Faculty of Humanities
School of Arts
Department of Visual Arts
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
Two recent publications, Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture and Gendered bodies and new technologies: Rethinking embodiment in a cyber-era firmly place the new field of visual culture in the spotlight. Both books, the first an edited volume and the other a monograph, deal with the specific role played by gendered representations in visual culture. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture showcases a collection of papers that was delivered at the international conference that was hosted by the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies during June 2007. Gender and visual culture traverse in quite unique and often fascinating ways. On the one hand, gender functions as an interdisciplinary approach and critical tool to analyse and investigate several subject fields. As such, gender contributes to establishing a much-needed theoretical and functional platform spanning many fields of enquiry from where gender practices can effectively be critiqued and ideally changed. On the other hand, the growing popularity and ubiquity of visual culture in a global context create the increasing need to reflect on and interrogate this phenomenon in an academic manner. Although Visual Culture Studies is an established subject at many northern institutions, it is fairly new and relatively undertheorised in the south. In response to the growing need to investigate issues dealing with gender and visual culture, and particularly how they creatively intersect, this selection of chapters are collected in this volume in the hope to make a purposeful contribution to the burgeoning discourse.
The monograph, Gendered bodies and new technologies: Rethinking embodiment in a cyber-era, explores the contemporary era of ubiquitous information flow, heightened mobility and limitless consumer convenience, during which human interaction with new technologies has become increasingly seamless. In the process, the human body is effectively and steadily reduced to just another interface or a “second life.” What is easily forgotten during this translucent transaction is that being human necessarily implies being embodied. In other words, to constitute a body in its non-negotiable physicality is still what it entails to be human (among other things). To live daily in and through the complicated and dynamic intersection between “mind” and “body”, psychology and physiology ? also known as embodiment ? is what makes us human.
Contact person: Prof AA du Preez.
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