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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... space of the cinema , not least because that image keeps evading her . As she watches the fashionable lady disappear and reappear , the crush of other bodies against her own threatens to ruin the integrity of her fantasy space and to ...
... space of female vanishing that I suggest is useful to feminism but also how the vanishing lady — herself a subject under attack — might bear some of the responsibility for those other cor- poreal eradications . Magic transforms the ...
... space of the " real " and the " imaginal " ? Given that much of the violence of vanishing occurs as a result of the invisible conflation of these two spheres of being , one might think that an ethical imperative requires us persistently ...
... space of death and the struggle to do so anyway . Attempts to fix these dead bodies , to capture their " reality , " tend to produce lists of physical mutilations that numb rather than engage the focused mind . Ehrenreich , for example ...
... space between these two categories , to think about the tensions that arise when the borders between real and imagined bodies become blurred , and film becomes my privileged example of this space . Through a series of close readings of ...
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 | |