This article offers a timely, critical analysis of the male gaze upon sportswomen in male Chinese fans’ consumption of sporting megaevents. We use the most popular Chinese-language sports fandom platform, Hupu, as the data repository and scrutinise the threads of male Hupu users’ postings about two elite sportswomen at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics as the case studies. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), we elucidate the discursive strategies that male Chinese fans adopt to sexualise (...) sportswomen and trivialise their accomplishments. The research findings showcase how China’s sports fandom has evolved as a masculine terrain, where men’s visions of asymmetrical gender power relations are discursively negotiated and rationalised. (shrink)

첨예하고 중대한 사안으로 떠오른 디지털 성범죄 사진 · 영상파일의 불법적 생산과 유포 · 무한공유 시스템은 현실세계의 여성들의 일상 속 시공간을 얽어매고 재구축하는 조건으로 강력히 작동하고 있다. 필자는 이러한 디지털성범죄 시스템을 남성 시선-주체의 특권적 인식 좌표계의 창출로 분석해내고자 하며 이 시스템의 메커니즘을 떠받히고 있는 형이상학적 기반들을 분쇄하고자 한다. 필자는 여성의 위치와 이동반경, 일거수일투족을 파악, 포착해내는 이러한 인식지표 틀의 초월성을 다음과 같은 두가지 측면에서 분석해내고자 한다. 첫째, 수직적 초월성(transcendent)의 측면에서 여성의 몸이 구획되고 차등적으로 배치되는 기원을 데카르트의 『성찰』을 통해 고찰할 것이다. 둘째, 칸트적 (...) 의미에서의 초월론적(transcendental) 측면에 입각하여 여기저기 파인 남근 다발체들의 시선-구멍이 일으키는 시공간의 왜곡과 변형에 대해 논의하겠다. 더 나아가 필자는 환상의 일상화된 무대로서 기능하게 된 현실에 대한 분석으로서 판타지가 작동하는 방식에 대한 지젝의 논의를 분석할 것이다. 판타지의 재현물들이 어떠한 방식으로 위계적으로 욕망의 대상들을 배치하고 있으며 현실 속으로 난입하고 있는지를 고찰할 것이다. (shrink)

This article addresses issues of body and sexuality exposed by documentary films about orthodox Jewish women in Israel and traditional Islamic women in Iran, directed by Anat Yuta Zuria and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, respectively. These two groups of religious women are faced with some similar circumstances. The directors of these films use their cameras to expose not only the male gaze, but sometimes they also turn their cameras back on the men who perpetuate and benefit from religious legal systems (...) that subjugate these women. The camera thus is not merely a documentary tool but also a political tool revealing what is hidden in the inner sanctum and redeeming it from the “private sphere.” This comparison highlights the potential of Jewish feminism in Israel; it challenges it to work in alliance with Islamic women who live either as citizens in Israel or as non-citizens in the occupied territories. (shrink)

Gellner relied extensively on the work of Ibn Khaldun to understand both the dynamics of social order in North Africa and Islam’s alleged resistance to secularization. However, what the two scholars also shared is their focus on the social origins and functions of group solidarity. For Ibn Khaldun the concept of asabiyyah was central in understanding the strength of long-term group loyalties. In his view, asabiyyah was a fundamental and elementary cohesive bond of human societies which originated in nomadic tribal (...) structures and retained significance in the early formation of complex states and empires. For Gellner, the shape and character of group solidarity is heavily dependent on the economic foundations of a particular social order: foragers require small group bonds for mere survival, the agrarian universe stratifies solidarity and utilizes cultural bonds to differentiate between the ruling aristocrats and the plough-tied serfs, whereas the industrial world generates solidarity from incessant economic growth and state-induced, cross-class, national identifications. Thus, for Gellner, solidarity remains the central force that keeps social orders together. This paper provides a critical analysis of the Khaldunian and Gellnerian models of group solidarity and offers an alternative interpretation that places the social impact of micro-solidarity in the long-term development of ideological and coercive forms of social organization. (shrink)

Ernest Gellner was a unique scholar whose work covered areas as diverse as social anthropology, analytical philosophy, the sociology of the Islamic world, nationalism, psychoanalysis, East European transformations and kinship structures. Despite this diversity, there is an exceptional degree of unity and coherence in Gellner's work with his distinctly modernist, rationalist and liberal world-view evident in everything he wrote. His central problematic remains constant: understanding how the modern world came into being and to what extent it is unique relative to (...) all other social forms. Ten years after his death, this book brings together leading social theorists to evaluate the significance of Gellner's legacy and to re-examine his central concerns. It corrects many misunderstandings and critically engages with Gellner's legacy to provide a cutting edge contribution to understanding our contemporary post-9/11, global, late modern, social condition. (shrink)

ObjectivesThis pilot study sought to develop and evaluate a novel online group-based intervention to help breast cancer survivors make healthy lifestyle changes intended to yield not only beneficial physical outcomes but also greater behavioral, and psychosocial well-being.MethodsAn exploratory single-arm, mixed-method triangulation design was employed to evaluate the feasibility and preliminary effectiveness of the HLM-ABC intervention for overweight BCSs. Fourteen women participated in the 10-week intervention and completed quantitative measures of the above-mentioned outcomes at baseline, post-treatment, 6-month, and 12-month follow-up time (...) points. Qualitative data were obtained post-treatment via semi-structured interviews and a treatment satisfaction questionnaire.ResultsParticipants lost an average of 2.83% of their baseline weight by 1-year follow-up, equal to a small effect size. Despite achieving only modest weight loss, participants achieved meaningful gains in the form of increased physical activity, discovery of gratifying movement, more intuitive eating habits, greater bodily and emotional awareness, and positive shifts in beliefs about being able to make healthy choices regarding food and physical activity. Furthermore, they demonstrated a slight improvement in body image and described feeling more self-compassionate, empowered, and acknowledging of variables beyond control that can present barriers to change.ConclusionAfter completing a 10-week online program, participants achieved meaningful and lasting changes on a number of healthful indicators, even when this did not correspond with a significant reduction in weight. Findings highlight the complex, multifaceted nature of “health” and lend support for promotion of healthier lifestyle following cancer treatment that encompasses not only physical weight, but also behavior, psychosocial well-being, and circumstances such as life-preserving hormonal treatments. (shrink)

Cognitive Reserve, according to a recent consensus definition of the NIH-funded Reserve and Resilience collaboratory,1 is constituted by any mechanism contributing to cognitive performance beyond, or interacting with, brain structure in the widest sense. To identity multivariate activation patterns fulfilling this postulate, we investigated a verbal Sternberg fMRI task and imaged 181 people with age coverage in the ranges 20–30 and 55–70. Beyond task performance, participants were characterized in terms of demographics, and neuropsychological assessments of vocabulary, episodic memory, perceptual speed, (...) and abstract fluid reasoning. Participants studied an array of either one, three, or six upper-case letters for 3 s, then a blank fixation screen was presented for 7 s, to be probed with a lower-case letter to which they responded with a differential button press whether the letter was part of the studied array or not. We focused on identifying maintenance-related activation patterns showing memory load increases in pattern score on an individual participant level for both age groups. We found such a pattern that increased with memory load for all but one person in the young participants, and such a pattern for all participants in the older group. Both patterns showed broad topographic similarities; however, relationships to task performance and neuropsychological characteristics were markedly different and point to individual differences in Cognitive Reserve. Beyond the derivation of group-level activation patterns, we also investigated the inter-subject spatial similarity of individual working memory rehearsal patterns in the older participants’ group as a function of neuropsychological and task performance, education, and mean cortical thickness. Higher task accuracy and neuropsychological function was reliably associated with higher inter-subject similarity of individual-level activation patterns in older participants. (shrink)

The term “contemplation” has played a significant role in the history of Christian spirituality. Regardless of the tradition, whether Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, contemplation has been valued. Recently, however, some Evangelicals have raised various concerns about contemplation, including its Roman Catholic origin, the tendency to devalue Jesus Christ and his atonement, the marginalization of Scripture, and the assertion that a person who seeks to grow in the contemplative life will no longer be active to witness to the gospel in (...) the world. This article while recognizing the potential for possible theological distortions argues that there is a biblical and theologically accurate manifestation of contemplation. In particular, this essay seeks to examine the presence of contemplation within the Evangelical church. To that end, the writings of four Americans representative of the beginning of eighteenth-century Evangelicalism are examined to discern whether they display a biblical and orthodox expression of contemplation. In all cases, whether male or female, Calvinist or Wesleyan, this quartet of spiritual leaders reveal and challenge contemporary Christians of all traditions to be more intentional about cultivating a loving and grateful gazing on God and desire to delight in and enjoy God more fully. (shrink)

Analysis of sites of newly integrated DNA in cellular genomes is important to several fields, but methods for analyzing and visualizing these datasets are still under development. Here, we describe tools for data analysis and visualization that take as input integration site data from our INSPIIRED pipeline. Paired-end sequencing allows inference of the numbers of transduced cells as well as the distributions of integration sites in target genomes. We present interactive heatmaps that allow comparison of distributions of integration sites to (...) genomic features and that support numerous user-defined statistical tests. To summarize integration site data from human gene therapy samples, we developed a reproducible report format that catalogs sample population structure, longitudinal dynamics, and integration frequency near cancer-associated genes. We also introduce a novel summary statistic, the UC50, which provides a single number summarizing possible clonal expansion. Using these tools, we characterize ongoing longitudinal characterization of a patient from the first trial to treat severe combined immunodeficiency-X1, showing successful reconstitution for 15 years accompanied by persistence of a cell clone with an integration site near the cancer-associated gene CCND2. Software is available at https://github.com/BushmanLab/INSPIIRED. (shrink)

At the heart of recent feminist theorizing about art is the claim that various forms of representation--painting, photography, film--assume a "male gaze." The notion of the gaze has both a literal and a figurative component. Narrowly construed, it refers to actual looking. Broadly, or more metaphorically, it refers to a way of thinking about, and acting in, the world. . . . In examining this key feminist notion more carefully, I shall make clear the intrinsic interest of (...) this approach to aesthetics and suggest why its concerns merit serious consideration. To this end, I investigate how gendered vision work in one specific representational practice: film. Film is a natural choice for such a study because it is a medium so fundamentally built around the activity of looking. It is also, not surprisingly, the medium where the male gaze has been most extensively discussed. The relationship of gender and cinematic vision is extremely complicated. A complete analysis of this topic would require several hundred pages. In what follows, I focus on two key claims: that in cinema the gaze is male, and that the cinematic text is a male text. I make clear how these claims should be understood and situate them philosophically. In confining myself to the core claims of this debate, I shall of necessity leave aside many important, but internal, issues in film theory. (shrink)

Every archive holds many stories; this paper analyses the treatment and socio-political role of the Indian goddess icon, Kali, in the early nineteenth century, considering the story of legal subjectivity through her changing depiction and worship. Kali was reimagined as a monster-like figure of hate and fear, of depravity and unchecked female sexuality, and the anti-thesis of morality, by the East India Company officers who compiled the archive on thuggee. As the icon of reverence to thuggee, an early codified crime (...) of habitual stranglers, this paper follows Kali through her restructuring under the British imperial vision, and as a mirror-metaphor of repressed feminine energy in the legal archive. I analyse the change in Kali’s iconography under the gaze of the law and the advent of a new colonial branding made up from parts of her legend. It is through this new role that the introduction of a standardised legal framework forced Kali to become secondary to Western paternalism, a role that split her Eastern feminine aspect into separate facets. I discuss how the repression of the female voice in the thuggee archive reflects historic attitudes of engendering that echoed as a form of nomos in the twentieth century socio-political climate of Britain. Finally, I present where the feminine energy highlights the need for a subtle reorientation of the criminal law to overcome areas of recurring dissonance in service to its female subjects. (shrink)

This research examines the nature of gender presentation of men who were the stars on Disney Channel shows. Research has already examined how young women who were Disney stars become quickly sexualised and perceived as women under the male gaze. However, there is little corresponding research on boys who are subject to the scrutiny of the public. I engage in a phenomenological content analysis of the social media of three adult male actors who starred on the show (...) Wizards of Waverly Place. The nature of masculine gender capital encourages these men to move towards a masculine ideal while recognising they are under the erotic gaze. These men push to be severed from their youth identities, forming a strategic boundary that nods to the homoeroticism surrounding their identity. (shrink)

The story of Sara Baartman, who was brought to Europe in 1810 to be exhibited as the erotic-exotic freak ‘Hottentot Venus’, is arguably the most famous case study of the scientific validation of (gendered) racism. Her scientific examination and post-mortem dissection by Georges Cuvier, who looked for an alleged connection between the Khoisan and the orangutan, have been the object of famous critical works (Gilman, 1985; Haraway, 1989; Fausto-Sterling, 1995), but also exposed her to the unpalatable fate of becoming the (...) ‘quintessential’ figure of intersecting gender and racial oppressions. This paper deals with Abdellatif Kechiche's film Venus Noire (2010), which interestingly rearticulates the (in)famous narrative in unexpected ways. Shot by a male director who is also a postcolonial subject, the film exposes the performativity not only of gender and racial identities, but also of science theorisation, while at the same time raising the issue of whether exposing a violent male colonial gaze on a heavily exhibited woman can contribute to a counter-knowledge of her experience or rather risks reiterating the historical violence. The startling dynamic between the portrayed abuse and Kechiche's peculiar filmic strategies is the crucial focus of this paper. While Sara's body is continually exposed and violated, Venus Noire relies on her face, shot in recurrent extreme close ups, as a haunting presence potentially exceeding violence. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1987 [1980]) account of the close up, I explore how Kechiche's take on Sara's face builds a strong connection with the spectator's extra-filmic dimension. As a case of what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘reflective face’, such close ups invest the viewer with the ethical responsibility of being complicit in the othering practices of (post)colonial times. Vénus Noire thus manages to engage the spectator's own corporeal awareness of violence, and calls attention to the persisting exploitation of sexual and racial colonial tropes in the contemporary world. (shrink)

Bullying often results in negative coping in victims, including an increased consumption of alcohol. Recently, however, an increase in alcohol use has also been reported among perpetrators of bullying. The factors triggering this pattern are still unclear. We investigated the role of empathy in the interaction between bullying and alcohol use in an adolescent sample (IMAGEN) at age 13.97 (±0.53) years (baseline (BL), N = 2165, 50.9% female) and age 16.51 (±0.61) years (follow-up 1 (FU1), N = 1185, 54.9% female). (...) General empathic distress served as a significant moderator of alcohol use in perpetrators (F9, 493 = 17.978, p < 0.01), which was specific for males and FU1. Male perpetrators, who are generally less sensitive to distress, might thus be more vulnerable to alcohol abuse. (shrink)

Casting dirty looks is morally wrong when it encourages gender stereotypes and objectifies the woman looked at. Oglers are to blame for the harm done. And, if an ogler were to merely imagine what he perceives, we would blame him less than for his stare. So, in many such cases, we must be at least partly be blaming the ogler for being in the very perceptual state he is then in—for his male gaze. This line of reasoning goes (...) against ethical orthodoxy, which claims that perception is simply not the kind of thing for which the agents who perceive could be blamed. Against orthodoxy, I argue that the moral relevance of the male gaze implies that perception is the kind of thing for which perceiving agents could be blamed. (shrink)

Although the majority of literature has shown undistinguishable attentional effects when eye-gaze and arrows are used as cues, recent research has found that whereas eye-gaze selectively orient attention to the specific location or part of the object looked at, arrows unselectively direct attention towards parts of the environment. However, it is unclear whether this dissociation between gaze and arrow cues is related to social cognitive mechanisms such as the attribution of mental states (Theory of Mind, ToM). We (...) aimed at replicating the dissociation between gaze and arrow cues and investigating sex differences in attentional object selection triggered by these two types of stimuli. While we replicated the arrow-gaze dissociation, this was equivalent in the male and female population. This finding seems to run counter the intuition that theory of mind abilities can account for the dissociation observed between gaze and arrow cues since greater ToM abilities have been generally shown in females. However, this conclusion it must be interpreted with caution since no differences in ToM abilities and autistic quotient scores were observed between male and female in our sample. Further research is needed to shed light on this issue. (shrink)

Women, the half of the global population, having being persuaded of the images created by media, are in turmoil to preserve their womanhood—is now becoming a question of many of the researchers over the globe. Over the years, media, as it is one of the great contributors to upgrading the human civilisation to a greater extent, are obviously contributing its role—to develop humanity, in the construction of ideas regarding rights, duties, democracy, laws and many core ideas of the modern world. (...) But, side by side, the growing awareness among the womenfolk has made them conscious about the images being produced in media contents, be it print or electronic media, to question media as being coping the patriarchal notion on women and womanhood and regenerating the concept of popularity of male gaze. (shrink)

Biology is seen not merely as a privileged oppressor of women but as a co-victim of masculinist social assumptions. We see feminist critique as one of the normative controls that any scientist must perform whenever analyzing data, and we seek to demonstrate what has happened when this control has not been utilized. Narratives of fertilization and sex determination traditionally have been modeled on the cultural patterns of male/female interaction, leading to gender associations being placed on cells and their components. (...) We also find that when gender biases are controlled, new perceptions of these intracellular and extracellular relationships emerge. (shrink)

British art historian Charles Harrison presumes the existence of a patriarchal world with power in the hands of men who dominate the representation of women and femininity. He applauds the ground-breaking work of feminist theorists who have questioned this imbalance of power since the 1970s. He stops short, however, of accepting their claims that all women have been represented by male artists as images of “utter passivity” (p. 4), routinely reduced by the male gaze to the status (...) of exploited sexual objects, or that women’s subjectivity is eroded by the visual treatment they receive at the hands of male artists such as Manet and Picasso. He wants to show that what is depicted in the picture plane by the (typically male) artist and enjoyed by the (typically male) spectator is more nuanced than just a simple privileged understanding between two men. He adds a third (and possibly fourth or more) party to the mix when he significantly redefines and expands our concept of the gaze: “A gaze may also be conceived of as a function of a painting’s represented content” (p. 9). In other words, a gaze may be “addressed outward by a represented figure,” and regardless of who and where, “the assumption conveyed by the term [‘gaze’] is that some differential and usually asymmetrical relation will be at stake in any exchange between one who directs the gaze and another at whom it is directed. In fact, it is just this difference—in age, in sex, in class, in interest, in power —that the operation of the gaze tends to mark” (p. 9). Referring to a woman depicted within the picture plane, he asks us to consider, “What does it feel like to look like this?” (p. 21) in order to entertain our many emotional responses and interpretations. When he adds, “What does it feel like to whom?” the sexual difference of the spectator also clearly comes into play. (shrink)

This conversation between Laura Mulvey and Roberta Sassatelli offers a historical reconstruction of Mulvey’s work, from her famous essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to her most recent reflections on male gaze, film technology and visual culture. The conversation initially deals with the socio-cultural context in which the ‘Visual Pleasure...’ essay was produced by outlining a number of possible theoretical parallelisms with other scholars, from Foucault to Barthes to Goffman. Then, on the basis of Mulvey’s latest book, Death (...) 24× a Second, and of a variety of contemporary examples, the emphasis is on the relative shift in Mulvey’s work from gender to time and visual technology. Finally, the conversation focuses on the concept of ‘gendered scopic regime’ and the potential re-articulation of the male gaze through the technological re-direction and control of the visual. (shrink)

In an effort to address the image of the nude as a concern of both feminist aesthetics and existentialism, this paper shall provide a critique on the male gaze in visual art by means of Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of the image and the imagining consciousness. This paper aims to reassess not only the aspects surrounding the male gaze but the nature of its image. In this sense, while objectification is part of the nature of the nude, (...) both the representation and the imagining consciousness of its spectator play a part in the objectification of the nude as image. This paper argues that through Sartre’s account of the nature of images, the male gaze misconstrues the represented nude through her image in most works of art. I will show that as an act of the imagination, the male gaze elicits the sexually objectified representations of the nude and that the reality of the nude is conflated with its image thereby producing irreal, objectified and prejudiced representations of women. (shrink)

The Coronavirus disease pandemic of 2019 is a vast worldwide public health hazard, impacting people of all ages and socioeconomic statuses. Vaccination is one of the most effective methods of controlling a pandemic like COVID-19. This study aims to investigate the relationship between the number of vaccination injections and fear of COVID-19 and test whether beliefs benefit from vaccination COVID-19 mediate the effect of fear of COVID-19 on the number of vaccination injections. A total of 649 Vietnamese adults were enrolled (...) online to finish answering, including scales The Health Belief Model (HBM) and The Fear of COVID-19 (FCV-19S), consisting of 340 (52.4%) males and 309 (47.6%) females. The data were analyzed using variance, regression, and a simple mediation model. The total score of COVID-19 fear wasM= 22.26,SD= 5.49. Vietnamese fear of COVID-19 was at a medium level. Our results suggest that 18- to 20-year-olds are more fearful of COVID-19 than others. People who received the first dosage exhibited a greater fear of COVID-19 than those who received the second dose and were not inoculated. Additionally, the beliefs benefit of vaccination COVID-19 has a role in the relationship between the number of vaccination injections and fear of COVID-19. During the pandemic, adults in Vietnam are more afraid of COVID-19 than during prior outbreaks. Besides, the Vietnamese populace demonstrated a considerable demand for and high acceptability of the COVID-19 vaccine. The current study indicates that psychological counselors and therapists should counsel clients on the value of vaccination and address the fear of COVID-19 as public understanding of the benefits of vaccines increases. To further clarify the effect of this issue on the correlation between fear of COVID-19 and the number of vaccinations, the results of this study indicate that the existing vaccine communication factor for COVID-19 vaccination should be modified to increase confidence in the benefits of immunization. (shrink)

Nursing has evolved, yet media representation has arguably failed to keep up. This work explores why representation has been slow in accurately depicting nurses' responsibilities, impacts on public perceptions and professional identity. A critical realist review was employed as this method enables in-depth exploration into why something exists. A multidisciplinary approach was adopted, drawing from feminist, psychological and sociological theories to provide insightful understanding and recommendations. One main feminist lens has been implemented, using Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male-Gaze’ framework for (...) content analysis of three nurse-related advertisements to explore how the profession's female status influences representation, public perception and how this might impact nursing. Nurse representation has important real-world consequences. It is essential to improve unnecessary negative portrayals and contest ingrained stereotypes as there are costs to public opinion and nursing's self-identity. Nursing's female status has an impact within a male-dominated media industry, with a leisurely approach adopted toward changing representation. Media images become societally ingrained, this reiterates the significance of accurate/positive depictions. Social media is an instant method of communication with the public to combat stereotypes and maintain engagement to provide better understanding of what nurses do. (shrink)

Wallace-Hadrill's reading of spatial hierarchy does not address the representation of gender in mythological paintings. However, a rough survey indicates that the majority are erotic and/or violent. Erotic depictions common on household items suggest that the Romans were sensitive to this content; the likely use of pattern books in selecting programs for domestic decoration suggests a synoptic awareness of it. This points to the applicability of contemporary theories of representation and power, and Mulvey's model of visual pleasure in narrative film (...) is adapted for this paper. According to Mulvey, film offers two pleasures: scopophilia, which presents the woman as aesthetic-erotic fragments, suggesting but concealing her difference ; sadistic voyeurism, which assumes difference and then investigates, punishes, or forgives it. Both are illustrated in paintings of Ariadne abandoned and rediscovered, and in other paintings which portray either the gaze or erotic violence . While these paintings seem to confirm in relation to gender what the rest of the house says about class and status, some paintings confuse the issue. The male body is often fetishized , and attacked ; gender and role are sometimes deliberately ambiguous . Such transgressions of the boundaries of the male body are not a part of Mulvey's theory, and they suggest the use of gender to complicate as well as confirm the class/status message of the house; two different negotiations of this use are found in the House of the Vettii and the House of the Ara Maxima. One can compare reversals and reassertions of gender, class and status in other evidence, in literature, pantomime and the games. (shrink)

Recent feminist theory has attempted to bring considerations of women’s agency into analyses of the meaning and consequence of beauty norms in women’s lives. This article argues that these works have often been limited by their use of individualist frameworks or by their neglect of considerations of race and class. In this article I draw upon examples of African-American utilization of beauty discourse and practices in collective efforts to resist racism. I argue that there is no singular beauty standard enforced (...) by a unified male gaze. Instead, we should conceive of fields in which differently located individuals and groups invest in and promote particular ways of seeing beauty, producing both penalties and pleasures in women’s lives. (shrink)

Frequent observation: sexualities, self‐surveillance, confession and the construction of the active patient Following Foucault’s analyses of the development of the disciplinary power of the medical gaze, this paper describes the themes that are relocating the ‘active patient’ as the central object of health scrutiny by professionals. A key element in these discourses has been the deployment of power through disciplinary knowledge and techniques of social control through ritual forms of confession, thereby positing the patient/client as the subject of self‐surveillance. (...) The individual is also engaged their own sexuality, performativity and ‘truths’ of sexual experience. These Foucauldian insights have constructed the notion of surveillance medicine, whereby with the assistance of professional technologies, not only the patient’s body but also the ‘self’ can be probed through incitement to confess. However, the actor is not docile; resistances to disciplinary techniques are evident and within the professional practices of the clinic, there is resistance to the power of the erotic. The paper draws on recent research on the social construction of male sexualities in the fields of genitourinary practice, and explores how the ceremonial practices of the clinic engage with the rise of surveillance medicine and the medicalisation of everyday life. The individual actor is exhorted to engage in increased sexual and medical self‐surveillance and to be recruited in the project of becoming an ‘active patient’. It concludes with an examination of some of the implications this surveillance of self may have for practitioners in terms of power and the professional lens through which the sexualised, symbolic body is viewed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The problem of the captivated gaze has been taken up repeatedly in philosophy. Plato's Allegory of the Cave stands paradigmatically for this. Here, the gaze at the shadowy images prevents people from taking the path to the sun. Denis Diderot's critical reinterpretation of Plato's Allegory of the Cave is less well known. In Diderot, the view of the artificial light images is just as captivating as Plato's shadow images. Unlike there, however, Diderot does not distinguish between perception (...) and cognition but instead focuses on the significance of the seemingly unimportant shift of the gaze within the cave. Diderot determines the starting point of the realisation of freedom in the liberation of one's own gaze from the captivation intended by third parties. Prerequisites for the liberation of the gaze are the realisation of an interruption. It is shifts in the alignment of the eyeballs that become visible here as lucid intervals and which, in Diderot, become the starting point of power analysis and the site of revolt and freedom practice. In this article, I will show how Diderot's demand for enabling the individual realisation of lucid intervals is not first and foremost an aesthetic, but a highly political one. The criteria of art, which are defined by Diderot and have not lost their relevance until today, are based on his explosive insight that the incessant captivation of the gaze stands in the way of democratisation. (shrink)

This article draws on Foucault's concept of the exercise of power and Gramsci's concept of hegemony to examine how women used cosmetic surgery to exercise power over their bodies and lives. The analysis is rooted in two feminist perspectives on cosmetic surgery. The first argues that women who elect to have their bodies surgically altered are victims of false consciousness whose bodies are disciplined by the hegemonic male gaze. The second asserts that women who undergo elective cosmetic surgery (...) exercise free choice in controlling their bodies and lives. By examining sites wherein power is exercised by and over women, the authors argue for a synthesis of these two perspectives. They find that the women achieved greater power and control over their bodies and lives when they embodied hegemonic ideals of feminine beauty. Cosmetic surgery can be empowering for individual women while reinforcing the hegemonic ideals that oppress women as a group. (shrink)

Putting classical art to the side for the moment, the naked and near-naked female body became an object of mainstream consumption first in Playboy and its imitators, then in movies, and only then in fashion photographs. With the male body, the trajectory has been different. Fashion has taken the lead, the movies have followed. Hollywood may have been a chest-fest in the fifties, but it was male clothing designers [e.g., Calvin Klein] who went south and violated the really (...) powerful taboos--not just against the explicit depiction of penises and male bottoms but against the admission of all sorts of forbidden "feminine" qualities into mainstream conceptions of manliness. . . . Images of masculinity that will do double (or triple or quadruple) duty with a variety of consumers, straight and gay, male and female, are not difficult to create in a culture like ours, in which the muscular, male body has a long and glorious aesthetic history. (shrink)

Female specificity in narrative films is a topic as illusive and controversial as it is incredibly rich with potential for analysis and research. Particularly illusive is scholarly research on the female gaze in mainstream filmmaking. Male specificity in the movies is far less illusive and controversial. So pervasive is the male presence in mainstream film form that the term the male gaze1 has become institutionalized in theory and practice. The female gaze, perhaps unavoidably so, eludes (...) institutionalization.2 My paper presents a glimpse into the traces of the female gaze in Jane Campion's historical film, The Piano. Campion's filmic text creates a space in mainstream movies where cinematic enunciation intersects with the linguistic and psychoanalytical innovations of the last half-century. I have chosen The Piano because it presents an overwhelmingly clear demonstration of the female gaze and does so within the limitations of mainstream film conventions. (shrink)

In this essay I deploy Sartre's phenomenology of the gaze as the foil to demonstrate the cultural and philosophical movement from ethnology to ethnophilosophy that produces a specific conception of Africa. The violence of the Western gaze on Africa led several ethnological and anthropological excavations of Africa's cultural beingness, and the eventual creation of ethnophilosophical reason. Despite the obvious limitations of ethnophilosophy, I argue in this essay for a conception of cultural agency around which we can properly understand (...) “Africa” as a meaningful site, a territorial imaginary that is far from the ethnophilosophical imagination, but not too far. Ethnophilosophy serves as the platform around which we can commence a reconstruction of an African self that is sufficiently recuperated, through false memory and historical reinvention, to return the gaze and renegotiate its freedom. (shrink)

Contemporary consumer culture sees the body as the crucial indicator of the self and apparent bodily ageing as problematic. All bodies age, but how is evidence of ageing culturally interpreted? This article develops a critical-pragmatic analysis of consumerized body discourses, with particular focus on the semiotics of the visibly ageing face, in the context of lifestyle magazine features and advertisements on skin care. Such texts work to equate ageing with the look of ageing, problematize ageing appearance, and offer marketized solutions (...) to the ‘problem’ of ageing, using markedly gendered strategies. Texts aimed at a female market project skin care as a serious issue, pathologize the look of ageing, offer highly technologized solutions, and naturalize surgical intervention. The male market is being discursively engaged by strategies designed to normalize male investment in products and processes traditionally seen as in the domain of female bodily grooming. Consumerized male narcissism is enabled by ironic, ‘uncommitted’ discourses, the use of highly masculinized images and text, and, more recently, discourses which draw attention to the salience of the female appraising gaze. (shrink)

Introduction : the art of reading -- Adorno and the uncoercive gaze -- Buried possibility : Adorno and Arendt on tradition -- The inheritance of the constellation : Adorno and Hegel -- Judging by refraining from judgment : Adorno's artwork and its Einordnung -- The literary artwork between word and concept : Adorno and Agamben reading Kafka -- The artwork without cardinal direction : notes on orientation in Adorno -- False life, living on : Adorno with Derrida -- Conclusion (...) : a kind of leave-thinking. (shrink)

Jane Campion and Gerard Lee's miniseries Top of the Lake (2013) marked New Zealand-born but Australian resident Campion's return to New Zealand for the first time since The Piano (1993). The show's central subject of child sexual abuse by state officials echoes the different yet resonating political situations in twenty-first century Australia and New Zealand, a state of emergency that allows for the emergence of what Rebecca Solnit (2009) calls a ‘disaster community’. Implicitly addressing critiques of her colonialist gaze (...) in the earlier film, the miniseries both decolonises the idea of the Utopian no-place and offers an alternate, emplaced vision of relational, anti-colonial provisional Utopia through the main, mirroring female characters, Detective Robin Griffin and her half-sister Tui Mitcham. In contrast to contemporaneous police procedurals focussed on lone female officers, Top of the Lake rejects the authority of the police state and offers a resolution aslant that critiques generic expectations of individual heroism and resolution within a legal framework. Looking specifically at how the show knows its place—Lake Wakatipu on South Island, New Zealand—the article offers a close reading of Top of the Lake's formal critique of the male colonial gaze and its adoption of a feminist soundscape in relation to Campion's oeuvre; and considers its politics through indigenous media theory, to argue that it marks an initial step towards a decolonisation of viewing practices in relation to feminist conceptions of Utopia. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 3, Page 425-437, May 2022.

Beauty has captured human interest since before Plato, but how, why, and to whom does beauty matter in today's world? Whose standard of beauty motivates African Americans to straighten their hair? What inspires beauty queens to measure up as flawless objects for the male gaze? Why does a French performance artist use cosmetic surgery to remake her face into a composite of the master painters' version of beauty? How does beauty culture perceive the disabled body? Is the constant (...) effort to remain young and thin, often at considerable economic and emotional expense, ethically justifiable? Provocative essays by an international group of scholars discuss beauty in aesthetics, the arts, the tools of fashion, the materials of decoration, and the big business of beautification—beauty matters—to reveal the ways gender, race, and sexual orientation have informed the concept of beauty and driven us to become more beautiful. Here, Kant rubs shoulders with Calvin Klein. Beauty Matters draws from visual art, dance, cultural history, and literary and feminist theory to explore the values and politics of beauty. Various philosophical perspectives on ethics and aesthetics emerge from this penetrating book to determine and reveal that beauty is never disinterested. Foreward by Eleanor Heartney; "Introduction" by Peg Brand [Weiser] included here. Authors include Marcia M. Eaton, Noel Carroll, Paul C. Taylor, Arthur C. Danto, Kathleen M. Higgins, Susan Bordo, Dawn Perlmutter, Eva Kit Wah Man, Anita Silvers, Hilary Robinson, Kaori Chino, Sally Banes, and Peg Brand's essay "Bound to Beauty: An Interview with Orlan." (available on PhilPapers). (shrink)

This article considers the role of beauty in Costa Rican sex work. In the context of sex tourism, beauty operates as affective labour performed by sex workers, labour that is mediated by deeply contradictory understandings of race and nation. Theorising beauty as a form of affective labour means thinking about beauty as value, as something that circulates, can be exchanged and is ultimately relational. While Costa Rica's national mythology has long focused on claims to white origins, sex tourists identify local (...) women's ‘exoticism’ and non-whiteness as particularly appealing. Commercial sex does not simply depend on an imperial male gaze, but rather requires us to consider how particular national mythologies about race are linked to ideals of attractiveness in complex ways. I also explore how women experience and manage their sexual attractiveness to foreign tourists in their daily lives and work. (shrink)

The aim of this article is (1) to investigate the ‘neurosciences’ as an object of study for historical and genealogical approaches and (2) to characterize what we identify as a particular ‘style of thought’ that consolidated with the birth of this new thought community and that we term the ‘neuromolecular gaze’. This article argues that while there is a long history of research on the brain, the neurosciences formed in the 1960s, in a socio-historical context characterized by political change, (...) faith in scientific and technological progress, and the rise of a molecular gaze in the life sciences. They flourished in part because these epistemological and technological developments were accompanied by multiple projects of institution-building. An array of stakeholders was mobilized around the belief that breakthroughs in understanding the brain were not only crucial, they were possible by means of collaborative efforts, cross-disciplinary approaches and the use of a predominantly reductionist neuromolecular method. The first part of the article considers some of the different approaches that have been adopted to writing the history of the brain sciences. After a brief outline of our own approach, the second part of the article uses this in a preliminary exploration of the birth of the neurosciences in three contexts. We conclude by arguing that the 1960s constitute an important ‘break’ in the long path of the history of the brain sciences that needs further analysis. We believe this epistemological shift we term the ‘neuromolecular gaze’ will shape the future intellectual development and social role of the neurosciences. (shrink)