Blackwell Reference Online

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Those who have no country have no language. Women have no imagery available—no accepted public language—with which to express their particular point of view. And, of course, one of the major elements involved in any successful language system is that it can be easily understood, so that its tropes have a certain mobility and elasticity, as it were-they can rise from the lowest levels of popular parlance to the highest peaks of great art. ( Nochlin 1972 : 11) Feminist theory radically changed art, art history and film studies, opening onto the anti-hierarchical approach of ‘visual culture’ ( Carson and Pajaczkowska 2001 ). The focus is now on ‘image’, ‘representation’, ‘the gaze’, ‘identification’, ‘spectatorship’, while psychoanalytical theory has added terms like ‘voyeurism’, ‘fetishism’ and ‘scopophilia’. In anguished interaction with theorists of class and race, feminist theory has forged terms that enable us to see ‘the power of the image’ ( Kuhn 1985 ) and to acknowledge ‘the power of discourses to “do violence” to people, a violence which is material and physical, although produced by abstract and scientific discourses as well as discourses of the mass media’ (de Lauretis 1987 ). Following industrialization and urbanization, images proliferated as part of nineteenth-century economies of entertainment, shopping and commerce, advertising, illustrated newspapers and magazines. ... log in or subscribe to read full text