Teaching Visual Culture in an Interdisciplinary Classroom Teaching Teaching Visual Culture in an Interdisciplinary Classroom How to deal with gender, women, gender roles, feminism and gender equality in teaching practices? The ATHENA thematic network brings together specialists in women’s and gender studies, feminist research, women’s rights, gender equality and diversity. In the book series ‘Teaching with Gender’ the partners in this network have collected articles on a wide range of teaching practices in the field of gender. The books in this series address challenges and possibilities of teaching about women and gender in a wide range of educational contexts. The authors discuss pedagogical, theoretical and political dimensions of learning and teaching on women and gender. The books in this series contain teaching material, reflections on feminist pedagogies, practical discussions about the development of gender- sensitive curricula in specific fields. All books address the crucial aspects of education in Europe today: increasing international mobility, growing importance of interdisciplinarity and the many practices of life-long learning and training that take place outside the traditional programmes of higher education. These books will be indispensable tools for educators who take serious the challenge of teaching with gender. (for titles see inside cover) Visual literacy is crucial for understanding the role of visual culture as a key factor in processes of globalization, technologization and multiculturalization, which are all part of our historicity. Certainly, the study of the visual is not limited to the study of images, but also of their effects, material practices they entail and creative potential they offer. Therefore, it is of critical importance to work out new approaches to study both epistemologies and ontologies of the visual. Teaching Visual Culture in an Interdisciplinary Classroom weaves together various critical paradigms, theories and methodologies within the common field of feminist visual culture. By doing so, it demonstrates the importance of the analysis of the visual Teaching Visual Culture for feminist studies as well as the need to increase visual literacy in general. The volume provides theoretical and methodological support and examples of possible in an Interdisciplinary Classroom analyses for researchers and students interested in the field of feminist visual Feminist (Re)Interpretations of the Field culture or, more generally, women’s studies, gender studies, visual studies, art Elżbieta H. Oleksy and Dorota Golańska studies and science studies. It presents feminist theories and methodologies, A book series by ATHENA which were influential for the field of visual culture and encourages readers to think critically about the visual. From Introduction Edited by Elżbieta H. Oleksy and Dorota Golańska The books are printed and also published online. Contact [email protected] or go to www.athena3.org or www.erg.su.se/genusstudier to find out how to download or to order books from this series. ISBN 91-87792-49-4 Edited by Elżbieta H. Oleksy and Dorota Golańska Teaching Visual Culture in an Interdisciplinary Classroom. Feminist (Re)Interpretations of the Field Teaching with Gender. European Women’s Studies in International and Interdisciplinary Classrooms A book series by ATHENA © Iwona Cała Series editors: Annika Olsson, Andrea Peto and Berteke Waaldijk Editorial board: Barbara Bagilhole, Gunilla Bjeren, Rosi Braidotti, Anna Cabó, Sara Goodman, Daniela Gronold, Aino-Maija Hiltunen, Nina Lykke, Linda Lund Pedersen, Elżbieta H. Oleksy, Anastasia-Sasa Lada, Susanna Pavlou, Kirsi Saarikangas, Adelina Sánchez, Svetlana Slapsak Editorial assistant: Noémi Kakucs Titles in the Series: 1. Teaching Gender, Diversity and Urban Space. An Intersectional Approach between Gender Studies and Spatial Disciplines 2. Teaching Gender in Social Work 3. Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist Pedagogy 4. Teaching with the Third Wave. New Feminists’ Explorations of Teaching and Institutional Contexts 5. Teaching Visual Culture in an Interdisciplinary Classroom. Feminist (Re)Interpretations of the Field 6. Teaching Empires. Gender and Transnational Citizenship in Europe 7. Teaching Intersectionality. Putting Gender at the Centre 8. (previously published by ATHENA and Women’s Center University at NUI Galway). Teaching with Memories. European Women’s Histories in International and Interdisciplinary Classrooms Published by ATHENA3 Advanced Thematic Network in Women’s Studies in Europe, University of Utrecht and Centre for Gender Studies, Stockholm University “This book has been published with the support of the Socrates/Erasmus programme for Thematic Network Projects of the European Commission through grant 227623-CP-I-2006- I-NL-ERASMUS-TNPP” ZuidamUithof Drukkerijen, Utrecht 2009 CONTENTS Introduction 5 CHAPTER 1 15 Critical Visual Empowerment through the Gaze Elżbieta H. Oleksy CHAPTER 2 33 Re-visioning Feminism: Progressive Text, Genre and Female Experience in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) Joanna Rydzewska CHAPTER 3 55 Intersectionality and Visual Culture: Approaches, Complexities and Teaching Implications Aleksandra M. Różalska CHAPTER 4 75 Zooming in on Photography Online: Three Hundred and Sixty Five Flickering Selves Redi Koobak CHAPTER 5 95 Looking at Science, Looking at You! The Feminist Re-visions of Nature (Brain and Genes) Cecilia Åsberg CHAPTER 6 123 Look and Feel Those Chubby Cheeks: An Intersensory Approach to Seeing the Ultrasound Image Charlotte Kroløkke CHAPTER 7 145 The Potentia of Novelty. Through the Prism of Visual Representations of Human in Vitro Fertilization (IVF) Edyta Just CHAPTER 8 163 The Affective Turn and Visual Literacy renée c. hoogland CHAPTER 9 175 Seeing Differently: Towards Affirmative Reading of Visual Culture Marek M. Wojtaszek and Dorota Golańska NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 199 INTRODUCTION Teaching visual culture today requires special skills. We live in the times when not only entertainment but also knowledge are visually constructed. What we see has become as crucial as what we read or hear. School and university curricula have been restructured to include courses on the visual, so that visual grammar can be studied alongside texts and figures. Yet there is still much uncertainty as to how to “read” visual images and—particularly—how to respond to ideology, which is often embedded in visual texts, or how to approach the visual on the aesthetic level, despite its ideological/oppressive character. This teaching manual provides students with the tools they need in order to view critically what the visual has on offer. This kind of approach reconceptualizes the visual and makes visuality a process whereby the search for meanings involves not only resistance to dominant ideologies but also creativity on the part of the student. Visual culture should be seen as an interdisciplinary or even post- disciplinary field of study1 which focuses on a broadly defined problem of visuality. Stemming from art history, the field was inspired by British cultural studies which drew from multiple disciplines and methods of analysis to ex- pose deep hierarchical and intersecting structures of society. Social conditions and effects constitute crucial elements of cultural practices, and they are like- wise important for the articulation of meanings in visual culture. Therefore, critical approaches used within the field should focus on—as William J.T. Mitchell suggests—“the visual construction of the social, not just the social construction of vision”.2 The study of visual culture is crucial for understan- ding its role as a key factor in processes of globalization, technologization and multi culturalization, which are all part of our historicity. Today, the field is de- fined by its interdisciplinary study of images across diverse media, new media, architecture, design and art across a range of social arenas, namely, news, art, science, advertising and popular culture. At the centre of contemporary visual culture stands the image, but—as Mitchell reminds us—“we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what 1 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Subject of Visual Culture”, in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 2 William J.T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: a Critique of Visual Culture”, Journal of Visual Culture 1(2) (2002), 170. 5 is to be done with or about them”.3 Consequently, the study of visual culture is not limited to the study of images, but also examines their effects, the material practices they entail, and the creative potential they offer. Therefore, it is of critical importance to work out new approaches to study both epistemologies and ontologies of the visual. For these reasons, further exploration of the topic is necessary, especially from diversified feminist/minority perspectives, to improve our visual literacy of the increasingly sophisticated visual world in which we are all immersed. Both vision and visual culture belong to the most celebrated yet simultaneously hotly debated technologies of self and sources of knowledge. The different practices of seeing, looking and being looked at, organize and restrain the processes of subjectification. Clearly, looking contributes to the ways in which the hierarchy of gender is maintained within the phallocentric order, a system which is built on the principle