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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... turn the dissertation into a book . I also thank the Council of Graduate Schools and University Microfilms International for their support of this project . I thank the faculty members at the University of Rochester for their ...
... turn of the century American marketing cam- paign trades on a notion of woman as constantly changing and utterly ... turns distract our attention away from the mildly disturbing question of what happened to this lady's limbs . The window ...
... turn " real " violence into metaphors , however , Barbara Ehrenreich , in her forward to Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies , insists upon the supremacy of seeing over reading : " The reader's impulse is to engage in a kind of mental ...
... turn acts of violence into stories about ' something else ' ? And why does the mind prefer one narrative over another when it is distracted away from seeing violence itself ? 10 In the case of murder , the movement of the mind away from ...
... turning to one of Hollywood's camp icons : Bette Davis . She provides an apt focus for this inquiry first because she appeared in no less than four films about fading female stars , and , second , because in recent years her films have ...
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 | |