Expressions of Us and Them
Germaine Greer's Illustrated Magazine Articles as Sex Education Manual for Women
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ya'ara Gil-Glazer
Sharp and provocative, Germaine Greer (1939-) is a feminist public intellectual whose worldview was inspired by the bohemian and anarchist groups of the 1960s-70s. Born in Australia, she moved to the UK in 1964. Parallel with her academic career as a lecturer, she was active in the London counterculture scene, including writing for Oz underground magazine and serving as cofounding editor of Suck, subtitled "the first European sexpaper" (Kleinhentz, 2018; Wallace, 2013). In both Oz and Suck, which combined words and visual images to an equal degree, Greer called upon women to know their sexuality and use it in their struggle for equal rights, and served as a counterweight to the male-dominated editorial desk. In Oz, this was particularly true in a special issue where her theory that “encouraged women to explore the variations of their own heterosexuality in the name of women’s and sexual liberation” (Le Masurier, 2016, p. 28). In Suck she gave practical critical sexual information. In both magazines, the combination of Greer’s texts and creative, humorous, and subversive drawn and photographed illustrations – including her own nude photos – made for a unique and revolutionary sex education message, much of it silenced at the time, and still sorely needed. In this study, I examine Greer's texts and the attached illustrations in Oz Suck, within the theoretical framework of critical visual literacy and critical sexual literacy, addressing the question: How these image-texts serve as essential sexual pedagogy materials for women?
Writing a Photograph: How AI Is Changing Photography View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stafford Smith
The camera preceded photography by several centuries, but it may be the camera that is bowing out soon, while photography lives on. This is all thanks to artificial intelligence, or AI. The recent spread of easy to use, high-end software like DALL-E and Midjourney has changed the debate from whether digital photographs can be trusted to whether or not photography exists at all. The verb, "to take" a picture will need to be changed to "to write" a picture, as the tiresome task of getting some to pose and crack a smile becomes a thing of the past. How this impacts working photographers and photography curricula remains to be seen but cannot be ignored. The postmodern dream of semioticians has at last become realized as photography has truly become language, a literal one, as the camera is replaced by the keyboard and memory is replaced by the simulacrum.
Fairy Tales in Flux: Narrative Re-visions through the Currents of Time View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ziwei Zhao
This paper examines the different re-imaginations of two classic fairy tales: “The Little Mermaid” and “Cinderella”. By tracing how these stories transformed through the currents of time, this presentation aims to critically explore the socio-historical forces driving these changes, as well as the dynamic nature of storytelling and its ability to evolve and expand. In an age of online publishing and seemingly endless Disney remakes, it is increasingly important to appreciate the adaptability of stories while remaining conscious of the underlying messages they convey. Drawing on Adrienne Rich’s notion of “re-vision”, this presentation engages with these ever-shifting tales through the lens of feminist, queer, and post-colonial theory. It teases apart the intricate tapestry of re-visions by reviewing the genealogy of these stories and offers a close textual analysis of their intertextuality and subversion. Ultimately, this study celebrates the transformative power of stories while remaining cautious of the potential biases embedded within. It recognizes stories as both mirrors and shapers of society and encourages the audience to take note of their contributions to ongoing cultural conversations.
