Sexing the Look in Popular Visual Culture
Editor: Kathy Justice Gentile
Date Of Publication: Nov 2010
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2408-8
Isbn: 1-4438-2408-9
With dramatic advances in media technology, the practice of sexing or erotically enhancing images has become an increasingly widespread phenomenon. The eroticized “look,” as both noun and verb, the thing or image that draws our look, and the look that we bestow on images that elicit our visual, physiological, and emotional attention, is the focus of the essays in this volume. Every day, whether we are out in the world or in the workplace or in the privacy of our homes, we enter visual fields that heighten and distort reality, distortions that often emphasize sexuality and erotic promise. The contributors for this collection look at the sexualization of visual culture from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including literature, film studies, history, philosophy, art history, and media studies, with gender and sexuality studies providing the encompassing critical framework that binds these essays into a coherent analytical project.

The essays in this collection offer new theoretical conceptions of perception and representation, as well as rigorous reconsiderations of the polarized feminist debates over pornographic images. Essays on literature and film range from an interrogation of Baudrillard’s theory of seduction that posits femininity as a strategy of illusion and subversion to Bridget Jones’s challenge to the prevailing disciplinary regime that prescribes rigid standards for feminine beauty to a reevaluation of the subversive potential of sexy female robots. Other contributors consider the history of nudist images in US periodicals, the proliferation of eroticized images of girls in new digital technologies, gentlemanly masculinity in men’s fashion in late Victorian England, and a rape prevention campaign’s unintentional reinforcement of persistent heterosexist misconceptions about rape.

Kathy Justice Gentile is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Missouri, USA. She has published a book on Ivy Compton-Burnett and articles on Jane Bowles, Edward Bond, gothic film, and the uncanny. Her current research focuses on Jane Austen’s comedy and aesthetics. She was director of the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis from 2005 until 2010.

“A marvelous collection: theoretically rich, empirically grounded, and analytically sharp. [The editor presents] a new generation of scholars, building on earlier theoretical frameworks, who are interrogating the casual associations among images, their audiences, and the act of looking itself. The book will be a welcome contribution to gender and sexuality studies—indeed to studies of representations more generally.”

—Professor Michael Kimmel, Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA

“Sexing the Look combines a vibrant array of topics with thoughtful academic insight. By including chapters about everyday life—masculinity, advertising, femininity, violence prevention, and pornography—Kathy Justice Gentile’s timely anthology blends theories of visual imagery with the politics of contemporary culture. Sexing the Look provides challenging new insight into the philosophy of erotic and gendered imagery. This collection of essays will appeal to anyone who has both enjoyed and questioned our sexualized and increasingly visual surroundings.”

—Shira Tarrant, PhD, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, California State University, Long Beach, USA

Price Uk Gbp: 39.99
Price Us Usd: 59.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)