Notes Introduction 1. Critics such as Angela McRobbie and Andrea Stuart have observed that feminist theoretical trajectories shifted in the early 1990s as fem- inism split with “professional feminism” retreating to the academy, while “popular feminism” “comes at most of us through the media” (Stuart 30). However, what this split means is still hotly contested. Gill explains that critics have variously interpreted the emergence of “popular feminism,” or what has come to be known as “postfemi- nism,” as an “epistemological break” (250), a “historical shift” (251), or a backlash to feminism (253). Throughout this book, I follow Gill, who argues that postfeminism “is best understood not as an episte- mological perspective, nor as a historical shift, and not (simply) as a backlash” but rather as a “sensibility” with “recurring and relatively stable themes, tropes and constructions that characterize gender rep- resentations in the media in the early twenty- first century” (254– 55). 2. Judith Williamson refers to this genre of programming as “retro- sexist.” 3. As Sady Doyle explains, Game of Thrones features “old- timey, misog- ynist knights and kings,” while Mad Men focuses on old- timey, misogynist admen. 4. Andi Zeisler notes that “with every season of Game of Thrones, one question has become more insistent among in the blogosphere: ‘Is Game of Thrones feminist?’” The same is also true for Mad Men. Primarily, the debates about these programs have occurred online, in blogs and online magazines, though several scholarly collections focused on Mad Men have been published as well. Although it is beyond the scope of this introduction to list all the articles devoted to this debate, a few of the most widely cited articles are listed here. For the debate on Mad Men, see Coontz, Gray, Kearns, Kim, Matlack, and Rine. For the debate on Game of Thrones, see Armstrong, Arthur, Morrissey, Mulhall, Salter, Watercutter, and Zeisler. 150 NOTES 5. Recent critics have begun laying the groundwork for such critique. See Gill, Ross, Williamson, and Kearney for examples. 6. See the Centers for Disease Control’s 2010 report “National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey” for figures charting rates of domestic and sexual violence against women (Black, et al., 13– 19). See also the “Eating Disorders Statistics” provided by the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons’s “2012 Plastic Surgery Proce- dural Statistic” report documents the growing rate of plastic surgery among very young women. 7. See Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s The Anxiety of Obsolescence (2006) for a discussion of how key contemporary male writers have responded to new media. 8. Martin Jay points out that “the pictorial turn has taken place, as observers have been quick to note, against the backdrop of the seemingly exponential increase of images in Western culture” (Jay, “Vision” 3– 4). 9. Though the transition from an industrial, print-based society to one grounded in the information age took more than a century, accord- ing to the authors of Mass Media and the Cultural Landscape, “the electronic phase of the Information Age really boomed in the 1950s and 1960s with the arrival of television and its dramatic impact on daily life” (9). Richard Campbell, Christopher R. Martin, and Bet- tina Fabos explain that the move to the information age in America began in the 1840s with the development of the telegraph (8). Other “early signs” of the information age included “the rise of film at the turn of the twentieth century” and “the development of radio in the 1920s” (9). 10. The publication of The Feminine Mystique is arguably the start- ing point for modern, or second- wave, feminism. As Van Zoonen explains, the text led to the “revival of the women’s movement which had been dormant since the successful struggle for women’s suf- frage” (26). 11. For example, in 1970, approximately a hundred activists from NOW, Media Women, New York Radical Feminists, and Redstockings, among others, organized a sit- in at the offices of The Ladies Home Journal to protest the way the mostly male staff represented women’s issues and to demand, among other things, a female editor- in-chief and an onsite child-care center for employees. For a first- person account of the takeover by one of the activists involved, see Bikman. NOTES 151 12. Teresa de Lauretis and Judith Mayne also made note of the gap in feminist film theory regarding race, and bell hooks called on white feminists to remedy it in Black Looks. 13. It is worth noting that E. Ann Kaplan disagrees that psychoanalysis was responsible for the blind spots in early feminist models of spec- tatorship, though she acknowledges that early feminist theory did overlook issues of race and sexuality. She contends that “this claim ignores the groundbreaking work of Franz Fanon, the later writings of Joel Kovel and the current work of Jessica Benjamin, Michele Wal- lace, and Jane Flax, among others. Psychoanalysis can and should lead one directly to issues of race” (Kaplan, Looking 295). Instead Kaplan attributes the omission of race to “far broader historical, political, cultural and intellectual reasons than psychoanalytic meth- odology itself” (Kaplan, Looking xv). 14. For example, the study of advertisements— which as Karen Ross explains, has traditionally used “notions of woman and man as a simple analytical binary” and ignored “other kinds of marked dif- ferences such as race and ethnicity, often because introducing more than one variable (i.e. gender) into the mix could make analy- sis more ambiguous” (55)— has nevertheless increasingly seen the publication of studies that engage multiple identities. See Plous and Neptune; Durham; Duke; Covert and Dixon; Thomas and Treiber; and Holden. 15. This seems to stem, at least in part, from traditional divides between images and texts as well as between literary criticism and art history. 16. There is also a curious gap on this subject with regard to periodiza- tion. Although Mitchell identifies the pictorial turn as a contempo- rary phenomenon, most theoretical treatments of visual culture and literature focus on modernist or earlier literature, including Hinnov, Spengler, Sherrard- Johnson, Denisoff, Humm, Conway, and Jacobs. 17. As Annette Kuhn has explained, the “language of memory does seem to be above all a language of images,” and it shares with dreams and fantasies the ability to condense and displace our desires and fears into powerful images (Family Secrets 160). 18. For example, there has been a heated debate between scholars about women’s engagement with so- called women’s genres, such as soap operas. This debate focuses on whether there is any possible space for female agency or transformation within narratives that, as Rosalind Coward puts it, “confirm men’s power, women’s subordi- nation” (203). The fact that women frequently take pleasure from these narratives further complicates the question (Thornham 56). 152 NOTES For differing perspectives on the critical possibilities associated with women’s engagement with soap operas, see Modleski, Brown, and Ang. 19. The National Endowment for the Arts has exerted considerable resources studying reading habits in the twenty- first century. Its 2004 report Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America labeled the state of reading in America “bleak,” and its 2007 follow- up To Read or Not to Read suggested the situation was “alarming” (5). 20. See Birkerts and Nunberg. 21. See Lott, Hon, and Crain. 22. See Birkerts and Nunberg as well as the NEA studies Reading at Risk pg. vii and To Read or Not to Read. 23. Steven Johnson responded to the 2007 NEA study with an article in The Guardian, questioning the design of the study and its conclu- sions. And a 2012 PEW Research Center study found that e- readers may be leading to an increase in reading. It is also worth mentioning that recent work by N. Katherine Hayles demonstrates that though people may indeed be reading as much as ever before, what she terms “digital reading” is quite different from “print reading.” Hayles argues that the move from print to digital reading is transforming individu- als’ “cognitive modes”—away from the “deep attention” required to engage in close reading and toward “hyper attention,” with its con- comitant “hyper reading,” a practice that represents a survival strat- egy in the face of information overload (59– 60). I would suggest that a number of the narrative innovations developed by the writers in Confronting Visuality are precisely intended to engage an audience accustomed to “hyper reading.” This issue will be discussed in more detail, particularly in Chapter 3. 24. One result of the blurring of the visual and verbal has been to call into question traditional distinctions between these modes of com- munication. For example, in “There Are No Visual Media,” Mitchell argues that even painting cannot rightly be labeled a “purely visual medium” (7). Similarly, composition scholars, Anne Frances Wysocki notable among them, have argued that there are no purely textual mediums since text itself has a clear visual dimension (evident in the choices writers face regarding fonts, white space, and page layout), and these characteristics are not distinct from content but constitute part of the content. 25. An incomplete list of awards that the authors and works included in this study have won includes the Nobel Prize, the PEN/ Hemingway Award, Guggenheim Fellowships, the Booker Prize, NOTES 153 inclusion in Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize, and Lambda Literary Awards. Chapter 1 1. Critics have long considered issues of visuality in Morrison’s writing although The Bluest Eye remains the text most discussed in relation to these issues. For discussions of film in The Bluest Eye, see Azouz, Gerster, and Fick.