Jennifer Doyle Amelia Jones

Introduction: New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture

ow does she look? In 1991, Bad Object-Choices, a collective of queer

visual artists and scholars, produced How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video (1991), an anthology of essays and conversations about queer sexuality and spectatorship in relation to lm and video. In her essay for this volume, Teresa de Lauretis (1991) considers the layers behind the title question, how do I look? To you, to myself, how do I appear, how am I seen? . . . What are the conditions of my visibility? . . . How do I look at you, at her, at the lm, at myself? How do I see, what are the modes, constraints, and possibilities of my seeing, the terms of vision for me? . . . How do I look on, as the lm unrolls from reel to reel in the projector, as the images appear and the story unfolds on the screen, as the fantasy scenario unveils and the soundtrack plays on in my head? The question, how do I look? speaks to subjective vision and social visibility, being and passing, representation and spectatorshipthe conditions of the visible, what can be seen, and eroticized, and on what scene (223). How Do I Look? was groundbreaking for its inclusion of frank interchanges about the political tensions within the queer intellectual communityabout, for example, homophobia in feminist lm theory, the failure in much scholarship on sexuality to think about race, the racism that structures the dominant gaze in gay cinema and photography, and the asymmetry between the homophobic structures that put pressure on lesbian and gay artists and spectators. The book demands that people working in the visual arts consider how our desires and identities inform how we look, how we appear, and what we see. The essays in this special issue of Signs, New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture, expand on the questions raised in How Do I Look? and investigate the layers behind a slightly rephrased question, how does she look?an equally double-edged query that points to the female subject as both viewed and viewing and as embodied and socially and politically situated in specic and particular ways. The essays collected in this issue

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2006, vol. 31, no. 3] 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2006/3103-0003$10.00

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take as their subject a she for whom this question cant be answered fully without thinking about gender (or what feminist discourses in lm studies and art history in the 1980s called sexual difference) as inextricably entwined (embodied, experienced, thought, and imagined) with other aspects of identity, including race and ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and class. The projects represented in this issue center on a feminine subject for whom this question cant be answered without thinking about the complexities of how viewed and viewing subjects are situated in space, time, and history.

Gender beyond sexual difference

Politicized critical practices must challenge the ways in which the structures of disciplines and the models of critique developing out of identity politics have tended to carve up and atten out identityfor example, by rendering race and class outside the concerns of feminism proper, race outside of gay studies proper, sexuality outside of ethnic studies proper, and so on. They must refuse the tendency within each strand of identity politics to assume a subject who is neutral in all but one highly charged and identied way (within feminism, for example, a subject who is marked as female but who is otherwise presumably straight, white, middle class, and rst world). The most politically rigorous new feminist scholarship in visual studies (including performance, theater, and drama studies; lm and television studies; dance theory and history; architectural and urban history and theory; new media studies; art history; and visual culture studies), exemplied by the essays in this issue, insists on the intersectionality of gendered experience as inherently, simultaneously, and irrevocably raced, classed, sexed, and so on. As developed by scholars such as Kimberle Crenshaw in the late 1980s, a theory of intersectionality starts from the premise that people live multiple, layered identities derived from social relations, history and the operation of structures of power (2004, 2).1 The term intersectionality points to the political imperative that discourses addressing social oppression acknowledge the complexity of how identity actually functions as we navigate the world and engage with others. As Crenshaw puts it in her 1994 essay, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,
1 The term intersectionality was introduced and developed by Crenshaw (1992) in her work on legal denitions of racial identity as well as specic cultural events such as the Clarence Thomas hearings.

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feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling (1994, 94). It is this kind of location that resists telling that each of the essays in this issue addresses, giving words to complex visual encounters that require the comprehension of different levels, modes, and political permutations of identity formation.2 If in academic writing the location of women of color resists telling, it is because it is often constituted outside proper disciplinary boundaries. For example, attention paid to the politics of identity and identication in visual art is often dismissed by guardians of the discipline of art history as cultural studies, as antiformalist, ahistorical, or both, and therefore as outside the eld.3 Scholars working from and with identity positions that are doubly and triply marginalized may nd themselves at odds not only with the eld that corresponds to the objects or images they are examining (e.g., lm studies, art history, and media studies) but with the institutional spaces that support the identity-based academic elds to which their work is relevantsuch as lesbian and gay studies, womens studies, and ethnic studies. Femininity, as it is experienced and perceived in relation to various subjects seen and seeing in the world, is thus understood and explored in these essays through an array of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary tools as always already conditioned by its relationship to structures of racial, ethnic, sexual, class, national, and other modes of identity. To articulate this twenty-rst-century conception of gendered identity and its consequences, each essay draws on feminist theories of the visual but equally on antiracist, queer, postcolonial, and/or Marxist theories of how seeing
2 At the same time, the editors take note of Judith Butlers intelligent questioning of approaches to cultural critique that hinge on making identity plural: Plurality disrupts the social ontology of the subject itself when that relationality is understood not merely as what persists among subjects, but as the internal impossibility of the subject as a discrete and unitary kind of being. Identity as effect, as site, as dynamic, as simultaneously formed and formative is not equivalent to the notion of identity as subject and ground. Reading identities as they are situated and formed in relation to one another means moving beyond the heuristic requirement of identity itself (1995, 446). 3 Douglas Crimp addresses this erasure in his essay Getting the Warhol We Deserve (1999).

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assigns social and psychological value to subjects (bodies) and their representations. These essays all exceed the boundaries of a single discipline, ratifying the authors and editors collective commitment to a politics of complexity. The aim of this special issue, then, is to represent the work of those scholars who are committed to an intersectional feminist politics and visual theorywhose work traverses a range of critical territories. These essays are deeply indebted to models of feminist analysis dominant in the visual theory of the 1970s and 1980s but are also critical of their limits, of their tendencies to focus on conceptions of feminine identity that were implicitly white, middle class, rst world, and straight. As black cultural theorist bell hooks put it in her 1992 essay The Oppositional Gaze, Feminist lm theory rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework that privileges sexual difference actively suppresses recognition of race. . . . The concept Woman [in the abstract] effaces the difference between women in specic socio-historical contexts ([1992] 2003, 99100). Drawing on the insights of earlier cultural theorists such as hooks, this issue of Signs seeks to forward scholarship produced from a feminist bibliography but whose aims and whose complexity cannot be fully read within the framework of feminist art history or feminist visual theory.

The essays

New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture was initially inspired not only by some of the important critical and artistic work noted above but also by a conference titled Intersectional Feminisms, which was co-organized by Jennifer Doyle, Amelia Jones, and Molly McGarry and took place in April 2003 at the University of California, Riverside. This introduction, furthermore, is also inspired by the dynamic presentations and performances given at the Theorizing Queer Visualities symposium and events, which took place in April 2005 at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Co-organized by Jones and Laura Doan, the symposium included presentations by Doyle and Jose Esteban Mun oz and queer feminist performative engagements by Ron Athey, Juliana Snapper, and Vaginal Davis. Intersectional Feminisms included presentations by scholars and artists such as Lorraine OGrady, Nao Bustamante, Inderpal Grewal, Mun oz, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta with a live performance by the Toxic Titties. Mun ozs presentation, substantially revised and expanded, and Senguptas brief polemic are represented here, while the Toxic Titties, a queer feminist art collective, with primary author Julia Steinmetz, have addressed the

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issues raised in their University of California, Riverside, performance through a critical essay. Senguptas polemic dynamically highlights a range of crucial mitigating factors to the 1970s idea of identity as being xable in separable categories linked to gender, race, and so on. Using concrete examples of the myriad contemporary subjects who complicate previous conceptions of identity such as the rich Indian racist or the anti-Semitic black Muslim descendant of slavesSengupta effectively sets the tone for the journal issue as a whole by pointing to the simultaneous inescapability and profound complexity of identity categories as they condition how and where people live in the world in the early twenty-rst century. Conrming the issues commitment to a multidimensional and uid understanding of the subject, Eve Oishis essay on race, sex, and perverse forms of visual pleasure and identication explores the productive leaps that queer spectators of color make every day. These are leaps that, in fact, take place regularly across the color line, across the line between gay and straight, between men and womenleaps that complicate the difference between me and not me and that reveal identication as uid, as a process rather than a position. In contrast to the totalizing narratives of much classical feminist lm theory (in which you either are whats on screen, or are not), Oishi considers the generative moment . . . in the recognition of the impossibility of fully losing oneself through full identication with the image (659). At the heart of Oishis argument for a perverse theory of identication is a commitment to partial and ambivalent identication, the power of the spectators sense of not quite and not yet. Her writing revolves around deeply personal (and political) encounters with lmher own memories of watching The King and I and of forming a bond between Oishi and her father as fans of westerns and Yakuza gangster lms. Like Oishi, Mun oz offers a portrait of queer and racialized spectatorshipbut focuses less on identity itself than on affect and emotion. Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position orbits around a reading of the artist Nao Bustamantes video installation Neopolitan, in which we watch a loop of the artist weeping as she watches and rewinds the conclusion of a lm. Bustamantes work, Mun oz writes, does not conform to our associations of art practices that emerged at the moment of identity politics, nor does it represent an avoidance of the various antagonisms within the social that dene our recognition and belonging as racialized, gendered, and sexed subjects (675). In developing a political reading of depression, Mun oz explores the productive overlaps between feminist psychoanalytic theory (which is

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traditionally blind to the subject of racial difference, as hooks points out in the quotation in the section above) and theories of racial identity and affect. By juxtaposing the writing of Melanie Klein (on the depressive affective position) with that of Hortense Spillers (on race, psychoanalysis, and critical thought), Mun oz begins to map a queer theory of race and affect via a response to the question posed by Bustamantes piece: Why would a woman of color want to cry? In Territories, Identities, and Thresholds: The Saturday Mothers Phe stanbul, Gu vegen draw on urban nomenon in I lsu m Baydar and Bern I and gender theory to explore the way in which the mothers protest movement against the disappearance of politically contentious individuals stanbul, active from 199599, complicates conunder police custody in I vegen ventional ideas about space and identity. In particular, Baydar and I argue that the Saturday Mothers phenomenon served to unhinge the binary oppositions, such as public versus private and masculine versus feminine, that conventionally determine who is allowed to occupy what social space. In particular, they argue, the mothers mobilized a specic stanbul (along the highly differentiated I stiklal Street) public space in I as well as a naturalized motherhood identity with universalist claims (691) for political ends. In this way, they redened the maternal-feminine not as an identity category but as a state of becoming and a line of ight toward the radical transformation of the social imaginary (713). To this vegen argue compellingly that this specic woman-led end, Baydar and I political intervention can serve as a crucial example of the radical global potential of a new kind of feminist social protest. In her essay, Activists Who Yearn for Art That Transforms: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements in the United States, Lisa Gail Collins studies the parallels between the black arts and feminist art movements and probes the limits of each movement, as well as each movements specic contributions to a feminist antiracist visual theory and practice. Noting that many pivotal leaders in the largely parallel movements were so deeply desirous of unity based on shared experience that they either hesitated or refused to acknowledge and embrace the complex diversity of their constituents because they perceived the true recognition of diversity as potentially divisive (719), Collins offers a revised history of the two movements and poses an astute and politicized institutional and discursive critique that attends to the intersections between gender and sexuality and race and ethnicity. The Toxic Titties experience working with, through, and around Vanessa Beecroft gives us an unusual look inside the contemporary art world. Here we have a queer feminist art collective taking on one of the most

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paradoxical contemporary high-prole artistsan art star, whose work is staged in the most raried art-world settings (museums, galleries, and biennials) and is centered on the display of the female body but whose politics are, in essence, veiled. As ambivalent as many art historians and critics are about Beecrofts work, few have actually bothered to take it seriously enough to analyze it with the close eye and ethnographic approach deployed by the Toxic Titties. Heather Cassils and Clover Leary, members of the collective who auditioned to participate in Beecrofts performance, set out with the intention of disrupting the performance but soon found themselves overwhelmed, overpowered by Beecrofts process, which is designed to strip down each participants sense of individuality. The Toxic Titties have been working through their participation in Beecrofts VB46 performance since 2001documenting the aspects of Beecrofts process that are hidden from view, appropriating and reimag ining Beecrofts fascistic aesthetic, narrating and reframing their experience of the performance. This process is ongoing, and the essay presented here was authored by Toxic Tittie Steinmetz (who witnessed VB46 alongside other members of the collective) with input and feedback from Cassils and Leary. Sharon P. Hollands essay, Death in Black and White: A Reading of Marc Forsters Monsters Ball, marks perhaps the outer limits of this kind of scholarship, for it shows us where feminist thought takes us, how it helps us to ask certain kinds of questions about sexuality, desire, and race, and how those answers take us into other critical regions. Using the conicted reception history of the lm Monsters Ball as a way to track the workings of white liberal ideology, which would, for example, sanitize racismwhich would prefer that racism had no erotics to itHolland offers a reading not only of the interracial desire that is this lms most spectacular element but also, and more provocatively, of the association explored in this lm between death, whiteness, and women. In doing so Holland begins to sketch the psychic life, the unconscious, of the prisonindustrial complex. Analisa Taylors contribution, Malinche and Matriarchal Utopia: Gendered Visions of Indigeneity in Mexico, explodes myths of a wholesome female-centered culture in the Zapotec region of Oaxaca, Mexico. Analyzing the lm Blossoms of Fire, which explores the potential for transgendering in this culture as unhinging outsiders views of homogenizing mestizidad, and happy matriarchy, Taylor uses this case study to explore the broader question of Mexican identity in general via the Malinche trope (La Malinche was the Indian woman, a Christian convert, who enabled the Spanish explorer Herna n Corte s by serving as his interpreter, but who

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also almost certainly saved the lives of thousands of Indians by encouraging him to negotiate). Through this analysis of the complex, two-sided gure of La Malinche, she demonstrates how fantasies of happy matriarchy combine with fears of the treacherous female in the Euro-American imaginary to reinforce gendered, sexualized, and racialized stereotypes of the Mexican subject. In his essay, Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: Boys Love as Girls Love in Sho jo Manga, James Welker bends lesbian lm theory to explore the vicissitudes of gender in Japanese popular comic novels in which beautiful boys are read on multiple levels as queeras (simultaneously) feminine, gay, and lesbian. Tracking aspects of the production and consumption of this genre, Welker tells the suggestive story of a popular form that is so queer on its surface that its lesbian dynamics seem to hide in plain sight. Welker extends the scope of lesbian cultural studies to consider the importance of these texts to the story of the formation of lesbian subjectivity in Japan. In the study of visual culture of all kinds, the most innovative new feminist scholarship does more than forward the analysis of work by women or critique representations of women. Informed, intersectionally, by other complex theories of identity and meaning, feminist scholarship, as these essays exemplify, can expand but also rene how we think about identity and visuality as well as the conceptual categories that are central to our work, such as history, experience, and difference. In todays world of rapidly shifting national and ideological boundaries, we believe that nothing could be more important in the realm of intellectual and creative inquiry. Department of English University of California, Riverside (Doyle) Art History and Visual Studies University of Manchester (Jones)

References

Bad Object-Choices, ed. 1991. How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video. Seattle: Bay Press. Butler, Judith. 1995. Collected and Fractured: Response to Identities. In Identities, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., 43947. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crenshaw, Kimberle . 1992. Whose Story Is It Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill. In Racing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays

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on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison, 40240. New York: Pantheon. . 1994. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. In The Public Nature of Private Violence: The Discovery of Domestic Abuse, ed. Martha Albertson Fineman and Roxanne Mykitiuk, 93118. New York: Routledge. . 2004. Intersectionality: A Tool for Gender and Economic Justice. Womens Rights and Economic Change 9 (August), http://www.awid.org/ publications/primers/intersectionality_en.pdf. Crimp, Douglas. 1999. Getting the Warhol We Deserve. Social Text 59 (Summer): 4966. de Lauretis, Teresa. 1991. Film and the Visible. In Bad Object-Choices 1991, 22364. hooks, bell. (1992) 2003. The Oppositional Gaze. In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones, 94105. New York: Routledge.