This article had several purposes. First, I wanted to highlight the work of Esther Bubley, an American photographer whose documentary work for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information in the early 1940s is largely unknown. Second, I wanted to show how her images complicated and undermined the traditional themes of Depression era photography in the United States, Third, by looking at her images of women, my intention was to reveal how she worked against depictions of (...) femininity during the Depression, and in confrontation with one-dimensional portrayals of women as America entered the Second World Wan In conclusion, I contend that Bubley's images were fundamentally portrayals of working-class femininity represented as being an individual – rather than a symbolic – experience. Most specifically in the images I have examined, Bubley deconstructs an ideological image of female working-class identity which was central to documentary photography in 1930s America. For example, unlike in photographs by Dorothea Lange, Bubley did not portray working-class women as metaphoric sites of passive endurance which would eventually lead to the rejuvenation of American nationalism. Rather, she showed working-class women to be potentially subversive in the ways they defined themselves against the legacy of 1930s photography and in opposition to the ideological impositions of wartime propaganda. As a result, Bubley's images of working-class women waiting in bars for lonely soldiers, or looking for a future beyond the confines of their boarding house existences while remaining outside the middle-class boundaries defined by capitalist consumerism, set out a pictorial foundation for working-class female identity which exists beyond the context in which the photographs were taken. Consequently, Bubley's work highlights individual self-identity, personal empowerment and self-conscious desire in working-class women which was – and still is – confined and repressed by economic disadvantage and systematic marginalization from an American society defined from a middle-class point of view. (shrink)

For more than fifteen years, Melissa Ann Pinney has been making photographs of girls and women, from infancy to old age, to portray how feminine identity is constructed, taught, and communicated. Her work depicts not only the rites of American womanhood—a prom, a wedding, a baby shower, a tea party—but the informal passages of girlhood: combing a doll's hair, doing laundry with a mother, smoking a cigarette at a state fair. With each view, we gain a greater understanding of (...) the connections between mother and daughter, and by extension the larger world of family, friends, and society. Pinney's approach to interpreting girlhood became more complicated and complex when her daughter, Emma, was born eight years ago. Emma's childhood evoked in Pinney her own girlhood and gave her work new meaning and purpose. Ultimately, Regarding Emma shares with all of us the incremental and the ritualistic changes that take place in a woman's life over time. Her photographs are artistic and social documents that reveal the subtle and bold aspects of feminine identity—documents whose reach will extend well beyond the walls of America's leading galleries and museums into the hearts and homes of everyday Americans. "Melissa Ann Pinney is making powerful art. In matters of light, color, and composition she is flawless. But these are not simply constructions of elements. These photographs bear witness to the speed at which the little girl becomes the old woman, to the fleeting, breathless beauty of childhood, to life itself, which leaves us stunned in its wake."—Ann Patchett, from the Foreword "Melissa Ann Pinney provides a compelling portrait of American girls as they make their way from infancy to adulthood. Using her daughter's childhood as a point of departure, she traces the complex terrain of adolescence and budding femininity. The results are photographs marked by empathy and grace."—Sylvia Wolf, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City "These photographs by Melissa Ann Pinney impart a sense of the special and sacred everyday rituals we take for granted. She appreciates at once the transient nature of what she finds and its gravity. Her pictures describe so well the wonder, and beauty, and centrality of the things we know best and the people we see often."—Sandra S. Phillips, Curator of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "Melissa Ann Pinney's record of life with her daughter, Emma, adds a new and touching chapter to our knowledge of the lives of women and girls."—Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon and a staff writer for The New Yorker "Melissa Pinney's passionate, painstaking investigation of the stages of women's lives is impressive for its rigor and courage. Her themes aren't imposed on the pictures or on the women, men, and children who people them; instead, they arise from her attentive study of particularities— of the ways human lives are etched on the surfaces of faces and the positions of bodies in real spaces and places, mundane but radiant. When she turns from the lives of others to her own life, the shift is seamless but the volume swells, the emotions grow more pointed and the paradoxes more painful, joyous, and direct. This is remarkable work by an artist at the height of her powers."—Peter Bacon Hales, author of William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape. (shrink)

Illustrations include selections from Atget's signature views of Paris, Stieglitz's portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe, Weston's distinctive nudes, and Arbus's images of women.

In Pythagorean Women, classical scholar Sarah B. Pomeroy discusses the groundbreaking principles that Pythagoras established for family life in Archaic Greece, such as constituting a single standard of sexual conduct for women and men. Among the Pythagoreans, women played an important role and participated actively in the philosophical life. While Pythagoras encouraged women to be submissive to men, his reasoning was based on the desire to preserve harmony in the home. -/- Pythagorean Women provides English (...) translations of all the earliest extant examples of literary Greek prose by Neopythagorean women, shedding light on their attitudes about marriage, the home, music, and the cosmos. Pomeroy sets the Pythagorean and Neopythagorean women vividly in their historical, ecological, and intellectual contexts, illustrated with original photographs of sites and artifacts known to these women. (shrink)

_Edward Bibring Photographs the Psychoanalysts of His Time_ provides us with a unique pictorial window into a fascinating period of psychoanalytic history. It is the gift of Edward Bibring, a passionate photographer who, Rolleiflex in hand, chronicled international psychoanalytic congresses from 1932 to 1938. The period in question spans the ascendancy of Hitler, the great exodus of analysts to England and the U.S., and the Anschluss of 1938. A year after the Paris Congress, the last meeting photographed by Bibring, Europe (...) would be in flames. At Wiesbaden in 1932, we find an ever dignified Ernest Jones relaxing aboard a sight-seeing ship, and Helene Deutsch and Heinz Hartmann delightfully at ease at a coffee shop. At the Lucerne Congress of 1934, Anna Freud, Ludwig Jekels, Wilhelm Reich, Grete Bibring, Max Eitingon, and Franz Alexander happily converse outside a hotel. At Marienbad in 1936, there are smiling new faces: Annie Reich, Ernst Kris, Otto Fenichel, Edward Glover, and others. At Budapest in1937 the women – Anna Freud, Vilma Kovacs, Dorothy Burlingham, and Elisabeth Geleerd – speak animatedly among themselves. A demure Margaret Mahler and a chic Marianne Kris make their appearance. In 1938, we see a series of table shots, where analysts, now with suit jackets removed and even a few collars loosened, relax with their food, wine, and cigars. Bracketed by Sanford Gifford’s brief introduction and biographical sketches of all the captured parties, Bibring’s photographs, digitized and enlarged, retain just enough graininess to evoke a different era in the history of psychoanalysis. It is heartening to see the paragons of “classical psychoanalysis” as warmly human, their analytic reserve supplanted by relaxed affability. But it is sobering to remember that the high spirit engendered by Congresses – in Bibring’s time no less than our own – may overlay the gravest political developments and the deepest personal anxieties. (shrink)

Photographic representations of women living with or beyond breast cancer have gained prominence in recent decades. Postmillennial visual narratives are both documentary projects and dialogic sites of self-construction and reader-viewer witness. After a brief overview of 30 years of breast cancer photography, this essay analyzes a collaborative photo-documentary by Stephanie Byram and Charlee Brodsky, Knowing Stephanie , and a memorial photographic essay by Brodsky written ten years after Byram’s death, “Remembering Stephanie” . The ethics of representing women’s postsurgical (...) bodies and opportunities for reader-viewers to engage in “productive looking” are the focal issues under consideration. (shrink)

To celebrate the acquisition of the Tom Phillips archive, the Bodleian Library has asked the artist to assemble and design a series of books drawing on his themed collection of over 50,000 photographic postcards. These encompass the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, ‘ordinary’ people could afford to own their portraits.Women in Hats explores the remarkable range in the world of millinery from outrageous Edwardian creations to the (...) inventive austerities of the Second World War.This book contains 200 images chosen with the eye of a leading artist from a visually rich vein of social history. Their covers will also feature a thematically linked painting, especially created for each title, from Tom Phillips’ signature work, A Humument. (shrink)

The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria. In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the (...) invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"—they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries. (shrink)

The face of a child in need is a visual trope that is at the forefront of the politics of spectacle in emergency news and aid initiatives. Images of children’s faces work on both affective and ethical levels, appealing to compassion and to a discourse of universal human rights. Acknowledging both the cultural fascination with and distrust of images of children, this article focuses on the strategies of persuasion used by an international NGO Save the Children in their child sponsoring (...) campaign. Identifying the ways that both NGO guidelines and strategies shape the way the image is composed and framed, and engaging with the concepts of ‘sponsoring,’ ‘saving,’ and ‘parenting,’ the article follows how the campaign configures financial help as an affective, rather than economic, relationship between the donor and the beneficiary. (shrink)

The emotion of disgust is suggested to be an adaptation that evolved to keep us away from sources of infection. Therefore, individuals from populations with greater pathogen stress should have a greater disgust sensitivity. However, current evidence for a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and the intensity of infectious diseases in the environment is limited. We tested whether disgust and contamination sensitivity changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Disgust was assessed in 984 women in 2017 and 633 (...) class='Hi'>women in 2020 by a set of photographs depicting sources of infection and Pathogen and Moral of Three-Domain Disgust Scale. Further, contamination sensitivity among participants in two waves was measured by Contamination Obsessions and Washing Compulsions Subscale of Padua Inventory. State anxiety was measured with the Polish adaptation of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory only during the second wave of data collection. Women from the COVID-19 pandemic group assessed the photographs depicting sources of infection as more disgusting, scoring higher on Padua Inventory, but lower on Moral Disgust Domain as compared to women from before the pandemic. In addition, anxiety levels during pandemic positively correlated with scores from Pathogen Disgust Domain, Padua Inventory, and the ratings of the photographs. The participants of the study scored higher in state anxiety than the norms determined for the Polish population. Summarizing, we present evidence for differences in individual levels of disgust sensitivity in relation to pathogen stress, supporting the idea that disgust evolved to serve as protection from pathogens. (shrink)

Within the arena of sport, as throughout society, traditional definitions of femininity and masculinity have established and maintained gender differentiation. The authors’research examines this pattern in intercollegiate athletics by analyzing National Collegiate Athletic Association media guide cover photographs. They find gender differentiation in the depiction of women and men athletes. For example, women athletes are less likely to be portrayed as active participants in sport and more likely to be portrayed in passive and traditionally feminine poses. These differences (...) changed little between 1990 and 1997. The findings suggest that while one might expect less gender stereotyping from the teams themselves, the gendered images produced by intercollegiate athletic programs vary little from those produced by the popular press. (shrink)

Achieving accurate skin tones is one of the most challenging tasks in digital photography. Master this challenge with professional photographer Lee Varis as he covers a range of skin: women and men, young and old, various tones, in-studio and outdoors, tattoos, and more. His step-by-step tutorials and before-and-after illustrations demonstrate various techniques for topics such as digital-specific lighting challenges and what can and cannot be done in post-process. A free CD-ROM accompanies the book and contains sample image files to (...) use while following the tutorials, plus equipment recommendations and technical reference materials that enhance and reinforce the instruction. Order your copy of this practical guide today and get a complete start-to-finish approach to integrating everything from posing models to shooting and retouching candid scenes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 78-88 [Access article in PDF] Remembering Beauty:Reflections on Kant and Cartier-Bresson for Aspiring Photographers Stuart Richmond In the past few decades beauty has become something of an endangered species in the Western art world. Indeed, beauty has never been a central aim of contemporary art, which has tended to focus on meaning and politics rather than formal values, conceptual art being (...) a case in point. Feminist artists and critics, reacting to the objectification of women in society have rendered attention to women's beauty, especially the nude, impolitic. This is perhaps understandable given the persuasive emphasis on beauty in marketing, that many argue socializes an unhealthy self-image in young people and distracts attention from important social issues. As well, techno-global-business practices increasingly invade our lives and private spaces with a virtual culture of information and efficiency. We do not know how this retreat from the sensual, concrete present will affect human sensibilities and values in the long run, although there are some disturbing signs. Seen as un-cerebral and allied with pleasure, beauty and its alter ego, appreciation, have acquired a decided regressive air. Having said that, for many people at the level of ordinary life — in human relationships, arts activities, and love of nature, for example — beauty never really went away because beauty is a source of pleasure and well-being that we cannot help wanting. As Plato pointed out, beauty is the only visible quality that inspires love. 1 A life of beauty in a free and ethical environment is an invitation to a life worth living. Though I cannot pursue the matter here, it is noteworthy that we often call a person of courage, goodness, and humility, a beautiful human being. Around the world people find many paths to beauty and of late in the Western artistic and academic worlds, beauty seems to be making a comeback. But beauty is a difficult thing to talk about, partly due to its being an experiential concept, partly because it has a long and complex philosophical history, and also because there is the risk in analysis of reducing it to something small and formulaic. Words in the end cannot replace the experience [End Page 78] of beauty. Despite these concerns, however, I believe that now, more thanever in the arts and education, we need to develop capacities for creating and appreciating beauty, if only to bring us back into contact with what is sensual and intrinsically worthwhile after so much arid theorizing, conflict in the world, and technocratic obsession. Through beauty we might be able to regain a stronger sense of human values and pleasure in living. Therefore, my aim here is to re-examine beauty in order to strengthen its role in aesthetic education. I do not expect to develop any precise definitions but I shall aim for a few signposts. Background to the Concept of Beauty "Beauty," "beautiful," or "the beautiful" refer primarily to a quality found pleasing to the senses. Here I shall restrict discussion to the visual domain, and later principally to art. As noted, beauty has a long philosophical history but the concept remains vague. From classical times on, beauty has been defined or associated with such properties as symmetry, balance, variety, harmony, proportion, order, unity, and perfection. And indeed, these features have long provided normative guidelines for the creation and appreciation of beauty. Over time we have learned the shape and proportions of a beautiful pot or supporting column. The golden section, a ratio of 1:1.6, has been used to good effect in design for millennia, the Parthenon being a prime example, the 35 mm negative another. However, as is well known, differences in beauty in individual cases tend to elude definition on account of this or that property or collection of properties. Exceptions can always be found. A painting may be well balanced but lacking in a certain élan vital, or unbalanced but beautiful. The variability of beautiful things seems to rule out a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 78-88 [Access article in PDF] Remembering Beauty:Reflections on Kant and Cartier-Bresson for Aspiring Photographers Stuart Richmond In the past few decades beauty has become something of an endangered species in the Western art world. Indeed, beauty has never been a central aim of contemporary art, which has tended to focus on meaning and politics rather than formal values, conceptual art being (...) a case in point. Feminist artists and critics, reacting to the objectification of women in society have rendered attention to women's beauty, especially the nude, impolitic. This is perhaps understandable given the persuasive emphasis on beauty in marketing, that many argue socializes an unhealthy self-image in young people and distracts attention from important social issues. As well, techno-global-business practices increasingly invade our lives and private spaces with a virtual culture of information and efficiency. We do not know how this retreat from the sensual, concrete present will affect human sensibilities and values in the long run, although there are some disturbing signs. Seen as un-cerebral and allied with pleasure, beauty and its alter ego, appreciation, have acquired a decided regressive air. Having said that, for many people at the level of ordinary life — in human relationships, arts activities, and love of nature, for example — beauty never really went away because beauty is a source of pleasure and well-being that we cannot help wanting. As Plato pointed out, beauty is the only visible quality that inspires love. 1 A life of beauty in a free and ethical environment is an invitation to a life worth living. Though I cannot pursue the matter here, it is noteworthy that we often call a person of courage, goodness, and humility, a beautiful human being. Around the world people find many paths to beauty and of late in the Western artistic and academic worlds, beauty seems to be making a comeback. But beauty is a difficult thing to talk about, partly due to its being an experiential concept, partly because it has a long and complex philosophical history, and also because there is the risk in analysis of reducing it to something small and formulaic. Words in the end cannot replace the experience [End Page 78] of beauty. Despite these concerns, however, I believe that now, more thanever in the arts and education, we need to develop capacities for creating and appreciating beauty, if only to bring us back into contact with what is sensual and intrinsically worthwhile after so much arid theorizing, conflict in the world, and technocratic obsession. Through beauty we might be able to regain a stronger sense of human values and pleasure in living. Therefore, my aim here is to re-examine beauty in order to strengthen its role in aesthetic education. I do not expect to develop any precise definitions but I shall aim for a few signposts. Background to the Concept of Beauty "Beauty," "beautiful," or "the beautiful" refer primarily to a quality found pleasing to the senses. Here I shall restrict discussion to the visual domain, and later principally to art. As noted, beauty has a long philosophical history but the concept remains vague. From classical times on, beauty has been defined or associated with such properties as symmetry, balance, variety, harmony, proportion, order, unity, and perfection. And indeed, these features have long provided normative guidelines for the creation and appreciation of beauty. Over time we have learned the shape and proportions of a beautiful pot or supporting column. The golden section, a ratio of 1:1.6, has been used to good effect in design for millennia, the Parthenon being a prime example, the 35 mm negative another. However, as is well known, differences in beauty in individual cases tend to elude definition on account of this or that property or collection of properties. Exceptions can always be found. A painting may be well balanced but lacking in a certain élan vital, or unbalanced but beautiful. The variability of beautiful things seems to rule out a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jennifer C. Nash Black Lactation Aesthetics: Remaking the Natural in Lakisha Cohill’s Photographs In her 1992 essay “Selling Hot Pussy,” bell hooks recounts entering a “late night dessert place” with a group of colleagues who all began to laugh at a shelf of “gigantic chocolate breasts complete with nipples— huge edible tits.”1 For hooks, the chocolate Black (...) breasts are mammy imagery, a “displaced longing for a racist past when the bodies of black women were a commodity, available to anyone white who could pay the price.”2 For her white colleagues, the chocolate breasts are simply comical. Her colleagues’ response—their willingness to consume, laugh, and ignore racial, gendered, sexual violence—constitutes the racialized visual marketplace that hooks’s essay seeks to both describe and dismantle. The chocolate breasts become a rhetorical point of entry into hooks’s critical engagement with a visual marketplace where Black female bodies are delectable and disposable objects. hooks’s analysis has become part of a canon of Black feminist work exploring how Black breasts get taken up as signs of pathology, “excess flesh,” sexual deviance, hypersexuality, and alterity.3 From histories of the so-called Hottentot Venus and the preoccupation with her breasts, buttocks, and genitalia—including 1. bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 61. 2. hooks, 61–62. 3. See Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Jennifer C. Nash 95 signature works by Zine Magubane, Janell Hobson, Samantha Pinto, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting4 —to scholarship on the construction of black women’s imagined corporeality as “social dead weight” by Sabrina Strings, Black feminists have given critical attention to the construction of Black breasts as the location of Black women’s imagined racial and sexual difference.5 If Black breasts have been culturally and scientifically constructed as deviant, excessive, pornographic, and desirous, they have largely been uncoupled from an identification with nutrition—from the capacity to sustain and feed babies—except their connection with wet nursing and their conscription into maternal labor for white children. In this imaginary, Black breasts provide nutrition only when recruited as white property, with their nurturance capacity oriented toward white health and futurity. We might understand the cultural inability to interpret Black breasts as nurturing Black life as part of what Andrea Freeman describes as the “unmothering” of Black women, the unseeing of Black maternity except to elevate it as a symbol of brokenness or pathology.6 But in recent years, as I argue in my forthcoming book Birthing Black Mothers, Black breasts have entered the US cultural imagination anew. Black breasts are increasingly viewed as in need of support through seemingly benign state interventions to encourage Black breastfeeding. Indeed, Black breasts are recruited by an array of actors who often find themselves strangely aligned to champion Black breastfeeding —including NGOs, public health campaigns, and reproductive justice efforts spearheaded by Black feminists—precisely because Black breastfeeding is thought to perform urgent political, emotional, and 4. See Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender & Society 15, no. 6 (2001): 816–834; Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005); Samantha Pinto, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 5. See Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: NYU Press, 2019). 6. Andrea Freeman, “Unmothering Black Women: Formula Feeding as an Incident of Slavery,” Hastings Law Journal 69, no 1545 (2018): 1545–1606. 96 Jennifer C. Nash public health work. Black breastmilk is increasingly described as a crucial technology of Black life, one that supports Black infant life and inoculates it physically, psychically, and even spiritually against the array of anti-Black forces that wound and violate. The work that Black breast milk is thought to perform includes its posited... (shrink)

In 120 exquisitely reproduced black-and-white images, Minnesota in Our Time: A Photographic Portrait showcases the work of twelve talented photographers who sought to capture the essence of the state and its people at the threshold of the new millennium. Like the Farm Security Administration photographers of the Depression era, these men and women document the details of life in this time and the transformations now taking place in this state. This work is a product of the MINNESOTA (...) 2000 Photo Documentation Project, a three-year effort that has also produced an archival collection of 360 images and a museum exhibition. The project's wealth of images provides a multifaceted look at lives and landscapes in Minnesota, focusing on common experiences and themes among a diverse population of individuals. Edited by photography historian George Slade, the book features a selection of the photographs, a lucid interpretive essay by Slade and art historian Robert Silberman, a preface by exhibition curator Bonnie G. Wilson, and brief introductions to and commentaries about each photographer's work. Minnesota in Our Time features photographs by Joe Allen, Tom Arndt, Stephen Dahl, Chris Faust, George Byron Griffiths, Terry Gydesen, David Heberlein, Wing Young Huie, Mark Jensen, Peter Latner, David Parker, and Keri Pickett. (shrink)

Abstract The Me as a socially constructed self presenting itself, is the subject of new conceptual interest. Discourse analysis is the preferred tool for analysis of the linguistic repertoires that we use to order the experience of our selves. But we also present ourselves visually, with some care. An attempt is made to apply a kind of discourse analysis to self?portraits by eminent photographers. Within the process of portraiture and the rules of the pose, professionals should be able to (...) present their true visions of themselves. Specific dilemmas are likely. While women have been the site of many contradictions in themselves as a sight, men in their images must be prepared to bear the castrating power of ?the look?. It might even be that in some romantic sense, there is the revelation of an authentic, spontaneous self. A set of ten examplars is interpreted, ranging from 1901 to 1986. The photographic evidence for men clearly shows situational self?characteristics in terms of the role of the photographer in the period. Although the women included are comparable in status, using the non?verbal interpretative models of Goffman and Wex, they rather demonstrate signs of the conventional submissive feminine identity. Such an analysis of visual discourse cannot decide on the degree of awareness in the presentations. Further the interpretations are as open to rational contradiction as other forms of discourse analysis. (shrink)

My interest in undertaking the study of images of Arab women in Western visual ethnography and art emerged from my own life experience. My identity as an Arab feminist having lived in different Eastern and Western communities has shaped my understanding and affected my observation in this research. As an Arab woman being observed in the first place, I am taking the role of the "outside"/inside' observer in this study. I am observing the observers and the observed, and both (...) become the observed in my chosen study. I observe visual images of Arab women under the gaze of Western observers. Ethnographers, photographers, and artists become the observed under my investigation. Here again, visual images of Arab women are observed—in fact they only have been observed as objects, a result of their display as visual images by Western observers. Contemporary North African women, Assia Djebar, Houria Niati, and Leila Sebbar are observers who examine visual images of North African women that were painted by Western artists. In examining their works here, they in turn become the observed. Also I observe Elizabeth Fernea's visual ethnographic work on North African women. Fernea and her project become the observed in my research. Finally, I undertook the role of the observer in this study mainly in order to understand myself and identify my place in the society of other women and men. I introduce a cross‐cultural dialogue that will question the bipolar cultural boundaries in feminist and historiographic scholarship. (shrink)

‘Femininity’ is a concept formed by structures of class difference: to be ‘feminine’ is to fit into an idealised higher-class position. Working-class women, without the financial or cultural capital to successfully perform femininity, are regularly cast down into the realms of the grotesque. This ‘fall from grace’ has repercussions on the representation and lived experiences of women who are then defined negatively. Contemporary British media stories are full of demonising depictions of working-class women deemed grotesque for not (...) presenting themselves with sufficiently ‘classy’ femininity. This article provides a rereading of the images made by British photographer Richard Billingham of his mother Liz, against the grain of much classist and misogynistic critical writing. The author discusses what happens when women reject the aspiration to transcend their supposedly faulty working-class femininity, and instead of trying to ‘better themselves’ through class-passing choose to present aspects of a working-class identity that firmly situate them within an undesirable class position. By employing an auto-ethnographic approach, the author offers new receptions of such images that have often been dismissed and discussed derogatorily, by bringing to bear her own lived experience of being a woman from a working-class background to offer narratives rarely explored in academic texts. The author shows that by thinking through an alternative femininity, via an ‘Anti-Pygmalion’ aesthetic, we can reclaim the negative descriptions of working-class women as grotesque, and begin to question the constructions of femininity itself. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has identified the modern wedding as a principal site for the construction of heteronormativity. This article examines whether and how the participation of same-sex couples in the wedding ritual can challenge this construction. Photographs from the 2004 San Francisco same-sex weddings were quantitatively content-coded for subjects’ gender presentation and for the extent to which the couple embodied the heteronormative wedding standard of one bride and one groom. I find that all the men in these photographs conformed to gender (...) norms and thus no male couple conformed to the wedding standard. In contrast, approximately one-fifth of the women presented non-normative gender, and more than two-thirds of the formally dressed lesbian couples conformed to the wedding standard of a bride and a groom. In a close reading of four photographs, I argue that these images have the potential to challenge assumptions about normative sex, gender, and sexuality at the level of the symbolic when understood in relation to the institution of marriage. Nonetheless, the enactment of weddings depicted in these images may also reify weddings as heteronormative by conforming to expectations about how individuals and couples present themselves when marrying. These findings point to the importance of distinguishing symbolic and enacted heteronormativity. (shrink)

Initially commissioned to record the progress of Pittsburgh’s Renaissance I, these unforgettable black-and-white photographs of Roy Stryker's Pittsburgh Photographic Library capture the city in a state of flux. They reveal a union of opposites—the suited wonderment of the downtown businessman with the easy grace and competence of a shirtless construction worker balanced high over his head; the anonymity and isolation of planned housing with the belief in expansion and renewal; the energy and excitement of a city on the move with (...) the traditions of the established elite; the juxtaposition between the growing optimism about the ability of technology to improve our lives; and the traditional steel and other heavy smokestack industries that still dominated the region. The Renaissance was seen as a way for Pittsburgh to keep abreast of modern urban life and to preserve its economic position, but the rapid development of a white suburban middle class was sapping the very essence of the personalized downtown neighborhoods. These photographers have captured the convergence of destruction and rejuvenation that is the essence of an urban renaissance—all the anxiety and hope of the decade is reflected in these poignant photographs. Constance Schulz's fascinating essay on the story of the PPL, in order to present a full picture of the political and civic goals, achievements, and failings of the project, provides a thorough discussion of the background of the Pittsburgh Photographic Library, putting into perspective the Allegheny Conference's purpose for initiating the PPL, Roy Stryker's own vision and work, as well as those of the photographers who worked for Stryker on the project, and the politics that undermined the full implementation of it. Clark M. Thomas's accompanying narrative offers an eclectic range of facts and fascinating bits of the city's history and neighborhood lore, as well as noting important political and economic episodes. It also provides a glimpse into the often underrepresented lives of minorities and women in the region's development. Anyone moved by the incredible social upheaval and expansion that occurred in cities across the nation in the 1950s following years of depression and war will want to have this collection. (shrink)

For couples for whom assisted reproduction is the only way to have genetically related offspring, the donation of gametes by others makes available enhanced reproductive options. There has been an increasing demand for such services, as evidenced by the Web site launched by fashion photographer Ron Harris in the fall of 1999. Although the sale of such gametes is not new, this Web site does speak to a different set of priorities and values than has been witnessed in the context (...) of assisted reproduction: the selection of particular traits, in effect, the creation of designer babies. With the expanding demand for such services come expanded liabilities, which are the focus of this article. The author argues that this kind of commodification of gametes reinforces dubious social attitudes, leads to potential harms for the children created by this technology, and suggests a departure from traditional paradigms in medicine: a departure in an ill-advised direction. (shrink)

Firms face mounting pressure to appoint ethical leaders who will avoid unnecessary risk, scandal and crisis. Alongside mounting evidence that narcissistic leaders place organizations at risk, there is a growing consensus that women are more ethical, transparent and risk-averse than men. We seek to interrogate these claims by analyzing whether narcissism is as prevalent among women CEOs as it is among men CEOs. We further analyze whether narcissistic women CEOs take the same types of risk as narcissistic (...) men CEOs. Drawing on social role and token theories, we test hypotheses related to gender differences in the prevalence and impact of CEO narcissism on firm-level practices. Using a unique dataset that includes a large sample of CEOs of S&P 1500 companies from 1992 through 2014, we create a narcissism composite score for each CEO based on their photograph size in the annual report, and their cash earnings and non-cash earnings relative to the next highest paid executive. We find that women CEOs are less likely to exhibit narcissistic personality traits compared to men CEOs. Furthermore, we find that gender moderates the relationship between narcissistic CEOs and our outcome variables of risk-taking and questionable behaviors. (shrink)

Monograph on the historical evolution of women's rights from 1902 to 1978 - describes various campaigns for achieving civil rights for women, rights for political participation, equal opportunities for the woman worker, etc., and considers the contributions made to the emancipation of women by the international alliance of women (interest group), the League of Nations, the UN (role of UN) and other international organizations, the international women's year, etc. ILO mentioned. Bibliography pp. 312 to 314, (...) chronology of major events and photographs. (shrink)

This paper focuses on representations by and deployments of the four Palestinian women who during the first four months of 2002 killed themselves in organized attacks against Israeli military personnel or civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or Israel. The paper addresses the manner in which these militant women produced and situated themselves as gendered-political subjects, and argues that their self-representations and acts were deployed by individuals and groups in the region to reflect and articulate other gendered–political subjectivities (...) that at times undermined or rearticulated patriarchal religio-nationalist understandings of gender and women in relation to corporeality, authenticity, and community. The data analysed include photographs, narrative representations in television and newspaper media, the messages the women left behind, and secondary sources. (shrink)

The proverb ‘women hold up half the sky’ was created by the Maoist government 64 years ago in order to show that women in ‘New China’ have equal power and rights to their male peers. I selected three photographs for my FLaK zine and called them ‘unwanted girls’, ‘battered wives’ and ‘inglorious women’. To examine the relevance of the proverb in Modern China, I will discuss three women-related problems behind these photographs and analyse their cultural and (...) legal causes. By doing so, I aim to achieve two purposes—first, to help the reader have a better understanding of the problems of women in the region where one-fifth of the global population lives, and second, to argue that seemingly gender neutral law and policy can produce new and greater restrictions on women’s freedom. (shrink)

The socio-historical events and libertarian cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s shaped the Catholic mother-daughter relationship for the women in this feminist genealogical study. This study is based on interviews with 36 Anglo-Australian Catholic women – 13 sets of mothers and daughters – as well as dialogue between my mother and myself about family photographs. Women’s stories of secondary school days tell of the formation of lady-like identities circumscribed through uniform regulations, the cult of the Virgin (...) Mary and ceremonies of everyday Catholic school life. The abject maternal body resurfaces in adolescence with the flow of menstrual blood, and the heralding sexuality of young women is circumscribed through patriarchal institutions such as Catholicism. Amid their silenced and contested dialogue, although years apart, the stories between mothers and daughters in this study drew parallels. (shrink)

What happens when we unexpectedly see an attractive potential partner? Previous studies in laboratory settings suggest that the visualization of attractive and unattractive photographs influences the perception of time. The major aim of this research is to study time perception and attraction in a realistic social scenario, by investigating if changes in subjective time measured during a speed dating are associated with attraction. The duration of the dates was variable and participants had to estimate the time that passed. Among other (...) measures, participants also rated the potential partners in terms of their physical attractiveness before and after the dates and reported if they would like to exchange contact with them. Results showed that, in a real speed dating situation, when there is a perception of the partner as being physically more attractive, women tend to overestimate the duration of that meeting, whereas men tend to underestimate its duration. Such changes may reflect evolutionary adaptations which make the human cognitive system more responsive in situations related to reproductive fitness. (shrink)

Objective: Body dissatisfaction is a major risk factor underlying vulnerability to eating disorders. Laboratory settings suggest that body dissatisfaction could be improved by using evaluative conditioning (EC). The present study evaluates the feasibility of using an EC app in everyday life and the effects of its use on body dissatisfaction. Method: We designed a game-like app inspired by the Therapeutic Evaluative Conditioning app. 60 participants were randomly assigned to two conditions. Participants in the EC condition had to pair photographs of (...) their own body with positive photographs, while participants in the neutral condition had to pair photographs of their own body with neutral photographs. We tested the effect of use of the app on body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness, self-esteem, mood and eating behaviors. Results: Analysis revealed that participants in all conditions presented a significant decrease in body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness. However, contrary to our hypothesis, these reductions were not greater in the EC condition than in the neutral condition. Conclusions: This is the first study to evaluate the effects of an app-based EC intervention targeting body image. Results appear to be promising and the app could easily be implemented in an ecological setting as it is a low effort, attractive and accessible intervention. However, these findings do not support the idea that evaluative conditioning is responsible for the effects. Results are discussed. (shrink)

This article focuses on service provision for women who are involuntarily referred under the UK Mental Health Act (1983) into medium and high security care in England and Wales. We explore how physical and procedural security in such settings is prioritized over relational care (see also Fallon Report, Department of Health, 1999a and NHS Executive, 2000 – Tilt Report). We are not arguing against the importance of protecting the public from the acts of dangerous members of our society. However, (...) we are arguing that many of the women in our secure services are inappropriately placed and receive inappropriate forms of treatment and care. Rather than physical security, it is high relational care, which the women require. Further, we argue that current service provision often re-produces forms of violence and violation which have marked many of women's lives prior to their entry into the secure system. (shrink)

"Golf day 2005 @ federal golf club, red hill." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (196), pp. 7.

The forty-five women who created these works-artists and writers such as Deborah Willis, Carrie Mae Weems, Nan Goldin, and Carm Little Turtle-are connected by a belief that images are political and that today's feminist concerns cannot be ...

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while its (...) feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)