Portrayals of Sexuality
Sexual Emancipation and Visual Culture in High School and College
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ya'ara Gil-Glazer
The proposed study expands on the concept of visual critical pedagogy (VCP). Based on four terms intrinsic to both critical pedagogy and visual culture: exposure, deciphering, representation and visibility, VCP suggests merging the theory and practice of both fields. These concepts are used to analyze three case studies in which high school and college students have applied VCP as an emancipatory activist tool in the struggle against oppressive perceptions related to sexuality – through provocative-protestive use of artistic media. The first case is a final project by a high school student made up of his bodily and facial portraits, representing his “outing” in front of the school community. The second is a presentation on genital mutilation – following works by Egyptian cartoonist Doaa Eladl – by three Israeli Arab college students, designed to raise a discussion on marginalized women’s right to their body, which also exposed Jewish students’ prejudices. The third case is a play based on a college student’s personal story, exposing the “knowledge” behind the contraceptive pill and discuss issues such as (male) gynecologist-patient power relations, the pharmaceutical industry and male and female sexual freedom. All cases represented a climatic encounter between the spectators and artworks addressing contested sexual issues of broad social significance.
Neo-burlesque and the Aging Performer: "True" Liberation or "Superficial" Empowerment?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gemma Collard-Stokes
Rejecting the correlation between ageing and asexuality that persists in the UK's cultural representation of the [female] ageing body, this paper reveals the importance of sexuality and maintaining a sexual identity to “older” women, paying particular attention to how they negotiate such representations. Through in-depth interviews and ethnographic participant observation of a cohort of women, aged 50 and older engaged in a programme of recreational burlesque dance, the paper explores the transformative possibilities mediated through taking part in dramatic arts and the processes thereby initiated. The author examines how the construction of a performer identity, through carefully conceived acts and stage names, supports empowerment and increased self-esteem through sexualized dance. In conclusion, the paper discusses the psychological and physiological benefits of such an activity and its capacity to negate social invisibility as experienced by older women.
Nude: Praxis through Experimental Performance on Instagram
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fidelia Lam
NUDE is an ongoing experimental online performance work that utilizes an Instagram account created for the artist’s laptop as a platform for exploring the intimacies and significances of the laptop apparatus in our technologically mediated society. Through automated screen recordings posted to the account “fideliasmacbookpro2,” this experimental performance posits the idea that our technological devices are more intimate representations of us than are our actual physical bodies. Instagram is used as a performance space to question the very anxieties of vulnerability, information security, production, and authenticity that the platform exemplifies. I draw on theorists as disparate as Brian Rotman, Rosi Braidotti, Diana Taylor, and Jonathan Crary to focus on the work as it both enacts and interrogates the self-surveilling practices of new media and online social media networks, the intimate relationships we have with our technological devices as they both empower and control us, the anxieties of work, production, and presentation, and the shifting notions of memory, knowledge, and knowledge production.
