1 Introduction

Notes 1 Introduction 1. The term comes from Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006). 2. For analysis of the present-day chattel class of the American and global workforce, see ibid.; Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000). The discourse of disposability was visible a decade earlier during the phase of deregulation and liberalization initi- ated by the Clinton administration. For example, the US Senate Subcommittee on Labor published a transcript of its hearing on June 15, 1993, under the title “Towards a Disposable Workforce: The Increasing Use of ‘Contingent’ Labor.” In the hearing, Wendy Perkins, author of Temporarily Yours (Google Books/Permanently Collectible, 1989), describes her experiences in the early configuration of “temp labor,” conveying that the disposability of human workers was long in view and desirable from a corporate perspective: “Temps are an invisible work force with the toughest jobs in America and the least amount of respect. They are unrepresented in collective bargaining power to seek greater income stability and work benefits . Management gets rewarded for cost control of the labor force, early retirees, and eliminating full-time jobs to create contingent jobs. They save 30 to 50% for not providing benefits to their workers. Have we created a modern day slave or a flexible, highly skilled worker?” See Towards a Disposable Workforce: The Increasing Use of ‘Contingent’ Labor: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, 113th Cong. 4 (June 15, 1993) (statement of Wendy Perkins). 3. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), 194. 4. See Petra Kuppers, “Visions of Anatomy: Exhibitions and Dense Bodies,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15, no. 3 (2004): 150. 5. See Manuel Castells, The Rise of The Network Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); and Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the 158 Notes Communications Revolution Is Changing Our Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 6. Svetlana Alpers, The Dutch Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), xxv. 7. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972). 8. I thank a former student, Sharon Holmes, for bringing this episode to my attention. On the website Feministing, Jessica Valenti registered outrage at the episode. See Jessica Valenti, “America’s Next Top (Dead) Model,” Feministing (blog), March 23, 2007, http://feministing.com/2007/03/23/americas_next _top_dead_model/. Jennifer Posner, founder of Women in Media & News, also criticized the show. See Jennifer Posner, “Top Model ’s Beautiful Corpses: The Nexus of Reality TV Misogyny and Ad Industry Ideology,” Huffington Post, March 27, 2007, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-l-pozner/top-models -beautiful-corp_b_44331.html. 9. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin 77, no. 4 (December 1995): 542. 10. W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Surplus Value of Images,” Mosaic 35, no. 3 (September 2002). 11. Margaret Dikovitskaya, “An Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell,” in Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 238. 12. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “What Is Visual Culture?” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998), 9. 13. Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 63. 14. Similarly, Norman Bryson stresses that paintings have “semantic mobility” because the way in which they are read changes depending upon their context. He writes, “The frame establishes a convention whereby art is marked as semantically mobile, changing according to its later circumstances and con- ditions of viewing” (Norman Bryson, introduction to Looking In: The Art of Viewing, by Mieke Bal [Amsterdam: G&B Arts, 2001], 3). 15. Mulvey wrote a supplemental article in 1981 titled “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun.” Both essays appear in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 16. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other Pleasures, 19–21. 17. Hollywood director Budd Boetticher, quoted in ibid., 19. Film theorist Raymond Bellour makes a similar argument in an interview with Janet Bergstrom. He posits, “It seems to me that the classical American cinema is founded on a systematicity which operates very precisely at the expense of the woman, if one can put it that way, by determining her image, her images, in relation to the desire of the masculine subject who thus defines himself through this determination” (Janet Bergstrom, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond Bellour—An Excerpt,” in Feminism and Film Theory, ed. Constance Penley [New York: Routledge, 1988], 195). Notes 159 18. Teresa De Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 119. De Lauretis also discusses the cinema as an apparatus that functions to model gender and reproduce gender ideologies in culture, in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 11–15. 19. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 20. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (London: Routledge, 1992). 21. Carol J. Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Representations 20 (Autumn 1987): 187–228. 22. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 23. Norman Bryson’s Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) helped me to recognize this facet of my own research. 24. Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 25. Ibid., 129. 26. Similarly, I critique reviewers of Minority Report (2002) who focus on the protagonist John Anderton (Tom Cruise) but ignore the film’s gendered violence. 27. Bal, Death and Dissymmetry, 17. 28. Ibid.,18. 29. Ibid., 2. 30. Ibid., 5. 31. Ibid., 3. 32. The term “unruly” gains its feminist cachet from Kathleen Rowe, Unruly Women: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). 33. Slavoj Žižek uses the term “desubjectivized subjectivity” in the context of a discussion about concentration camp prisoners described as the “living dead.” See his Welcome to the Desert of the Real (New York: Verso, 2002), 138–140. 34. Judith Halberstam, “Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representation, Rage, and Resistance,” Social Text 37 (Winter 1993): 187–201. 35. Susan Bordo makes the case for anorexia as feminine protest in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 36. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, x. 37. Ibid., 59. 38. Ibid., 255. 39. Foucault writes, “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Michel Foucault, 160 Notes Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage Books, 1979], 201). 40. Brian Norman, Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 3. 41. Ibid., 17–21. 42. Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), offers a fascinating discussion of the ghost as a figure that powerfully haunts as a means to social justice. Gordon discusses the ghost in relation to Argentina’s desaparecidos (“disappeared”), Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved: A Novel (New York: New American Library, 1987), and Sabina Spielrein. 43. Deborah Jermyn, “You Can’t Keep a Dead Woman Down: The Female Corpse and Textual Disruption in Contemporary Hollywood,” in Images of the Corpse from the Renaissance to Cyberspace, ed. Elizabeth Klaver (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 153–168; Deborah Jermyn, “Women with a Mission: Lynda LaPlante, DCI Jane Tennison and the Reconfiguration of Television Crime Drama,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 46–63. 44. See Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 29. 45. Elke Weissman, “The Victim’s Suffering Translated: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and the Crime Genre,” Intensities no. 4 (Autumn/Winter 2007), http://intensitiescultmedia.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/weissmann-victims -suffering-translated.pdf. 46. This idea is inspired by Janey Place’s reading of film noir femme fatales in “Women in Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 35–67. Place theorizes that, despite the containment of the woman via the film’s storyline, what viewers of these films remember is the dynamic though dangerous woman who exercised so much power during the journey of the film. In this, she argues, the woman is in excess of narrative containment. Excellent examples are the crafty Jane Greer as Cathie Moffat, shot dead by Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past (1946), and the too-clever-for-her-own-good Bridget O’Shaughnessy, played by Mary Astor, who is sent off to jail at the end of The Maltese Falcon (1941). 47. Mary, the mother of Christ, is the “mother of sorrows.” See Margaret Bruzelius, “Mother’s Pain, Mother’s Voice: Gabriela Mistral, Julia Kristeva, and the Mater Dolorosa,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1999): 215–233.

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