Introduction: New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture

Author(s): Jennifer Doyle and Amelia Jones

Source: Signs, Vol. 31, No. 3, New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture (Spring 2006), pp. 607-
615
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 Jennifer Doyle
Amelia Jones

Introduction: New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture

H ow does she look? In 1991, Bad Object-Choices, a collective of queer

visual artists and scholars, produced How Do I Look? Queer Film and
Video (1991), an anthology of essays and conversations about queer
sexuality and spectatorship in relation to film and video. In her essay for
this volume, Teresa de Lauretis (1991) considers the layers behind the
title question, how do I look? “To you, to myself, how do I appear, how
am I seen? . . . What are the conditions of my visibility? . . . How do I
look at you, at her, at the film, at myself? How do I see, what are the
modes, constraints, and possibilities of my seeing, the terms of vision for
me? . . . How do I look on, as the film unrolls from reel to reel in the
projector, as the images appear and the story unfolds on the screen, as
the fantasy scenario unveils and the soundtrack plays on in my head?”
The question, how do I look? speaks to “subjective vision and social
visibility, being and passing, representation and spectatorship—the con-
ditions of the visible, what can be seen, and eroticized, and on what scene”
(223).
How Do I Look? was groundbreaking for its inclusion of frank inter-
changes about the political tensions within the queer intellectual com-
munity—about, for example, homophobia in feminist film theory, the
failure in much scholarship on sexuality to think about race, the racism
that structures the dominant gaze in gay cinema and photography, and
the asymmetry between the homophobic structures that put pressure on
lesbian and gay artists and spectators. The book demands that people
working in the visual arts consider how our desires and identities inform
how we look, how we appear, and what we see.
The essays in this special issue of Signs, “New Feminist Theories of
Visual Culture,” expand on the questions raised in How Do I Look? and
investigate the layers behind a slightly rephrased question, how does she
look?—an equally double-edged query that points to the female subject
as both viewed and viewing and as embodied and socially and politically
situated in specific and particular ways. The essays collected in this issue

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2006, vol. 31, no. 3]
䉷 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2006/3103-0003$10.00

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608 ❙ Doyle and Jones

take as their subject a “she” for whom this question can’t be answered
fully without thinking about gender (or what feminist discourses in film
studies and art history in the 1980s called sexual difference) as inextricably
entwined (embodied, experienced, thought, and imagined) with other
aspects of identity, including race and ethnicity, nationality, sexual ori-
entation, and class. The projects represented in this issue center on a
feminine subject for whom this question can’t be answered without think-
ing about the complexities of how viewed and viewing subjects are situated
in space, time, and history.

Gender beyond sexual difference

Politicized critical practices must challenge the ways in which the struc-
tures of disciplines and the models of critique developing out of identity
politics have tended to carve up and flatten out identity—for example, by
rendering race and class outside the concerns of feminism proper, race
outside of gay studies proper, sexuality outside of ethnic studies proper,
and so on. They must refuse the tendency within each strand of identity
politics to assume a subject who is neutral in all but one highly charged
and identified way (within feminism, for example, a subject who is marked
as female but who is otherwise presumably straight, white, middle class,
and “first world”).
The most politically rigorous new feminist scholarship in visual studies
(including performance, theater, and drama studies; film and television
studies; dance theory and history; architectural and urban history and
theory; new media studies; art history; and visual culture studies), ex-
emplified by the essays in this issue, insists on the intersectionality of
gendered experience as inherently, simultaneously, and irrevocably raced,
classed, sexed, and so on. As developed by scholars such as Kimberlé
Crenshaw in the late 1980s, a theory of intersectionality “starts from the
premise that people live multiple, layered identities derived from social
relations, history and the operation of structures of power” (2004, 2).1
The term intersectionality points to the political imperative that dis-
courses addressing social oppression acknowledge the complexity of how
identity actually functions as we navigate the world and engage with oth-
ers. As Crenshaw puts it in her 1994 essay, “Mapping the Margins: In-
tersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,”

1
The term intersectionality was introduced and developed by Crenshaw (1992) in her
work on legal definitions of racial identity as well as specific cultural events such as the
Clarence Thomas hearings.

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 S I G N S Spring 2006 ❙ 609

“feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts

to politicize experiences of people of color have frequently proceeded as
though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually
exclusive terrains. Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives
of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And
so, when the practices expound identity as ‘woman’ or ‘person of color’
as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color
to a location that resists telling” (1994, 94). It is this kind of “location
that resists telling” that each of the essays in this issue addresses, giving
words to complex visual encounters that require the comprehension of
different levels, modes, and political permutations of identity formation.2
If in academic writing the location of women of color resists telling,
it is because it is often constituted outside “proper” disciplinary bound-
aries. For example, attention paid to the politics of identity and identi-
fication in visual art is often dismissed by guardians of the discipline of
“art history” as “cultural studies,” as antiformalist, ahistorical, or both,
and therefore as outside the field.3 Scholars working from and with identity
positions that are doubly and triply marginalized may find themselves at
odds not only with the field that corresponds to the objects or images
they are examining (e.g., film studies, art history, and media studies) but
with the institutional spaces that support the identity-based academic fields
to which their work is relevant—such as lesbian and gay studies, women’s
studies, and ethnic studies.
Femininity, as it is experienced and perceived in relation to various
subjects seen and seeing in the world, is thus understood and explored
in these essays through an array of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary tools
as always already conditioned by its relationship to structures of racial,
ethnic, sexual, class, national, and other modes of identity. To articulate
this twenty-first-century conception of gendered identity and its conse-
quences, each essay draws on feminist theories of the visual but equally
on antiracist, queer, postcolonial, and/or Marxist theories of how seeing

2
At the same time, the editors take note of Judith Butler’s intelligent questioning of
approaches to cultural critique that hinge on making identity plural: “Plurality disrupts the
social ontology of the subject itself when that relationality is understood not merely as what
persists among subjects, but as the internal impossibility of the subject as a discrete and
unitary kind of being. Identity as effect, as site, as dynamic, as simultaneously formed and
formative is not equivalent to the notion of identity as subject and ground. Reading identities
as they are situated and formed in relation to one another means moving beyond the heuristic
requirement of identity itself” (1995, 446).
3
Douglas Crimp addresses this erasure in his essay “Getting the Warhol We Deserve”
(1999).

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610 ❙ Doyle and Jones

assigns social and psychological value to subjects (bodies) and their rep-
resentations. These essays all exceed the boundaries of a single discipline,
ratifying the authors’ and editors’ collective commitment to a politics of
complexity.
The aim of this special issue, then, is to represent the work of those
scholars who are committed to an intersectional feminist politics and visual
theory—whose work traverses a range of critical territories. These essays
are deeply indebted to models of feminist analysis dominant in the visual
theory of the 1970s and 1980s but are also critical of their limits, of their
tendencies to focus on conceptions of feminine identity that were implicitly
white, middle class, “first world,” and straight. As black cultural theorist
bell hooks put it in her 1992 essay “The Oppositional Gaze,” “Feminist
film theory rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework that privi-
leges sexual difference actively suppresses recognition of race. . . . The
concept ‘Woman’ [in the abstract] effaces the difference between women
in specific socio-historical contexts” ([1992] 2003, 99–100).
Drawing on the insights of earlier cultural theorists such as hooks, this
issue of Signs seeks to forward scholarship produced from a feminist bib-
liography but whose aims and whose complexity cannot be fully read
within the framework of feminist art history or feminist visual theory.

The essays
“New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture” was initially inspired not only
by some of the important critical and artistic work noted above but also
by a conference titled “Intersectional Feminisms,” which was co-organized
by Jennifer Doyle, Amelia Jones, and Molly McGarry and took place in
April 2003 at the University of California, Riverside. This introduction,
furthermore, is also inspired by the dynamic presentations and perfor-
mances given at the “Theorizing Queer Visualities” symposium and
events, which took place in April 2005 at the University of Manchester
in the United Kingdom. Co-organized by Jones and Laura Doan, the
symposium included presentations by Doyle and José Esteban Muñoz and
queer feminist performative engagements by Ron Athey, Juliana Snapper,
and Vaginal Davis.
“Intersectional Feminisms” included presentations by scholars and art-
ists such as Lorraine O’Grady, Nao Bustamante, Inderpal Grewal, Muñoz,
and Shuddhabrata Sengupta with a live performance by the Toxic Titties.
Muñoz’s presentation, substantially revised and expanded, and Sengupta’s
brief polemic are represented here, while the Toxic Titties, a queer feminist
art collective, with primary author Julia Steinmetz, have addressed the

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 S I G N S Spring 2006 ❙ 611

issues raised in their University of California, Riverside, performance

through a critical essay.
Sengupta’s polemic dynamically highlights a range of crucial mitigating
factors to the 1970s idea of identity as being fixable in separable categories
linked to gender, race, and so on. Using concrete examples of the myriad
contemporary subjects who complicate previous conceptions of identity—
such as the rich Indian racist or the anti-Semitic black Muslim descendant
of slaves—Sengupta effectively sets the tone for the journal issue as a whole
by pointing to the simultaneous inescapability and profound complexity
of identity categories as they condition how and where people live in the
world in the early twenty-first century.
Confirming the issue’s commitment to a multidimensional and fluid
understanding of the subject, Eve Oishi’s essay on race, sex, and perverse
forms of visual pleasure and identification explores the productive leaps
that queer spectators of color make every day. These are leaps that, in
fact, take place regularly across the color line, across the line between gay
and straight, between men and women—leaps that complicate the dif-
ference between “me” and “not me” and that reveal identification as fluid,
as a process rather than a position. In contrast to the totalizing narratives
of much classical feminist film theory (in which you either are what’s on
screen, or are not), Oishi considers “the generative moment . . . in the
recognition of the impossibility of fully losing oneself through full iden-
tification with the image” (659).
At the heart of Oishi’s argument for a perverse theory of identification
is a commitment to partial and ambivalent identification, the power of
the spectator’s sense of “not quite” and “not yet.” Her writing revolves
around deeply personal (and political) encounters with film—her own
memories of watching The King and I and of forming a bond between
Oishi and her father as fans of westerns and Yakuza gangster films. Like
Oishi, Muñoz offers a portrait of queer and racialized spectatorship—but
focuses less on identity itself than on affect and emotion. “Feeling Brown,
Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the De-
pressive Position” orbits around a reading of the artist Nao Bustamante’s
video installation Neopolitan, in which we watch a loop of the artist weep-
ing as she watches and rewinds the conclusion of a film. Bustamante’s
work, Muñoz writes, “does not conform to our associations of art practices
that emerged at the moment of identity politics, nor does it represent an
avoidance of the various antagonisms within the social that define our
recognition and belonging as racialized, gendered, and sexed subjects”
(675). In developing a political reading of depression, Muñoz explores
the productive overlaps between feminist psychoanalytic theory (which is

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612 ❙ Doyle and Jones

traditionally blind to the subject of racial difference, as hooks points out

in the quotation in the section above) and theories of racial identity and
affect. By juxtaposing the writing of Melanie Klein (on the depressive
affective position) with that of Hortense Spillers (on race, psychoanalysis,
and critical thought), Muñoz begins to map a queer theory of race and
affect via a response to the question posed by Bustamante’s piece: Why
would a woman of color want to cry?
In “Territories, Identities, and Thresholds: The Saturday Mothers Phe-
nomenon in İstanbul,” Gülsüm Baydar and Berfin İvegen draw on urban
and gender theory to explore the way in which the mothers’ protest
movement against the disappearance of politically contentious individuals
under police custody in İstanbul, active from 1995–99, complicates con-
ventional ideas about space and identity. In particular, Baydar and İvegen
argue that the Saturday Mothers phenomenon served to unhinge the
binary oppositions, such as public versus private and masculine versus
feminine, that conventionally determine who is allowed to occupy what
social space. In particular, they argue, the mothers mobilized a specific
public space in İstanbul (along the “highly differentiated” İstiklal Street)
as well as a “naturalized motherhood identity with universalist claims”
(691) for political ends. In this way, they redefined the “maternal-feminine
not as an identity category but as a state of becoming and a line of flight
toward the radical transformation of the social imaginary” (713). To this
end, Baydar and İvegen argue compellingly that this specific woman-led
political intervention can serve as a crucial example of the radical global
potential of a new kind of feminist social protest.
In her essay, “Activists Who Yearn for Art That Transforms: Parallels
in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements in the United States,” Lisa
Gail Collins studies the parallels between the black arts and feminist art
movements and probes the limits of each movement, as well as each
movement’s specific contributions to a feminist antiracist visual theory
and practice. Noting that “many pivotal leaders in the largely parallel
movements were so deeply desirous of unity based on shared experience
that they either hesitated or refused to acknowledge and embrace the
complex diversity of their constituents because they perceived the true
recognition of diversity as potentially divisive” (719), Collins offers a
revised history of the two movements and poses an astute and politicized
institutional and discursive critique that attends to the intersections be-
tween gender and sexuality and race and ethnicity.
The Toxic Titties’ experience working with, through, and around Va-
nessa Beecroft gives us an unusual look inside the contemporary art world.
Here we have a queer feminist art collective taking on one of the most

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 S I G N S Spring 2006 ❙ 613

paradoxical contemporary high-profile artists—an “art star,” whose work

is staged in the most rarified art-world settings (museums, galleries, and
biennials) and is centered on the display of the female body but whose
politics are, in essence, veiled. As ambivalent as many art historians and
critics are about Beecroft’s work, few have actually bothered to take it
seriously enough to analyze it with the close eye and ethnographic ap-
proach deployed by the Toxic Titties. Heather Cassils and Clover Leary,
members of the collective who auditioned to participate in Beecroft’s
performance, set out with the intention of disrupting the performance
but soon found themselves overwhelmed, overpowered by Beecroft’s pro-
cess, which is designed to strip down each participant’s sense of individ-
uality. The Toxic Titties have been working through their participation
in Beecroft’s VB46 performance since 2001—documenting the aspects of
Beecroft’s process that are hidden from view, appropriating and reimag
ining Beecroft’s fascistic aesthetic, narrating and reframing their experience
of the performance. This process is ongoing, and the essay presented here
was authored by Toxic Tittie Steinmetz (who witnessed VB46 alongside
other members of the collective) with input and feedback from Cassils
and Leary.
Sharon P. Holland’s essay, “Death in Black and White: A Reading of
Marc Forster’s Monster’s Ball,” marks perhaps the outer limits of this kind
of scholarship, for it shows us where feminist thought takes us, how it
helps us to ask certain kinds of questions about sexuality, desire, and race,
and how those answers take us into other critical regions. Using the
conflicted reception history of the film Monster’s Ball as a way to track
the workings of white liberal ideology, which would, for example, sanitize
racism—which would prefer that racism had no erotics to it—Holland
offers a reading not only of the interracial desire that is this film’s most
spectacular element but also, and more provocatively, of the association
explored in this film between death, whiteness, and women. In doing so
Holland begins to sketch the psychic life, the unconscious, of the prison-
industrial complex.
Analisa Taylor’s contribution, “Malinche and Matriarchal Utopia: Gen-
dered Visions of Indigeneity in Mexico,” explodes myths of a wholesome
female-centered culture in the Zapotec region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Ana-
lyzing the film Blossoms of Fire, which explores the potential for trans-
gendering in this culture as unhinging outsiders’ views of homogenizing
mestizidad, and happy matriarchy, Taylor uses this case study to explore
the broader question of Mexican identity in general via the Malinche trope
(La Malinche was the Indian woman, a Christian convert, who enabled
the Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés by serving as his interpreter, but who

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614 ❙ Doyle and Jones

also almost certainly saved the lives of thousands of Indians by encouraging

him to negotiate). Through this analysis of the complex, two-sided figure
of La Malinche, she demonstrates how fantasies of happy matriarchy com-
bine with fears of the treacherous female in the Euro-American imaginary
to reinforce gendered, sexualized, and racialized stereotypes of the Mex-
ican subject.
In his essay, “Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: ‘Boys’ Love’ as Girls’
Love in Shôjo Manga,” James Welker “bends” lesbian film theory to ex-
plore the vicissitudes of gender in Japanese popular comic novels in which
“beautiful boys” are read on multiple levels as queer—as (simultaneously)
feminine, gay, and lesbian. Tracking aspects of the production and con-
sumption of this genre, Welker tells the suggestive story of a popular form
that is so queer on its surface that its lesbian dynamics seem to hide in
plain sight. Welker extends the scope of lesbian cultural studies to consider
the importance of these texts to the story of the formation of lesbian
subjectivity in Japan.
In the study of visual culture of all kinds, the most innovative new
feminist scholarship does more than forward the analysis of work by
women or critique representations of women. Informed, intersectionally,
by other complex theories of identity and meaning, feminist scholarship,
as these essays exemplify, can expand but also refine how we think about
identity and visuality as well as the conceptual categories that are central
to our work, such as history, experience, and difference. In today’s world
of rapidly shifting national and ideological boundaries, we believe that
nothing could be more important in the realm of intellectual and creative
inquiry.

Department of English
University of California, Riverside (Doyle)

Art History and Visual Studies

University of Manchester (Jones)

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