Introduction
Genealogies of Feminism
Vision and Difference
Marianne Hirsch, Fall 2023
Even before Laura Mulvey’s classic feminist essay on the “male gaze,” feminist and queer artists and filmmakers, as well as theorists of visuality, have analyzed, critiqued and contested the association of vision with power and knowledge. Through the last decades, they have creatively reframed the gaze and subverted conventions of visual representation, reimagining the relationship of media technologies to embodied and social difference, and to social constructions of gender, race, class and sexuality.
Throughout the fall of 2023, an interdisciplinary group of us studied the evolution of feminist and queer theories and practices of visuality over the last decades of the 20th century to the present. We followed shifting strategies of critique and reinvention by looking at painting, film, photography, performance, activism and social media in transnational perspective.
Our discussions were motivated by a commitment to what Fred Moten calls a “world- encompassing gaze” and by the desire to find ways of looking with rather than at fellow subjects rather than objects of the gaze. Attuned to the vicissitudes both of visibility and of invisibility, we searched for forms of co-witnessing that would begin with a willingness to make ourselves vulnerable as observers and participants in practices of looking and being looked at.
Along the way, we encountered classic films such as Imitation of Life, Jeanne Diehlman and Paris is Burning, as well as more recent ones like Tangerin, and Crip Camp. We discussed theoretical writings by Linda Nochlin, Laura Mulvey, Griselda Poloock, Denise Murrell, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, bell hooks, Susan Sontag, Eliza Steinbock, Jack Halberstam, Tina Campt, Frantz Fanon and others; and we grappled with works by Cindy Sherman, Yoko Ono, Martha Rosler, Carrie Mae Weems, Arthur Jafa, and many more. Class visits by artists Susan Meiselas, Lorie Novak, Adama Delphine Fawundu and Maria José Contreras introduced us to innovative practices and raised questions about the powers of critique and the possibilities of repair that we found inspiring.
Lorie Novak’s cover image “Look/Not” (2011) encapsulates our role as responsive and responsible witnesses that we tried to navigate through the course—our desire to look and to intervene in scenes of violence and pain, and the simultaneous need to protect ourselves from the violence surrounding us, and also, perhaps, to look away so as not to cause further harm through the act of looking. Novak invites us to look both with and at her and thus she exposes the fragility both of looking and of being looked at.
This site contains the work students have contributed to the course in their final projects— projects that engage and mobilize the course materials to explore many different feminist and queer ways of seeing.
Symposium
The projects and papers were presented as part of the 2023 Vision and Difference Symposium at the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, Columbia University. Below you will find the presentations schedule:
12:00 pm Gathering for lunch and socializing.
12:30 pm I. I Know You are Looking at Me
[moderator: Charlotte Nash]
Is there a refugee gaze?: Gender Construction
through Refugee Photography
Peyton Baxley
Women’s Bodies and the Imagination of Resistance: How Women’s Bodies in
Photographs Have Driven Iranian Hijab Protests
Zeqi Chen
Making Faith See: Feminist & Womanist Visions that Challenge the Church
Marisa Hulstine
10 minute break
1:20 pm II. Can You See Me? [moderator: Marisa Hulstine]
Restaging ‘A Great Day in Harlem’: Representations of Gender in Jazz
Historiography Through Photographs
Rebecca Zola and Roosmarijn Klopper
Making the Invisible Visible: Employing a Feminist Gaze Within Historic Sites
Drew Citron
Unseen, unsatisfied: Regarding Pain in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail
Isabel Blankfield
Where Does it Hurt?: Archiving the Body in Pain
Srija Umapathy
10 minute break
2:20 pm III. Look Again [moderator: Téa Vachon Goss]
Con/textures: Textiles, Familial Memory, Mother Tongue
Tatiana Krasilnikova
Judy Chicago’s Rainbow Pickett: Finally Looking, Hoping to See
Caitlin Chan
What Does it Mean to be a Feminist Artist?: Reflecting on a Retrospective
Charlotte Nash
The gap between seeing and understanding: Studium and Punctum in
Film Narrative
Yining Fan
10 minute Break
3:10 pm IV. The World is Watching [moderator: Isabel Blankfield]
Toxic Exposures: Pollution, Vulnerability, Visibility
Sophia Featherstone
Does the gaze truly see?: Living Between Societal Witnessing and
Perpetual Invisibility
Téa Vachon Goss
Resistance in Reflection: Instances of Visual Vulnerability within Photography
Christine Almadjian
The Invisible Visibility: An Examination of Media Portrayals of A Feminicide
Victim in Brazil
Isabella Villa Real Seabra