. The subversion of the gaze: Shérazade and other women in the work of Leïla Sebbar Of mixed Franco-Algerian parentage, Leïla Sebbar spans a variety of genres in her writing,including short stories,journalism,essays,children’s writing and contributions to collaborative works, including collections of visual material. She also has a number of major novels to her credit. In its thematic content, Sebbar’s work straddles the Mediterranean, focusing attention on the dynamics between the generations. She is not engaged in any mission of
10 ‘Gazing in hir glasse of vaineglorie’: negotiating vanity Faye Tudor This chapter explores the problems that mirrors presented for women, at whom they were often directed, and discusses the potential for women to circumvent some of the mirror’s negative associations. This essay will present three self-portraits by Sofonisba Anguissola and Artemisia Gentileschi which will reveal the different approaches of these women to the problem of representing themselves. These women seek out a new method of either sidestepping the issues of self-representation, often
“Rebranding James Baldwin and His Queer Others” was a session held at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association in November 2019 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The papers gathered here show how Baldwin’s writings and life story participate in dialogues with other authors and artists who probe issues of identity and identification, as well as with other types of texts and non-American stories, boldly addressing theoretical and political perspectives different from his own. Nick Radel’s temporal challenge to reading novels on homoerotic male desire asks of us a leap of faith, one that makes it possible to read race as not necessarily a synonym for “Black,” but as a powerful historical and sexual trope that resists “over-easy” binaries of Western masculinity. Ernest L. Gibson’s engagement with Beauford Delaney’s brilliant art and the ways in which it enabled the teenage Baldwin’s “dark rapture” of self-discovery as a writer reminds us that “something [has been missing] in our discussions of male relationships.” Finally, Nigel Hatton suggests “a relationship among Baldwin, Denmark, and Giovanni’s Room that adds another thread to the important scholarship on his groundbreaking work of fiction that has impacted African-American literature, Cold War studies, transnational American studies, feminist thought, and queer theory.” All three essays enlarge our assessment of Baldwin’s contribution to understanding the ways gender and sexuality always inflect racialized Western masculinities. Thus, they help us work to better gauge the extent of Baldwin’s influence right here and right now.
This essay’s close interrogation of James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room allows us to see one aspect of how sexual shame functions: it shows how shame exposes anxiety not only about the feminizing force of homosexuality, but about how being the object of the gaze is feminizing—and therefore shameful. It also shows that the paradigm of the closet is not the metaphor of privacy and enclosure on one hand and openness and liberation on the other that it is commonly thought to be, but instead is a site of illusory control over whether one is available to be seen and therefore humiliated by being feminized. Further, the essay reveals the paradox of denial, where one must first know the thing that is at the same time being disavowed or denied. The narrative requirements of fictions such as Giovanni’s Room demonstrate this, as it requires that the narrator both know, in order to narrate, and not know something at the same time.
and transformed both the long history of colonial imagery and the more recent emergence of Holocaust memory. Heerten deftly analyses general elements of the Western humanitarian gaze but, like many of the essays in Humanitarian Photography , also stresses how the motives and concerns of Biafra activists in various national contexts – the UK, Germany, United States and France – are best understood against the background of specific historical trajectories and social
of gazing upon a famous ‘altruistic saviour of a suffering “other”’ ( Müller, 2018 : 47). Further, celebrities like Affleck accompany the increasing presence of other private actors like philanthropists and corporations – except these A-listers possess the ability to attract new funding, ideas and support to establish their own organisations (see also Budabin et al. , 2017 ). Increasing competition among humanitarian actors for funding and attention has
– it is as if Beckett’s writing 34 Beckett and nothing reads one back, demonstrating the vanishing point of one’s own reading practices whilst refusing to yield itself to interpretation. It is perhaps this quality, this kind of reverse interpretation, that leads to Derrida’s famous reluctance to read Beckett, to expose deconstruction to Beckett’s deconstructive gaze. Beckett is an author, Derrida says in an interview with Derek Attridge, ‘to whom I feel very close, or to whom I would like to feel myself very close; but also too close’,22 and it is precisely this
writer? The discussion which follows will offer potential answers and raise further questions on this subject. It is evident from Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman or Michel Serres’s Variations sur le corps, or indeed from the exhibition ‘Spectacular Bodies’ (London, Hayward Gallery, ), that the body, the battlefield and old war-horse of feminist theory, is also on the current philosophical and cultural agenda.10 Like Susan Faludi in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man, Detambel turns her gaze in Blasons d’un corps masculin (blazons of a male body) to the
welfarist gaze serves to make detained people intimately known to authorities, registering not only their attitudes and behaviours, but also their dreams and aspirations. While officials’ compassion and concern for the well-being of detained people were surely genuine, their recording gaze was also perceived as controlling and intrusive by those incarcerated. Reza, one of the detained men who had spent
borderland life within its totalising gaze. This intuition, I argue, is what makes possible a politics ‘of’ the border, stretching the borderline into an affective-political ‘constellation’ suturing the past and present into a future-oriented time-space capable of revealing ‘hidden’ connections and affinities between a multiplicity of borderland contexts in ways not permitted by two-dimensional cartography. But now it is time to get up from our Wyler deckchairs, stretch our legs, go for a stroll, and in the process pick up some real and imagined fellow-travellers. Re