Theorizing the Body in Visual Culture (original) (raw)
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The Association for Art History , 2019
The Annual Conference brings together international research and critical debate about art, art history and visual cultures. This key annual event is an opportunity to keep up to date with new research, hear leading keynotes, broaden networks and exchange ideas. The Annual Conference is open to all. It is a key annual event for those presenting new research, and those wanting to listen and learn about new research. Attracting around 500 attendees each year, the conference is popular with academics, curators, practitioners, phd students, early career researchers and non-art historians engaged with art history research. 2019 Annual Conference 4 – 6 April 2019 University of Brighton NOTATE, DOCUMENT, SCORE: BODY CULTURE & VISUAL CULTURE Session Convenors Paisid Aramphongphan, De Montfort University Hyewon Yoon, University of New Hampshire Session Abstract This session will examine the intersections of body culture and visual culture across time, encompassing notation, performance and experimental scores, photographic documentation, film, and other archival sources. Rather than focusing on rubrics traditionally understood as dance, such as choreography and performance designed for time-limited showings, the papers examine body and movement as an expanded field of practice, and how that fits within, emerges out of, and/or shapes a particular social and historical context.
Body and Visual Image – New Readings: Deconstruction, Medium and Immediacy
Social Sciences Research Network/ESA Lisbon 2009
The interest in body images alongside a concern for their reception and repercussions on the viewer has an exceptional innovative dimension - one that echoes the program conveyed by contemporary theory through which a new significance of the World Image and World Knowledge is launched. It gathers not only Art Theory, Image Criticism, Body Interpretation but also Narrative Perspectives. Making this position explicit, our conception of body image criticism begins with the analysis of the form, which articulates the authority attributed to the medium in which it is located, the narratives problematic, as well as the nature of the body’s immediacy in the world, consequently producing a new paradigm which is essential to a better understanding of the images. To make mediation a formal problem, it is necessary for an individual to realize how absolutely impossible it is to explain visual content and its effects, whether in the realm of arts and technology, science or politics without a discussion of their contexts, forms, and histories. In visual culture, it becomes history by drawing attention to the visual object’s nature, rather than the role of the viewer/critic, or the embodied subjectivity of the author or subject. This second approach to visual images claims the importance of identity in the sense that every interpretation differs according to the subject position. “Far from suggesting that an explanation follows from a particular identity according to some essential or defining characteristic, this [approach] assumes that subjectivity is always in a state of flux and that while all knowledge is situated, it is never fixed” (Haraway, 1988). Virtually or aesthetically speaking, body imagistic and cultural knowledge are located and never permanent. Expressive bodies, arts and sign languages achieve (im)possible readings due to volatile subjectivities. Given that the human figure has always been artistically exploited in its formal and anatomic visions. We will than present a template sign for the meanings and dominant interpretative paradigms of body’s visual image, approaching the implicit diversity and fragmentation in postmodern narrative perspectives and their communicative accomplishments.
Properties of cultural embodiment: Lessons from the anthropology of the body
At present for a genuinely cultural theory of embodiment the first step should be to bring together cognitive linguistic and anthropological discourses on embodiment. The specific strength of cognitive linguistics is its analytic tool of embodied image schemas. However, a cultural approach requires moving towards a more contextadaptive analysis, as expressed in my notion of situated image schemas. The specific strength of the anthropology of the body, in particular cultural phenomenology, is a contextually situated, qualitative and performative approach that views embodiment as being-in-the-world. Based on both theoretical strands, I will argue that cognitive theory should widen its purview (a) by looking at the integral relation between embodied intentionality, agency and human selves, as well as the cultural nature of the preconceptual; (b) by exploring “shared” or “distributed embodiment” between agents; and (c) by modeling the body-discourse relation bi-directionally, including how discursive imagery is implanted into body awareness.
In Visual Pleasure, Laura Mulvey describes how human curiosity and the desire to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. 1 Mulvey's analysis of scopophilia, deriving pleasure from looking, emphasizes recognition and misrecognition in objectivity and self-image. " The image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior, projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject." (Ibid., 17) Consequently, this misrecognition is caused by the gendered difference in spectator and image representation. Mulvey argues that there is a "determining male gaze" in mainstream cinema, which "projects its fantasy onto the female figure," creating a split between the active male and passive female. 2 For this reason, the scopophilic pleasure in looking by way of cinematic forms continues to determine the female body as a sexual object.
Hydra: Interdisciplinary Journal of the Social Sciences , 2013
This article questions the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy followed by most Western academia. It compares and contrasts two ethnographies of the body that entail different theoretical conceptions of the body, casting doubt on the ‘Cogito ergo sum’ which reduces the body to this ‘common thing’ on which the authority of a superior private mind is exerted. The first ethnography - ‘The Body of One Color: Indian Wrestling, the Indian State, and Utopian Somatics’ by Alter (1993) - seems to follow, at first, this tradition, defending the Foucauldian image of an inanimate and politically benign body inhabited by a multiplicity of external force relations called ‘power’. However, in his conclusion Alter (1993) questions the Foucauldian framework stating that the Indian wrestler does not express his protest rationally, but fundamentally embodies his opposition to state domination. The second ethnography - ‘Words from the Holy People: a case study in cultural phenomenology’ by Thomas Csordas (1994) - introduces his concept of ‘embodiment’ as the way bodies are inhabited in the world prior to all abstract objectifications of it. I conclude with Lambek’s original argument (1998) that the discussed mind/body problem arises from the human capacity of self-reflection and needs to be understood in its specific Western socio-historical context.
Encounters on the borders of the Immaterial: Body, Technology and Visual Culture
From representation to abstraction and from the materiality of the object to the fluidity of experience, the trajectory of the artistic object from the beginning of the 20th century up until today has subjected it into a constant questioning of its material substance and an incessant expansion of its communicative means. As contemporary artists realize their work through time-specific –hence fleeting- actions, temporary installations and intangible bytes and pixels, the question of the immaterial rises as a challenging enigma that poses a new question to every answer attempt: Can we talk about immateriality and visuality within the same discourse? Can the immaterial be linked to the intellect and the corporeal at the same time? How can we experience it with the body? (Doctoral thesis in English and Spanish. See links for each language)
2022
Note: This syllabus is suitable for a graduate course or honors/upper level undergraduate seminar. DESCRIPTION - This course provides an in-depth introduction to historical and contemporary understandings of the body and embodiment in society. Drawing on a broad range of interdisciplinary literature and theoretical traditions from the social sciences, human geography, cultural studies, media studies, philosophy and the humanities, this course explores the symbolic and material horizons along and out of which bodies fashion—and are fashioned by—worlds, myth, societies, and selves. Part I of the course considers the cosmological and organizing principles of the body in myth and enlightenment thinking, bringing each into conversation with understandings of the body in early sociology. Part II introduces the phenomenological, post-structural, postmodern, and cultural theoretical perspectives vital to the “bodily turn” and thematization of the body in social thought that occurred in the late 20th century. Part III examines body and embodiment in relation to issues of identity, place, and the boundaries of the embodied self. Topics from this section include sex, gender, race, and class; health, medicine, ageing and the life course; and posthumanism. Part IV attends to the public-facing social body, exploring the body at worship and play, the body that witnesses and protests, and the aesthetic politics embodied in art and the built environment.
Toward a Strong Cultural Sociology of the Body and Embodiment
Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter, 2023
Tracing the thematization of culture and the body across modern, postmodern, and neo-modern sociological thought, this chapter explores the possibility of developing a meaning-centered, strong cultural sociology of the body and embodiment, one that approaches body and embodiment as constituting a uniquely hermeneutic situation—a fusion of subject and object, ideality and materiality—structured by cultural codes and dependent upon interpretation for getting itself out into the social world. The development of a Strong Program cultural sociological perspective on the body is, author Anne Marie Champagne argues, uniquely suited to ferreting out and reconstructing the personal and collective representations, senses and sensibilities, and myths and motifs through which the physical body comes to embody self, society, and world. **** NOTE: This is a post-peer review, pre-edited version of a chapter published in Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter (Bristol University Press, 2023), edited by Anne Marie Champagne and Asia Friedman. It differs from the definitive publisher-authenticated version cited below. Definitive publisher version: Champagne, A. M. (2023). "1: Toward a Strong Cultural Sociology of the Body and Embodiment". In Interpreting the Body. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press. Retrieved Mar 17, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529211580.ch001