VISUAL CULTURE

First published 2003 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Transferred to Digital Printing 2008
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Selection and editorial matter 2003 Amelia Jones; individual chapters 2003 the contributors Reprinted 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Typeset in Perpetua and Bell Gothic by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon Printed and bound in Great Britain by Tul Digital, Padstow, Cornwall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication

Data Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication

A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBNIO: 0-415-26705-6 (hbk) ISBN 10: 0-415-26706-4 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-26705-2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-26706-9 (pbk)

Contents

List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgments Permissions

xi xiii
XXV

xxvi

Amelia Jones
INTRODUCTION: CONCEIVING THE INTERSECTION OF FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE

PART ONE Provocations

Amelia Jones
INTRODUCTION TO PART ONE

1 Rosemary Betterton
FEMINIST VIEWING: VIEWING FEMINISM

11

2 Jennifer Doyle
FEAR AND LOATHING IN NEW YORK: AN IMPOLITE ANECDOTE ABOUT THE INTERFACE OF HOMOPHOBIA AND MISOGYNY

15

3 Lisa Bloom
CREATING TRANSNATIONAL WOMEN'S ART NETWORKS

18

4 Judith Wilson
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER: BLACK FEMINIST VISUAL THEORY

22

5 Faith Wilding
NEXT BODIES

26

vi CONTENTS

6 Meiling Cheng
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF SIGHT

29

PART TWO Representation

Amelia Jones
INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO

33

7 John Berger
FROM

WAYS OF SEEING

37

8 Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro

FEMALE IMAGERY

40

9 Laura Mulvey
VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA

44

10 Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis

TEXTUAL STRATEGIES: THE POLITICS OF ART-MAKING

53

11 Mary Ann Doane

FILM AND THE MASQUERADE: THEORIZING THE FEMALE SPECTATOR

60

12 Mary Kelly
DESIRING IMAGES/IMAGING DESIRE

72

13 Griselda Pollock
SCREENING THE SEVENTIES: SEXUALITY AND REPRESENTATION IN FEMINIST PRACTICE - A BRECHTIAN PERSPECTIVE

76

14 bell hooks
THE OPPOSITIONAL GAZE: BLACK FEMALE SPECTATORS

94

15 Peggy Phelan
BROKEN SYMMETRIES: MEMORY, SIGHT, LOVE

105

PART THREE Difference

Amelia Jones
INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE

115

16 Luce Irigaray
ANY THEORY OF THE "SUBJECT" HAS ALWAYS BEEN APPROPRIATED BY THE "MASCULINE"

119

CONTENTS

vii

17 Harmony Hammond
LESBIAN ARTISTS

128

18 Monique Wittig
THE STRAIGHT MIND

130

19 Sander L. Gilman
BLACK BODIES, WHITE BODIES: TOWARD AN ICONOGRAPHY OF FEMALE SEXUALITY IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART, MEDICINE, AND LITERATURE

136

20 Trinh T. Minh-ha
DIFFERENCE: "A SPECIAL THIRD WORLD WOMEN ISSUE"

151

21 Lorraine O'Grady
OLYMPIA'S MAID: RECLAIMING BLACK FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY

174

22 Sandy Stone
A POSTTRANSSEXUAL MANIFESTO

187

23 Ann Eden Gibson

COLOR AND DIFFERENCE IN ABSTRACT PAINTING: THE ULTIMATE CASE OF MONOCHROME

192

24 Coco Fusco
THE OTHER HISTORY OF INTERCULTURAL PERFORMANCE

205

25 Jos Esteban Muoz

"THE WHITE TO BE ANGRY": VAGINAL CREME DAVIS'S TERRORIST DRAG

217

PART FOUR Disciplines/Strategies

Amelia Jones
INTRODUCTION TO PART FOUR

225

26 Linda Nochlin
WHY HAVE THERE BEEN NO GREAT WOMEN ARTISTS?

229

27 Camera Obscura Collective

FEMINISM AND FILM: CRITICAL APPROACHES

234

28 Adrian Piper
THE TRIPLE NEGATION OF COLORED WOMEN ARTISTS

239

viii

CONTENTS

29 Mira Schor
PATRILINEAGE

249

30 Hlne Cixous
BATHSHEBA OR THE INTERIOR BIBLE

256

31 Irit Rogoff
GOSSIP AS TESTIMONY: A POSTMODERN SIGNATURE

268

32 Patricia Morton
THE SOCIAL AND THE POETIC: FEMINIST PRACTICES IN ARCHITECTURE, 1970-2000

277

PART FIVE Mass Culture/Media Interventions

Amelia Jones
INTRODUCTION TO PART FIVE

283

33 Pratibha Parmar
HATEFUL CONTRARIES: MEDIA IMAGES OF ASIAN WOMEN

287

34 Tania Modleski
THE SEARCH FOR TOMORROW IN TODAY'S SOAP OPERAS

294

35 Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz

FEMINIST MEDIA STRATEGIES FOR POLITICAL PERFORMANCE

302

36 Amelia Jones
FEMINISM, INCORPORATED: READING "POSTFEMINISM" IN AN ANTI-FEMINIST AGE

314

37 Lynn Spigel
THE SUBURBAN HOME COMPANION: TELEVISION AND THE NEIGHBORHOOD IDEAL IN POSTWAR AMERICA

329

38 Ann duCille
BLACK BARBIE AND THE DEEP PLAY OF DIFFERENCE

337

39 The Guerrilla Girls

INTRODUCTION AND CONCLUSION TO

THE GUERRILLA GIRLS'

BEDSIDE COMPANION TO THE HISTORY OF WESTERN ART

349

40 Kathleen Zane
REFLECTIONS ON A YELLOW EYE: ASIAN I(\EYE/)CONS AND COSMETIC SURGERY

354

CONTENTS ix

41 Judith Mayne
FEAR OF FALLING

364

PART SIX Body

Amelia Jones
1NTRODUCTION TO PART SIX

369

42 Mary Douglas
EXTERNAL BOUNDARIES

373

43 Klaus Theweleit
STREAMS/ALL THAT FLOWS

and

WOMAN: TERRITORY OF DESIRE

375

44 Andrea Dworkin
PORNOGRAPHY

387

45 Julia Kristeva
APPROACHING ABJECTION

389

46 Judith Butler
PERFORMATIVE ACTS AND GENDER CONSTITUTION: AN ESSAY IN PHENOMENOLOGY AND FEMINIST THEORY

392

47 Sue-Ellen Case
TOWARD A BUTCH-FEMME AESTHETIC

402

48 Janet Wolff
REINSTATING CORPOREALITY: FEMINISM AND BODY POLITICS

414

49 Deborah Fausch
THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE BODY AND THE PRESENCE OF HISTORY: TOWARD A FEMINIST ARCHITECTURE

426

50 Susan Leigh Foster

THE BALLERINA'S PHALLIC POINTE

434

51 Susan Bordo
NEVER JUST PICTURES

454

52 Moira Gatens
EPILOGUE TO IMAGINARY BODIES: ETHICS, POWER AND CORPOREALITY

466

x CONTENTS

PART SEVEN Technology

Amelia Jones
INTRODUCTION TO PART SEVEN

471

53 Donna Haraway
A CYBORG MANIFESTO: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIALIST-FEMINISM IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

475

54 N. Katherine Hayles
VIRTUAL BODIES AND FLICKERING SIGNIFIERS

497

55 Elizabeth Grosz
BODIES-CITIES

507

56 Christine Ross
TO TOUCH THE OTHER: A STORY OF CORPO-ELECTRONIC SURFACES

514

57 Mara Fernndez
POSTCOLONIAL MEDIA THEORY

520

58 Sadie Plant
FEMINISATIONS: REFLECTIONS ON WOMEN AND VIRTUAL REALITY

528

59 VNS Matrix
CYBERFEMINIST MANIFESTO

530

60 Rosi Braidotti
CYBERFEMINISM WITH A DIFFERENCE

531

61

Jennifer Gonzlez
THE APPENDED SUBJECT: RACE AND IDENTITY AS DIGITAL ASSEMBLAGE

534

62 Sharon Lehner
MY WOMB, THE MOSH PIT

545

Index

551

AMELIA JONES

INTRODUCTION
Conceiving the intersection of feminism and visual culture

HE INTERSECTION OF FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE, twomodes of thinking, making, doing, or strategizing which have their own historical trajectories and political reasons for being, is a volatile and immensely rich one. Feminism, in most of its forms, proposes or demands a political and/or ethical stance towards cultural experience; academic versions of feminism theorize the ways in which all forms of culture condition, and are conditioned by, gender or "sexual difference." In its most recent forms, feminism insists on broadening models of analyzing the role of gender in cultural experience to accommodate the coextensivity of gender and other modes of subjectivity including aspects of sexual orientation, racial and ethnic identifications, nationality, class, and so on. Visual culture is a rubric and a model of critical thinking about the world of images saturating contemporary life. Visual culture was initially developed by scholars frustrated by the limitations of art historical analysis (which insists upon the separation of "high" from "low" cultural forms) and the separation of models of visual analysis according to disciplines (for example film theory and television studies). Visual culture, from the beginning, has been aimed at breaking down disciplinary limitations defining what and how visual imagery is to be analyzed within a critical visual practice. Both modes of thinking feminism and visual culture are, in this way, driven by political concerns and focus primarily on cultural forms as informing subjective experience. While feminism is a broader initiative encompassing all levels of cultural experience, its insights have become so central to our understanding of the world that it informs most modes of visual culture analysis at this point, whether this dependence is acknowledged or not. At the same time, feminism has long acknowledged that visuality (the conditions of how we see and make meaning of what we see) is one of the key modes by which gender is culturally inscribed in Western culture. Feminism and visual culture, then, deeply inform one another. This volume offers a selection of key texts that, in one way or another, theorize and historicize visual imagery and the issue of visuality through a feminist lens. The volume is intended to be suggestive, leading the reader to further exploration, rather than definitive; it conceives (of) this complex intersection both in the sense of imagining or putting it into form and in the sense of attempting to understand it through the inclusion of numerous prepublished, and six newly commissioned, essays.

2 AMELIA JONES

Definitions
Feminism is, of course, not a singular discourse to be easily defined or pinned down. Although its emergences (from the burgeoning of the suffragette movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the rise of women's lib in the 1960s and beyond) can be loosely mapped, its parameters and positions are under continual negotiation. This book takes feminism seriously but does not seek to patrol its borders by, for example, labeling authors or producers of images "feminist" or "not feminist." This kind of strategy is antithetical to the best impulses of what I take to be feminism, which in some forms at least argues against attributing inherent meaning or value to people, texts, or objects in the world. In organizing this anthology, I worked from the logic that any argument (whether visual or verbal, embodied, virtual, or textual) which takes an interest in, or can be deployed to explore, the ways in which subjects take on, perform, or project gendered identities is, to some extent, feminist, or at least is useful for a feminist study of visual or other kinds of culture. Having arisen as a critical rubric relatively recently, visual culture is at once a clearer and a more elusive category, though as a body of objects it has existed as long (at least) as the human eye. The simplest place in which to situate visual culture is in relation to the rise of cultural studies in England in the 1950s and beyond. Informed by the rise of the New Left in late 1950s Britain (itself sparked by the Soviet incursion into Hungary in 1956), cultural studies drew from myriad disciplines and methods of analysis but was most deeply marked, according to one of its foundational figures, Stuart Hall, by an abiding link to Marxism, with its commitment to analyze the deep structures of society and to focus on historical and cultural specificity. Cultural studies, Hall has insisted, is a "discursive formation" rather than a discipline (Hall 1992, 278). It is a set of ideas articulating new models of analysis in response to the forms of culture it seeks to address it "draws from whatever fields are necessary to produce the knowledge required for a particular project" (Grossberg et al. 1992, 2). While cultural studies is a mode of thinking about culture of all kinds, until the rise of the specific discourse of visual culture in the 1980s, its bias was towards textual analysis. This bias related to the fact that it took much of its theoretical impetus not only from Marx but from the fields of linguistics and semiotics, where the most sophisticated textual analyses were being done in the 1950s by scholars such as Roland Barthes. Through a semiotics inflected by Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, British scholars Raymond Williams and then Hall thus developed cultural studies in 1964, the center for which was the cross- (or even anti-)disciplinary Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. Cultural studies, then, developed with the strong motivation to break down the conventional distinctions defining disciplines and privileging certain kinds of culture over those deemed "popular" or "mass" oriented. Visual culture takes this democratizing impulse, but focuses on visual imagery and on the problem of visuality. Like cultural studies, visual culture draws from several complementary models for examining sign systems, institutions, and other aspects of lived cultural experience such as Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis but visual culture, having developed as a mode of analysis somewhat later, also takes much of its defining political impetus from feminism and the other rights discourses, including anti-racist and postcolonial theory and gay/lesbian or queer theory. Visual culture, naturally enough, is also deeply informed as well by the critical models of visual analysis developed in the disciplines of art history (including photography history and theory) and film studies. Through these latter influences and pressures, visual culture has developed far beyond its initial connection to cultural studies alone.

INTRODUCTION 3

While visual culture shares the impulse of cultural studies to reject disciplinary hierarchies (conceptions, for example, of "high" vs. "low" culture) and to explore the uses and meanings of images across disciplines, its even more important offering, as Nicholas Mirzoeff and others have pointed out, is in its revision of the conception of how meaning takes place in the visual relation (M irzoeff 1999, 3-4). In his epochal 1972 study of popular and fine art images, Ways of Seeing, John Berger' (Chapter 7) noted "Ctlhe way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe" (Berger 1972, 3). Berger (among others) opened the way for conceiving the meaning of visual images as taking place in a process of exchange between the image (with its proposed "way of seeing") and the viewer, whose beliefs inform the way she or he interprets the work. Visual culture, then, cuts through the conventional arthistorical notion of meaning as inherent in an image, as presumably embedded there in perpetuity by the willful intentions of the artist; as Keith Moxey has put it, "Ctlhe sign systems of the past are invested with meaning by those of the present" (Bryson et al. 1994, xxvii). Along with Berger's Ways of Seeing, one of the key moments in the articulation of a critica' discourse of visual culture studies was the publication in 1975 of Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (Chapter 9) in the important British film journal, Screen. The publication of this essay and Berger's emphasis on a feminist critique of visual culture mark the centrality of feminism to the study of visual culture. Both authors marshal aspects of psychoanalysis, Marxism, semiotics, and feminist theory to argue compellingly that visual images not only narrativize power relations (through the reiterative portrayal of naked women) but bear these relations within their very formal structure and in their conditions of distribution; both authors explore at some length how these relations are explicitly gendered. As Mulvey's and Berger's texts suggest, feminism and visual culture have a reciprocally weighted relationship. Feminism has had a central role in the development of critica! models of reading visual imagery in visual culture and its related disciplines of art history, film theory, television studies, and the visually oriented arms of media, new media, and cultural studies. Visual culture as a category of objects or images, or as a mode or strategy of interpretation, is always already determined in and through relations of sexual difference; it has offered some of the most useful possibilities for the development of a feminist model of critical cultural analysis. At the same time, cultural studies has not always embraced or even acknowledged the theoretical and political pressures of feminism in its critical practices (see Shiach 1999, 3). This volume counters this tendency within the cultural or media studies approach to relegate feminism to the sidelines as simply one way of thinking about textual or visual meaning. 2 It is the premise of this volume that feminism is not an adjunct to, or one critical model within, a larger umbrella of cultural or visual culture studies. Rather, feminism is one of the ways in which we can most usefully come to an understanding of the image culture in which we are suspended not the least because feminism is one of the myriad discourses that arose in symbiotic relation to the rise of modernity itself coincident with the development of the camera, media imagery, and, in short, modern image culture. This collection makes clear, in addition, that the insights of feminism provided crucial impetus for the opening up of disciplines which ultimately resulted in the formation of new interdisciplinary strategies of interpretation such as visual culture studies. And it points to the fact that, since around 1970, it has been feminist responses and approaches to visual images that have provided some of the strongest, most polemical, and most productive theories and critical strategies to come out of any of the disciplines or modes of analysis associated with visual culture.

4 AMELIA JONES

Inclusion/exclusion: the logic of the Reader

Far from pretending to be comprehensive, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader must admit its own partialities, the crucial political impulse behind feminism itself being a refusal of any claims of omnipotence, universalism, or comprehensiveness of point of view. The inevitable exclusions in this project are too many to narre. My choices are marked by my own particular position within this intersecting field: I was trained in the U.S. as an art historian (with a Ph.D. minor in film studies) and I came of age as a feminist scholar in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when U.S./English feminism dominated the scene. The logic of inclusion plays along several lines, all of which relate to my desire for the Reader to serve both as an introduction to feminism and visual culture for non-specialists and students and as a resource for those who have immersed themselves in its complex debates over the past thirty years. In order to provide a useful compendium for both types of audiences, I was motivated by the following premises: (1) I wanted to try to include at least most of the now canonical texts put to work in feminist studies of visual imagery such as M ulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and Donna Haraway's epochal "Cyborg Manifesto" (Chapter 53). My logic was that without these crucial essays the Reader would be incomplete for teaching purposes; the non-specialist reader would simply be forced to find them elsewhere. In addition, this Reader is intended to provide a historiography of feminist approaches to visual culture by tracing a trajectory through the various shifts in feminist visual theory; without the major texts, the story would be incomplete. (2) Another primary criterion for selection was that the included essay offer a new theoretical model of analysis or interpretation or critique a model that breaks (or broke, if it is an older work) new ground in some way. (3) Finally, I wanted to represent as many theoretical and political points of view as possible: a certain (though inevitably not broad enough, as noted) geographical scope covering an array of primarily Anglophone writers; as wide an array of positions within (and sometimes even obligue to) feminism as possible, including the voices of those critiquing the limitations of feminist visual theory; and as wide an array of visual culture examples as possible including photographs, advertisements, architecture, magazine imagery, toys, television shows, movies, dance, video, performance/theater, and the Internet. This breadth is necessarily somewhat biased towards those kinds of visual culture addressed by the field of art history, since I am trained in this discipline. At the same time, of course, my desire for breadth meant that I had to eliminate many important essays that overlapped other arguments already represented by essays written from a similar point of view. Even within art history, then, extensive debates are often only represented by the point of view offered in a single essay; in order more fully to follow debates within disciplines, the reader is urged to consult other anthologies focusing more specifically on art history (see Robinson 2001) or other disciplines related to visual culture. The lists of additional readings at the end of each section of the anthology point the reader in the direction of some of these additional sources. It is also in the spirit of inclusion (but with the knowledge of the inevitable exclusions that all inclusions entail) that I commissioned the six new essays in the first section of the

INTRODUCTION 5

book. Each is written by a feminist with a particular, strongly articulated point of view; the writers are working from different disciplinary locations, but all are interested in visual culture. Each of the six new essays stages a polemical opening for the various shifts marked by the articles grouped in historically and/or conceptually determined categories, in the rest of the book. These interventions are meant both to emphasize the urgency of focusing a feminist critique on the field of visual culture and, as they are posed by writers trained in different disciplines, to point to the specificity of different kinds of visuality.

Another logic: tracing a history of theory

In addition to providing the reader with a number of exemplary, rigorous feminist models for understanding how visual images function and come to have meaning, and how disciplines have accommodated various kinds of visual culture, the volume seeks to offer one historiography of feminist theories of the visual (only "one" because, indeed, the histories that could be told would be infinitely variable depending on the teller). Contrary to the views of some conservative art historians, whose anxieties about the opening signaled by visual culture take the form of hysterical denunciations of its putative ahistoricism (the questionnaire and many of the responses in a 1996 special section on "Visual Culture" in the art journal October being exemplary of this reactionism), 2 this volume takes visual culture as offering the potential for a deeply, if differently, historical understanding of the visual images of past and present. Rather than confirming social art history's conception of the image as superstructural as conveying through its own formal logic and subject matter the economic and/or social "facts" of its context of making the cross-disciplinary concept of visual culture and its newly broadened field of objects provides an alternative, less instrumentalist, model of thinking historically. Feminism, of course, has its own stake both in interrogating outmoded models of historicizing visual imagery and in articulating new ways of understanding the complex connections between images and the cultures and individuals they touch. Hence, as the essays in this volume attest, feminist examinations of visual culture and visuality have their own historical investments and connections and, thus, their own explicit politics that, in the most convincing cases, go beyond the instrumentalism of social art history altogether. It is with this impulse in mind an impulse that, through a feminist lens, views visual culture as producing its own kind of politics and history that each section of the anthology is designed to trace one trajectory of developments within a broad area of conceptual and theoretical concern in the feminist analysis of visual culture. Each of the thematic categories Representation, Difference, Disciplines/Strategies, Mass Culture/Media Interventions, Body, and Technology addresses a major aspect of feminist visual culture analysis, a node of debate where specific concerns have been highlighted and debated in complex ways. Each category marks a constellation of arguments that historiographically defines the intersection between feminism and visual culture a constellation, further, that conditions the way in which we understand the image culture in which we are immersed. Within each section, essays are arranged chronologically in order best to convey the flow of debate. The reader is pointed to the introductions of each section for a more extensive discussion of the logic of each section category.

AMELIA JONES

Conclusion
The old battles still being fought as late as 1996 with the discipline-guarding arguments in October no longer make sense. Visual culture is here to stay. Like those of film, television, cultural studies, and other modes of analysis, the tools of art history will inevitably serve this new, voraciously appropriative, cross-disciplinary mode of seeing, interpreting, and understanding our image-saturated culture. Feminism is already built into the way we look at images of women as well as of men so much is clear in the way in which articles written over the last fifteen years can assume the reader knows the Mulveyan argument about the gaze, as well as in the way in which one's students (even those in their first year of university) already look at the world through eyes that recognize a fetish when they see one. The ideas included in this volume representing the groundbreaking feminist work of writers from Mulvey, Griselda Pollock, and Judy Chicago to Klaus Theweleit, bell hooks, Peggy Phelan,

Sandy Stone, Mara Fernndez, and beyond comprise a particular history of feminist visual culture theory that, I hope, will provoke further debate as well as provide a basis for the teaching and intellectual exploration of this vital topic.

Notes
1 The typical logic of cultural studies is to ghettoize feminism into a separate category of "gaze theory" or some such thing; this occurs in the strange volume Visual Culture: The Reader, edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, the latter, of course, the "father" of institutionalized cultural studies. Aside from the problem of separating off most of the feminist articles (as well as the articles theorizing race, which as is typical of this kind of project go into a separate category as well), the book is flawed by its exclusive attention to photography (as if pre-, or for that matter, post-photographic images are not visual culture). See the forum on "Visual Culture" in October 77 (Summer 1996), which opens with a ludicrously biased questionnaire pompously intoning about the dangers of visual culture ("It has been suggested that the interdisciplinary project of 'visual culture' is no longer organized on the model of history" (25)). Thomas Crow expresses most directly the anxiety about visual culture's destruction of the boundaries formerly differentiating art from popular culture (and thus the art historian from the populist): "To surrender that discipline Ephilosophy, which he stages as analogous to art history] to a misguidedly populist impulse would universally be regarded as the abrogation of a fundamental responsibility" (34). Douglas Crimp writes a sharp, and elegant, attack on this rather fatuous debate among Octoberists, noting, among other things, their tendency to rail against an imagined, and vaguely defined, visual culture studies one that becomes the very kind of "illusory, phantasmatic, oneiric, hallucinatory" object of their own projections that they accuse capitalism of purveying and visual culture of shoring up. This brilliant article argues for the crucial role in visual culture or cultural studies in insisting on the political and socially overdetermined dimensions of every interpretation. Douglas Crimp, "Getting the Warhol We Deserve," Social Text 59 (Summer 1999), 53. Art history seems to have the biggest stake of all the related disciplines in warding off the incursion of visual culture as a rubric and mode of understanding visuality. It is a conservative field to begin with, staging its boundaries in relation to what can be considered art, and what cannot, and is deeply invested (as the October survey makes lamentably clear) in a very limited conception of what constitutes history.

References and further reading

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies (1957). Tr. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill & Wang, 1972. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books and London: BBC, 1972. Betterton, Rosemary, ed. Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media. London and New York: Pandora, 1987.

INTRODUCTION 7

Bloom, Lisa, ed. With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Bordo, Susan. Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Bryson, Norman, Holly, Michael Ann, and Moxey, Keith, eds. Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Carson, Fiona and Pajaczkowska, Claire, eds. Feminist Visual Culture. New York: Routledge, by arrangement with Edinburgh University Press, 2001 Cherry, Deborah, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850-1900. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Evans, Jessica and Hall, Stuart, eds. Visual Culture: The Reader. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999. Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary, and Treichler, Paula A. "Cultural Studies: An Introduction." Cultural Studies. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, eds. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies." Cultural Studies. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, eds. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage in association with The Open University Press, 1997. hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press, 1995. Jenks, Christopher, ed. Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Lippard, Lucy. The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art. New York: The New Press, 1995. Meyers, Marian, ed. Mediating Women: Representations in Popular Culture. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1999. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. The Visual Culture Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Morris, Meaghan. The Pirate's Fianc: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism. London and New York: Verso, 1988. October 77 (Summer 1996), "Questionnaire on Visual Culture," 25-70. Perry, Gill, ed. Gender and Art. New Haven and London: Yale University in association with The Open University, 1999. Pollock, Griselda, ed. Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Robertson, George, Mash, Melinda, and Tickner, Lisa, eds. The Block Reader in Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Robinson, Hilary, ed. Feminism/Art/Theory 1968-1999. London: Blackwell, 2001. Rogoff, Irit. Terra Infirma: Geography's Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Shiach, Morag, ed. Feminism and Cultural Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Shohat, Ella, ed. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998. Sturken, Marita and Cartwright, Lisa. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.