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• 1 2023-11-28T10:33:42-08:00 Introduction 17 toc 2024-02-01T06:22:54-08:00

  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 20^th 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