Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and FeminismDuke University Press, 2003 - 239 страница With the help of mirrors, trap doors, elevators, photographs, and film, women vanish and return in increasingly spectacular ways throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Karen Beckman tracks the proliferation of this elusive figure, the vanishing woman, from her genesis in Victorian stage magic through her development in conjunction with photography and film. Beckman reveals how these new visual technologies projected their anxieties about insubstantiality and reproducibility onto the female body, producing an image of "woman" as utterly unstable and constantly prone to disappearance. Drawing on cinema studies and psychoanalysis as well as the histories of magic, spiritualism, and photography, Beckman looks at particular instances of female vanishing at specific historical moments—in Victorian magic’s obsessive manipulation of female and colonized bodies, spiritualist photography’s search to capture traces of ghosts, the comings and goings of bodies in early cinema, and Bette Davis’s multiple roles as a fading female star. As Beckman places the vanishing woman in the context of feminism’s discussion of spectacle and subjectivity, she explores not only the problems, but also the political utility of this obstinate figure who hovers endlessly between visible and invisible worlds. Through her readings, Beckman argues that the visibly vanishing woman repeatedly signals the lurking presence of less immediately perceptible psychic and physical erasures, and she contends that this enigmatic figure, so ubiquitous in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, provides a new space through which to consider the relationships between visibility, gender, and agency. |
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... material body ? And how can we even distin- guish between real and imaginal bodies within the context of magi- cal disappearance , where magic might be described as the practice of collapsing the boundary between real and the imaginary ...
... material body in situations of ex- treme violence . Our repeated failure to focus on the real does not necessarily indicate the mind's unwillingness to deal with difficult material , although some minds are always more willing than ...
... material bodies , it would be mislead- ing to suggest that I pursue this f1gure with the sole purpose of draw- ing back the curtain , of exposing the illusions that blind us to the sufferings and oppressions of real bodies . Vanishing ...
... material body , yet both also rely heavily on narratives of female eradi- cation in the psychic realm . In Victorian Britain , for example , the perception of unmarried women as surplus bodies in need of depor- tation implies that ...
Magic, Film, and Feminism Karen Redrobe Beckman. in material or visual terms . In a discussion of a hysterical patient named " Mrs. Peters , " for example , Juliet Mitchell writes : " She ' dis- appeared ' in my company . This is hard to ...
Садржај
Surplus Bodies Vanishing Women Conjuring Imperialism and the Rhetoric of Disappearance 18511901 | 17 |
Insubstantial Media Ectoplasm Exposure and the Stillbirth of Film | 61 |
Mother Knows Best Magic and Matricide | 93 |
Violent Vanishings Hitchcock Harlan and the Politics of Prestidigitation | 129 |
Shooting Stars Vanishing Comets Bette Davis and Cinematic Fading | 153 |
Afterword | 189 |
Notes | 195 |
Works Cited | 219 |
Filmography | 233 |
235 | |