "work" of filters is, visually and socially. We probe the kinds of discourses filters participate in, and their gendered and affective dimensions. Our focus groups indicate that when looking at the selfies of others there is often an a priori assumption that filtering has been applied, whether conspicuously or not, to the extent that visual tune-ups have become central to the genre itself. As such, we explore the ambivalence and anxiety about authenticity that filters produce, as well as the intense looking practices aimed at decoding the legitimacy of images. We posit that filters are part of a digital ecosystem that demands an intensification of looking practices, which produce and enhance specific forms of objectification directed toward selves and others within digital environments.

This project examines Flavor of Love, a reality based dating show broadcast on Vh1, and its place in the continuum of televised subordination of women, particularly women of color. The study uses concepts of the “male” and “dominate” gaze to explore the interplay of race, gender, and misogyny, and the possible implications on audience perception. Television acts as a powerful socialization agent, and shapes audiences racially stratified and gendered world. Critical discourse analysis provides the rich contextual data necessary to extrapolate the relationship between race and gender inequality 1n reality television. This article highlights the production of meaning created by a visual cultural storyteller housed within a hegemonic tradition that objectifies and subjugates women of color powerless.

In the present article, I wish to concentrate on what may be called “transgressive border-crossings” engaged in by the protagonists of Ferzan Özpetek’s Hamam in two poignant instances of “hamam spying”, which – though effected in different configurations, for different purposes, and with drastically different consequences – introduce positions of “uninitiated” novices kept outside looking in. What I intend to engage with is Istanbul as a “third space”; a liminal space looming as a challenge to the individual, instilling fear as much as unleashing temptation and a faint promise or threat of finding out and being found out, of revealing, taking in, laying bare, getting laid, getting lost. By looking at Francesco and Mehmet looking (from above) at unsuspecting women in the bagno, and Marta looking (from below) at Francesco and Mehmet looking at one another in the shelter of Francesco’s originally unwanted inherited hamam, I wish to investigate the implications of reversing the male gaz...

In this chapter, I draw on a theory of visual consumption to show how art historical conventions inform contemporary marketing images, infusing them with visual, historical, and rhetorical presence and power. I invoke an analytical concept of consuming difference to describe a relational framework of contemporary brand identity campaigns that draw on what I call the ideology of the group portrait as a visual technique for representing identity. I treat advertising imagery much the way an art historian treats pictures as I proceed to analyze illustrative examples through the classic art historical techniques of formal analysis, compare and contrast, and interpretation—framed within representation understood as a cultural practice.

New feminism is a continuation of earlier feminisms but differs slightly as it emphasizes on the idea that woman is an individual with an equal worth as man while accepting the natural sexual differences. Indian Films have always portrayed women in the stereotypical roles of passive, submissive and dependent objects of visual pleasure. British Feminist Film Theorist Laura Mulvey, in her essay titled 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', talks about the Male Gaze and how women are presented as the object of voyeurism, which means 'to-belooked-at-ness' objects. This paper attempts to look at the changes brought in the representation of woman from the stereotypical pleasurable object to the emancipated lead actor who overcame the male gaze and became an independent and strong woman. The paper observes this change of representation in Gouri Shinde's film "English Vinglish". The film is about an Indian woman who overcomes the patriarchal obstacles and becomes successful and independent. The focus is also on the contemporary Indian female directors. Unlike most of the male directors, these female directors break away from showing the woman as passive and pleasurable objects. They represent their emancipation through independent women characters who are not dependent on men.

Las imágenes nos han invadido y con ellas la imposibilidad de ver. Una ceguera generalizada e involuntaria es el resultado de la contaminación visual en la que vivimos. Ante ello, la fotografía ofrece dos opciones: seguir llenando nuestra memoria con imágenes vacías, o bien, servir como una herramienta visual creativa que nos permita acercarnos con una mirada atenta, limpia y seductora al mundo que hemos dejado de ver. Memoria cero plantea la necesidad de cambiar la mirada, de intentar ver de nuevo. Este libro es producto de una investigación que pretende invitar a redescubrir la magia que habita en lo que nos rodea, ese mundo que se ha ocultado a los ojos de quien ya ve sin ver, del transeúnte siempre apurado por llegar a tiempo.La línea principal de la investigación es encontrar a través de la mirada del fotógrafo, una oportunidad para poder articular discursos a partir de la problemática de una mirada saturada.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey
Male–male sexuality is the central trope of Boys’ Love (BL) manga with stories tending to revolve around a central uke-seme (‘bottom’–‘top’) pair. Although focused on men, BL is produced and consumed primarily by women. This article presents, from an anglophone British perspective, analysis of age-stratified male–male romance – paederasty – as portrayed in BL. My corpus consists of 234 commercially-translated original Japanese BL manga stories, created by 100 different mangaka (author-artists), published commercially in English between 2003 and 2012. A total of 68 (30%) of these stories were identified as involving agestratified relationships, eight of which were selected for detailed analysis. Seven were selected for typicality: Waru (2007) by Yukari Hashida deemed the most typical. Fangs (2008) by Hiroki Kusumoto was also included in analysis as the most atypical age-stratified story in order to test the robustness of identified patterns. I argue that that, from an anglophone perspective, the characteristic themes of age-stratified BL map surprising well onto the eroticised intra-familial dynamics of Freud and the intra- and inter-familial economics of Lévi-Strauss. The patterns identified are evidenced and discussed under the following headings: the mother identified son, the doubly divested man, the castrated father, men on the market and the mother with the phallus. These themes help build and substantiate my argument that age-stratified BL might work, within an anglophone context at least, as a feminist critique of patriarchy through the mechanism of phallic divestiture.

Feminists have argued that women have been portrayed through lens dominated by men be it in television, films or photography. One of the probable reasons cited for this is that men have traditionally dominated professions associated with the camera.
However, the researcher observed in television, films, and photographs that specific media texts were not only composed of a male but also a female point of view. This paper is an attempt to find out if there is a difference in approach to the same
subject by photographers of different genders. Therefore, taking Indian freedom movement as the backdrop, the researcher has studied the works of two eminent photographers—Kulwant Roy and Homai Vyarawalla based on seniority of their work. How does gendered gaze affect the frame of these two photographers? To
seek an answer to this comparative study has been employed to analyze photojournalistic works of two prominent photojournalists who photographed at the same time in history to find if there is a ‘male’ or ‘female gaze’ in their respective works.

Il punto di vista è una caratteristica inscindibile ed insita del linguaggio filmico. Ogni rappresentazione cinematografica è filtrata da uno sguardo multiforme che è spesso testimonianza di una coscienza collettiva e complesse dinamiche politiche e sociali. Citando il critico d’arte britannico John Berger in Ways of Seeing (2015): “guardare è un atto di scelta” ed in quanto tale è un sistema codificato di segni tutt’altro che innocente, il quale spesso sottace dinamiche di potere di tipo patriarcale.
La teoria secondo la quale molti film del cinema narrativo classico sono rivolti ad un pubblico eterosessuale maschile è stata elaborata e diffusa per la prima volta da Laura Mulvey nel saggio Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Secondo quest’ultima, gli uomini esercitano l’agency del guardare e rappresentano la parte attiva dell’intero processo in quanto detentori dello sguardo, diversamente dalle donne, le quali sono relegate passivamente alla loro “to-be-looked-at-ness” e rese nient’altro che oggetto funzionale allo sviluppo del personaggio maschile all’interno della narrazione.
In questo elaborato voglio quindi sostenere come il fenomeno sopracitato, che definirò come “sguardo oggettivizzante”, appartenga ad una narrativa per lo più maschile per ragioni politiche, sociali, culturali e storiche senza però essere del tutto esule dall’universo femminile. A tal proposito, verrà approfondito il fatto che il discorso sulla narrazione dello sguardo sia sempre orientato verso un polo binario “uomo-donna”. Affermando ciò, proseguirò quindi con una disamina della rappresentazione dello sguardo queer che film come La Favorita (The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018) e Ritratto della giovane in fiamme (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, Céline Sciamma, 2019) mettono in luce, soffermandomi soprattutto sul genere del period drama. Indagherò quindi sul perché l’accostamento tra period drama e la queerness nelle uscite in sala degli ultimi anni si è rivelato sempre più frequente, sostenendo quindi la possibilità dell’esistenza di uno sguardo orizzontale, inclusivo, anti-patriarcale e femminista anche nel cinema mainstream.

This BA dissertation is a discussion around the meaning behind Edouard Manet's 'Bar at the Folies-Bergère'. I explore the work as an allegory of illusion; meaning there is more than what meets the eye in the painting. Manet has contrived an air of illusion through manipulation of formal qualities in artistic treatment to specific pictorial elements and subject matter. The mirror, as an arbitrary object, has a sense of prestige attributed to its function within Renaissance imagery where the symbol of the mirror is linked with ideas of misconception. Titian in particular has used the mirror in his works to allude to ambiguity of the female identity, and here I argue that similarities can be seen in Manet's treatment of the mirror in the Bar. A turn from illusion to allusion takes place in the discussion, referring to misconceptions in society and modern Paris (capitalism, consumerism, the flaneur, the spectacle). I aim to highlight the importance of the mirror in the work to gain deeper insight to the meaning of the painting and Manet's intentions in his final masterpiece.

This is a chapter from the book Visual Worlds (Oxford, 2020), a textbook on forms of visual practice in art, science, medicine, the miltary, law, and other fields. The book is available on Amazon.

In it we survey several principal forms of the theory of the gaze, including psychoanalytic (and feminist), and positional (perspectival), in an attempt to decide if the "theory of the gaze" is a coherent subject, or actually several theories traditionally named as one.