Browsing by Author "Roof, Judith A"

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    Out of Sight: Gender in Scopic and Aural Systems
    (2018-08-09) Beroiza, Alanna Margarita; Roof, Judith A
    From delivery rooms, to bathrooms, to celebrity boudoirs on the cover of Vanity Fair, gender, in its mainstream, contemporary definitions, circulates around visually articulated binary imaginaries of bodily materiality. These formulations depend on the visibly sexed body to act as a site of subjective “truth,” and this dependence only intensifies as medical, legal, educational, and popular cultural institutions increasingly recognize gender as “fluid.” Out of Sight: Gender in Scopic and Aural Systems examines the systems of representation that both enable the visible body to function as a site of subjective “truth” and expose it as a stand-in for the subject in mainstream models of gender. The project employs psychoanalytic, systems, and media theory to investigate the ways in which visual media technologies, such as photographs, digital images, and films, both suture and disclose the fiction of gender in their representations of bodily materiality. Additionally, the project explores the ways in which aural modes of representation—specifically, the voice—both radically undermine, and intensely reify, the totalizing illusions of the visual that sustain the fiction of the body as a material truth in mainstream gender. In critical analyses of texts that range from Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of Caitlyn Jenner for Vanity Fair, to archival images from the Documentary Collection at the Kinsey Institute, to Wynne Neilly’s photographic installation at Ryerson Image Centre, to films by Pedro Almodóvar, Sebastián Lelio, and Chase Joynt, the project demonstrates how scopic and aural systems of representation facilitate the conceptual collapse of gender into sex and visually articulated bodily materiality. In the same breath, these analyses also demonstrate—and the project as a whole insists—that this reductive, yet hugely pervasive, model for gender is but one of many possibilities for understanding subjects and the organization of their experiences and desires.