Visual Perversity


Book Description

Through her reading of Euripides'Bacchae, Colridge's Christabel, de Sade'sPhilosophy in the Bedroom, and Hitchcock'sPsycho author Alina M. Luna finds precedent for a destructive impulse lurking beneath the maternal gaze.




The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy


Book Description

Offers a new interpretation of “sympathy” as an instrument for investigating contemporary culture, gender, and visual technique.




The Dial


Book Description




Idols of Perversity


Book Description

This is a book filled with the dangerous fantasies of the Beautiful People of a century ago. It contains a few scenes of exemplary virtue and many more of lurid sin.




An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture


Book Description

How and why do people "frame" animals so pervasively, and what are the ramifications of this habit? For animals, being put into a cultural frame (a film, a website, a pornographic tableau, an advertisement, a cave drawing, a zoo) means being taken out of their natural contexts, leaving them somehow displaced and decontextualized. Human vision of the animal equates to power over the animal. We envision ourselves as monarchs of all we survey, but our dismal record of polluting and destroying vast swaths of nature shows that we are indeed not masters of the ecosphere. A more ethically accurate stance in our relationship to animals should thus challenge the omnipotence of our visual access to them.




Outlooks


Book Description

A comprehensive exploration of what constitutes a lesbian and gay artist and what differentiates them from their audience.




Archaeology's Visual Culture


Book Description

Archaeology’s Visual Culture explores archaeology through the lens of visual culture theory. The insistent visuality of archaeology is a key stimulus for the imaginative and creative interpretation of our encounters with the past. Balm investigates the nature of this projection of the visual, revealing an embedded subjectivity in the imagery of archaeology and acknowledging the multiplicity of meanings that cohere around artifacts, archaeological sites and museum displays. Using a wide range of case studies, the book highlights how archaeologists can view objects and the consequences that ensue from these ways of seeing. Throughout the book Balm considers the potential for documentary images and visual material held in archives to perform cultural work within and between groups of specialists. With primary sources ranging from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, this volume also maps the intellectual and social connections between archaeologists and their peers. Geographical settings include Britain, Cyprus, Mesoamerica, the Middle East and the United States, and the sites of visual encounter are no less diverse, ranging from excavation reports in salvage archaeology to instrumentally derived data-sets and remote-sensing imagery. By forensically examining selected visual records from published accounts and archival sources, enduring tropes of representation become apparent that transcend issues of style and reflect fundamental visual sensibilities within the discipline of archaeology.




The Immaculate Mistake


Book Description

President Donald Trump originated his political career by claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the USA. His “birtherism” theory was discredited, but there’s another possibility about birth. Evangelicals have given birth to Donald Trump in the immaculate mistake. Evangelicals are not a collection of dumb and irrational people; they are the creators of the demolition presidency of Trump. He is their child—the result of almost one hundred years of evangelical angst, resentment, and hurt. This is the story of how Trump has become a secular evangelical preacher and his message of fear, hatred, division, and getting even has captured the hearts and minds of evangelicals. Rather than dismissing them, this work takes them seriously and literally and offers a frank and disturbing series of portraits of their determination to win at all costs.




Dance, Gender and Culture


Book Description

'...full credit to Thomas and Macmillan for embarking on such a worthwhile venture - Dance Research I have already found the Thomas edition of enormous value in teaching both undergraduates and postgraduates, from the perspectives of dance anthropology, ethnography and theatre dance analysis - Theresa Buckland, Department of Dance Studies, University of Surrey This unique collection of papers, written specially for this volume, explores the aspects of the ways in which dance and gender intersect in a variety of cultural contexts, from social and disco dance to performance dance, to the Hollywood musical and dances from different cultures. The contributors come from a broad range of disciplines, such as cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, dance studies, film studies, and journalism. They bring to the book a wide body of ideas and approaches, including feminism, psychoanalysis, ethnography and subcultural theory. List of Plates - Preface to the 1995 Reprint - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction - PART 1: CULTURAL STUDIES - Dance, Gender and Culture; T.Polhumus - Dancing in the Dark: Rationalism and the Neglect of Social Dance; A.Ward - Ballet, Gender and Cultural Power; C.J.Novack - 'I Seem to Find the Happiness I Seek': Heterosexuality and Dance in the Musical; R.Dyer - PART 2: ETHNOGRAPHY - An-Other Voice: Young Women Dancing and Talking; H.Thomas - Gender Interchangeability among the Tiwi; A.Grau - 'Saturday Night Fever': An Ethnography of Disco Dancing; D.Walsh - Classical Indian Dance and Women's Status; J.L.Hanna - PART 3: THEORY/CRITICISM - Dance, Feminism and the Critique of the Visual; R.Copeland - 'You put your left foot in, then you shake it all about ...': Excursions and Incursions into Feminism and Bausch's Tanztheater; A.Sanchez-Colberg - 'She might pirouette on a daisy and it would not bend': Images of Femininity and Dance Appreciation; L-A.Sayers - Still Dancing Downwards and Talking Back; Z.Oyortey - The Anxiety of Dance Performance; V.Rimmer - Index




Perverse Spectators


Book Description

Film and television have never been more prevalent or watched than they are now, yet we still have little understanding of how people process and make use of what they see. And though we acknowledge the enormous role the media plays in our culture, we have only a vague sense of how it actually influences our attitudes and desires. In Perverse Spectators, Janet Staiger argues that studying the interpretive methods of spectators within their historical contexts is both possible and necessary to understand the role media plays in culture and in our personal lives. This analytical approach is applied to topics such as depictions of violence, the role of ratings codes, the horror and suspense genre, historical accuracy in film, and sexual identities, and then demonstrated through works like JFK, The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Psycho, and A Clockwork Orange. Each chapter shows a different approach to reconstructing audience responses to films, consistently and ingeniously finding traces of what would otherwise appear to be unrecoverable information. Using vivid examples, charting key concepts, and offering useful syntheses of long-standing debates, Perverse Spectators constitutes a compelling case for a reconsideration of the assumptions about film reception which underlie contemporary scholarship in media studies. Taking on widely influential theories and scholars, Perverse Spectators is certain to spark controversy and help redefine the study of film as it enters the new millennium.