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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... take another look at the sites of female vanishing and reappearance , and I discovered , on second glance , scenes littered with the traces of other , often unidentified bodies that had never been visible in the first place . While I ...
... takes place before our eyes , leaving us feeling — wrongly — content and relieved at the apparent absence of ... take pleasure in the spectacle of violence because at some level it knows that the violence enacted is always illusory ...
... takes place in the name of vanishing but the mechanisms by means of which these instances of violence try to render themselves invisible . In chapter four , for example , I juxtapose two films based on the same urban myth of an older ...
... takes the threat of heterosexual union one step further , when the disappearance of the daughter , Seraphim , into marriage can only happen once the mother has been literally erased . In contrast , chapter three focuses on nar- ratives ...
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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 | |