ARTH 1220 STUDY NOTES EXAM 1 PRACTICES OF LOOKING CHAPTER 3: MODERNITY: SPECTATORSHIP, POWER, AND KNOWLEDGE

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1 I. Content Summary ARTH 1220 STUDY NOTES EXAM 1 PRACTICES OF LOOKING CHAPTER 3: MODERNITY: SPECTATORSHIP, POWER, AND KNOWLEDGE Viewers do not always look at an image alone, in a darkened room. The interplay of human senses, the context of the image, the relationship to other viewers, and more contribute to how we practice looking. The term spectatorship provides a more textured understanding of looking, where the practice is enacted in an interactive, multimodal, and relational field. Understanding spectatorship also contains the concept of the gaze, which has been used in specific ways by visual theorists to emphasize the embeddedness of the gaze of the individual viewer in a social and contextual field of looks, objects, and other sensory information. To gaze is to enter into a relational activity of looking. The concept of the gaze plays a central role in theories of spectatorship in modernity. The Subject in Modernity René Descartes helped to usher in modernity with his philosophy that stated that the world becomes known when we accurately represent it in thought, not when we know it through the senses and not when we imagine it in our mind s eye. Representation held an important place in the Cartesian understanding of the human subject. The Cartesian human subject thus is constituted in part through an activity of thinking that involves spectatorship. This understanding of human subjectivity grounds our worldview in modernity, which is a term that scholars use to refer to the historical, cultural, political, and economic conditions related to the Enlightenment and the rise of industrial society and scientific rationalism and the control of nature through technology, science, and rationalism. Modernity is associated with the belief that industrialization, human technological intervention in nature, mass democracy, and the introduction of a market economy are the hallmarks of social progress. One of the hallmarks of human progress is the rise of modern cities such as New York, Chicago, and London. A metaphor that helps us understand the role of the spectator in modernity is that of a flâneur, a kind of urban dandy who strolls through a modern city (like Paris), a space that is newly organized in modernity to encourage a mobile and specular (looking) relationship to urban space and the new consumer goods of mass manufacture displayed there. The challenges of modernity (such as the move to postcolonialism and the problems of industrialization) brought about competing views on human subjectivity. Michel Foucault argued that the human subject is constituted in modernity not through liberal human ideals but through the discourses of institutional life of the period. Foucault saw the subject as an entity produced within and through the discourses and institutional practices of the enlightenment. Foucault s subject is never autonomous but is always constituted in relationships of power that are enacted through discourse. Discourse is a term that refers to the bodies of knowledge that make up social spheres such as law, economics, and sexuality. Views like Foucault s contribute to the destabilization of the concept of the human subject as a self-determining, free, autonomous and unitary being. For Foucault, subjects are always made, or constituted, through discourse. Another understanding of the subject comes from Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst. Lacan theorized that the infant s relationship as a unitary ego to the world, understood as outside and other, is produced through a process in which the ego is split from its very inception. Apprehension of oneself apart from others is always achieved in a rupture that divides the self. This theory contributes significantly to psychoanalytic film studies. The Gaze The concepts of gaze and spectatorship remain important cornerstones of visual studies because they provide a set of terms and methods through which to consider some aspects of looking practices that the concept of the viewer does not really allow us to consider in depth. These are (a) the roles of the unconscious and desire in viewing practices; (b) the role of looking in the formation of the human subject as such; and (c) the ways that looking is always a relational activity and not simply a mental activity engaged in by someone who forms internal mental representations that stand for a passive image object out there. Theories of the gaze and spectatorship are theories of address, rather than theories of reception, in which methods are used to understand how actual viewers respond to a cultural text. The gaze is not an individual s act of looking; rather, it situates the viewer in a field of meaning production (organized around looking practices) that involves recognition of oneself as a member of that world of meaning. Discourse and Power

2 Foucault s understanding of discourse, by which he meant a group of statements that provides a means for talking about (and a way of representing knowledge about) a particular topic at a particular historical moment, grounds a modern understanding of a bureaucratic institution. Foucault s expansion on Jeremy Bentham s concept of the panopticon is about how we participate in practices of self-regulation in response to systems of surveillance, whether they are in place or simply part of a larger inspecting social gaze. Foucault also wrote influentially about how modern societies are structured on a basic relationship of power/knowledge: He saw modern power not as a conspiracy or as authoritarian but rather as capable of normalizing bodies in order to maintain relations of dominance and subordination. The Gaze and the Other The gaze, whether institutional or individual, helps to establish relationships of power. The object of the gaze is less powerful than the gazer (which can be an institution or an individual). Photography is a manifestation of the gaze, where the object being photographed is made into the other at the hands of the photographer. Advertising relies on the gaze to perpetuate binary oppositions of power, such as Orientalism/Occidentalism, which portrays the Orient as a mysterious, exotic Other. The Gaze in Psychoanalysis Lacan s concept of the gaze differs from Foucault s in that Lacan s gaze does not make the subject knowable to itself or to others. Rather, the gaze is part and parcel of a desire for completion of oneself through the other (the image in the mirror, the other person through whom the subject misrecognizes himself or herself). Lacan emphasized that the gaze is a property of the object and not the subject who looks; it s a process in which the object functions to make the subject look, making the subject appear to himself or herself as lacking. Gender and the Gaze Women are also objectified by the gaze (in art and in advertising). John Berger wrote that in this history of images, men act, women appear. Women are the objects of the male gaze, and their returning looks are more often downcast, indirect, or otherwise coded as passive. Laura Mulvey takes this argument further, claiming that Hollywood cinema offers women as objects of the male gaze, geared toward male viewing pleasure, which she read within certain psychoanalytic paradigms including scopophilia and voyeurism. Alfred Hitchcock s Rear Window is an example of the male/female power relationship in the gaze. Changing Concepts of the Gaze Scholarship on spectatorship and the gaze in the 1980s and 1990s began to radically modify many of the early concepts of power and the gaze in ways that are similar to these kinds of representations. Film scholars have rethought questions of spectatorship in relationship to history and mass culture, to reception studies and studies of the audience, to issues of race and spectatorship that question the emphasis on the gender binary of the original model and the resistance of black viewers, to new formulations about how different kinds of viewers can occupy the male gaze, and to the concepts of transgressive female looking and lesbian spectatorship. These changing views of scholarship, and the idea of what kinds of images were important objects of intellectual inquiry, have been paralleled by trends in image-making across the fields of art, media, and advertising that reflect new concepts of gender and aesthetic conventions. Images are central to the experience of modernity and provide a complex field in which power relations are exercised and looks are exchanged.

3 II. Key Figures and Terms Theorist/Scholars Key Terms Artist/Creator/Producers Vladimir Tatlin Jacques Lacan Spectatorship Charles Baudelaire Michel Foucault Gaze Charlie Chaplin René Descartes Modernity Diego Velázquez Jürgen Habermas Flâneur Jean Léon Gérôme Karl Marx Discourse Jean-August-Dominique Bruno Latour Panopticon Ingres Guerrilla Girls Sigmund Freud Colonialism Lorenzo Lotto Michel Foucault Postcolonialism Titian Christian Metz Orientalism/Occidentalism Alfred Hitchcock Ferdinand de Saussure Scopophilia Sylvia Sleigh Jeremy Bentham Voyeurism Robert Mapplethorpe Jacques Derrida Identification Ana Mendieta Edward Said Psychoanalysis Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis Malek Alloula Catherine Opie Deborah Cherry Jean-Louis Baudry Jane Gallop Griselda Pollock John Berger Laura Mulvey Tania Modleski Mary Ann Doane Linda Williams Patricia White Robert Goldman Lynn Spigel

4 ARTIST/CREATOR/PRODUCER Vladimir Tatlin: Sculpture and painter Monument to the Third International is an example of a famous modern structure. It was intended to be 1,312 foot-high and to be consisting a metal spiral frame tilted at an angle, enclosing three glass structures (in the shape of a cylinder, a cone and a cube) housing conference spaces. - He wanted to capture the vitality and dynamism of the latest engineering and architectural forms and technologies that the Soviet Union was eager to embrace in this time of transition - Saw the potential for representing structure and technology as the embodiment of the new Soviet process of restructuring society according to the theories of Marx and Lenin - Tower was meant to embody the meanings of the word revolution - It is emblematic of modernism due to its embrace of technology as an expression of the Soviet ethos and in its focus on form as an expression of cultural meaning Charles Baudelaire: Poet - Thematized the urban experience of being lost in a crowd of strangers - The Painter of Modern Life - E.g. the Flaneur - Social malaise of the alienated individual who felt lost in the crowds and dehumanized by the industrialized life of the modern city characterized the era not only for the capitalist but also for the social worker Charlie Chaplin: Actor - Modern Times Critique of the impact of modernity and industrialization on the body of the everyday man - Attempts to retain his integrity as a human subject while working on a brutally fast assembly line as his body is entrapped by machines in a hilarious series of physical comedy gags Diego Velazquez: Painter - Las Meninas Composed in a manner that positions the spectator ambiguously - Depiction of a room within the king s palace in which several figures interact (kings daughter, her maid, a chaperone, other children and figures, a dog) - The gaze is being something enacted through a spatialized field - Mirror in which the upper bodies of the king and queen are reflected, their faces looking out, like that of Velazquez at us - Position of mirror suggests that they in fact stand somewhere in front of this scene - Placement of king and queen and the organization of their viewpoint in relation to that of the spectator has been of great interest to writers, including Foucault Jean-Leon Gerome: Painter - The Bath c Orientalist works in the style of neoclassicism - The women on display for the viewer - Distinct racial difference between the demure white woman turned away from the camera and the black woman servant who bathes her and is on full display for the viewer - Black servant is fully available to the viewer (codes of the image) - White woman, clearly a consumer of the exoticized locale of the bath, is shielded from our gaze - Example of orientalism Jean-August-Dominique Ingres: French artist - La Grande Odalisque Orientalist image - Reproduction of sorts - Drew on iconography of the harem during the Ottoman Empire - Orientalist gaze on the nude female body is what defines the image - Ingres is one of the last advocates of neoclassicism - Paintings regarded for their revival of classical beauty ideals, captured in the rendering of the human form in pure, classic lines and smooth textures - He was widely criticized for what was regarded at the time as his gothic distortions of the human form

5 - Appropriation of the odalisque figure as a sexual icon bears significance in relationship to the context of European imperial expansion and colonial conquest - Important icon of classical female beauty Guerrilla Girls: Feminist activist art group - Do Women Have to be Naked to get into the Met, Museum? Point about how few women artists had their work in the collection of the renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York - Ingres odalisque is invoked to question the equally timeless fact that women, as compared with men, have been disproportionately represented in museums of art not as artists but as subjects of works of art, often in states of undress (doesn t evoke associations with its timeless beauty) - In covering the face of the model, or odalisque, with the gorilla mask, the group are quite pointedly refusing to look back at the spectator Lorenzo Lotto: Painter - Venus and Cupid 1500s - Example of how paintings were for the most part geared toward male viewers - Most collectors were men until recently - Woman is typically posed so that her body is on display for the viewer s easy appreciation - Long tradition in art of understanding the female nude as the project and possession of the male artist - Women are posed as objects of an active or male gaze and their returning looks are often downcast, indirect or otherwise coded as passive Titian: Painter - Venus with a Mirror c Women gazing at themselves in mirrors, with bodies turned toward the presumed spectator of the painting - Mirrors offered another view to the image, to create multiple plans within a painting that could be seen by the stationary spectator - Also to code for femininity - On display for presumed male spectator, the convention of the mirror establishes her gaze as narcissistic Alfred Hitchcock: Film - Rear Window Explicit about gendered looking - Depicts the male gaze as a practice in which men look at female bodies containing them (through the device of binoculars, for example) and rendering them objects of visual pleasure - Male gaze is not as controlling and powerful of this interpretation suggests - Rear Window can also be defined by an ambivalence about femininity, in which women who know too much threaten patriarchal structures Sylvia Sleigh: American Painter - Philip Golub Reclining Turned the tables on Ingres and the gendered mirror trope by portraying her male model in the classical odalisque nude pose - Figure is male because of the title of painting - He lounges with his back to the spectator-painter in the vulnerable pose made by Ingres Odalisque, with curved spine and exposed butt - Absence of body parts makes it ambiguous that it is a man - Amplified by the face that gazes narcissistically at its own image in a mirror - Sleigh appears in the painting as a reflection (she is the spectator) Robert Mapplethorpe: American photographer - Pushed the boundaries of representation in relation to race, sexuality and gender - Works conveyed physical beauty in a manner that emphasizes the fine line between standards of masculine and feminine anatomy and physiognomy, between erotica and art, and between beauty and its exaggeration and distortion - Arnold Schwarzenegger Array of meanings about male sexuality, particularly in retrospect

6 Ana Mendieta: American artist (performance and earthworks) - Countered dominant traditions of representing the female body as a site of display and of women as narcissistically engaged with their own display for male consumption - Silueta Works in Mexico Trace of her body, marked like a crime-scene outline, is impressed with sand, then sprinkled and lined with blood-red pigment and photographed - Reminds the looker of the historical absence of the hand of the woman artist - Refuses the spectators gaze on her body by erasing her literal form while leaving its trace Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis: - Questioned the constitution of the subject in terms of race and cultural identity in visual culture - Exhibition Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self - First comprehensive works to take on an overarching compilation and analysis of photography, video, and film traditions across the sciences and the arts through which racial identities were imaged, constructed and challenged - Examine works from across news media, science images, art photography, and independent video to raise questions about the place of race and cultural identity in changing patterns and practices of spectatorship and representation Catherine Opie: Photographer - Photographic portraits examine lesbian subjectivity in everyday life - Self Portrait/Cutting Opie turns away from camera - Back is a tableau on display for the spectator, but is also a surface onto which the codes of heteronormativity have been painfully etched, with the childlike imagery of two stick figures in skirts holding hands before an image of a house with a peaceful sky above - Iconography is about the idyllic childhood dream of normative family life, but the violence in which it has been etched demand that we reread the image as a reworking of the codes of normativity to allow lesbian partnership to be an element of the dream of family THEORISTS/SCHOLARS Jacques Lacan: - Argued that liberal human subject never really existed as such but was an ideal against which emerges a subject who is radically split at the very time that it comes into being - Human subject becomes aware of itself and thus emerges as such not at birth but during a period of self awareness and apparent autonomy that typically begins between the ages of 6 and 18 months (mirror phase) - Concept of human subject as self-knowing and autonomous has been questioned by 20 th century thinkers - Mirror is not a reflection of the self, but about the mirror as the constitutive element in the construction of the self - Mirror constructs the self, and the self is organized entity is actually a imitation of the cohesiveness of the mirror image Michael Foucault: - The human subject is constituted in modernity not through liberal human ideals but through the discourses of institutional life of the period - Subject is an entity produced within and through the discourses and institutional practices of the Enlightenment - Subject is never autonomous but is always constructed in relationships of power that are enacted through discourse - We cannot know what it means to be a human subject outside of the discursive practices through which subjective experience and representations of human subjectivity are enacted. - Gave discourse the meaning of something that is usually used to describe passages of writing or speech, the act of talking about something Christian Metz: Film theorist - I exist to myself only insofar as I can imagine myself ina field in which I appear in light of others (objects, people) who make me apparent to myself

7 - The viewer suspends disbelief in the fictional world of the film and identifies not only with specific characters in the film but also, and more important, with the films overall ideology - Occurs through identification with the position of the camera or with film characters - Identification with character or camera position puts into play fantasy structures (such as an imagined idea family) that derive from the viewers unconscious Fernidand Saussure: - Theories of semiotics Jeremy Bentham: - Designer of the panopticon (a prison structure) - Design was organized around a concentric building composed of rings of cells, at the center of which stood a guard tower - When positioned in the tower, the guard could see and hear activity in the prison cells (which were connected to the tower by listening channels), but the guard could not be seen by inmates - Observation ports were covered in blinds and carefully designed to block visual evidence from below of the presence or absence of the observer making it possible for prisoners to imagine the presence of a guard when the tower was in fact unmanned - Concept of seeing without being seen and of imagining oneself being seen when in fact no human subject is looking - Gain of power of mind over mind - Foucault used this concept in his book Discipline and Punish - Concept of panopticon is about how we participate in practices of self-regulation in response to systems of surveillance, whether they are in place or simply assumed to be in place (e.g. camera surveillance) Jaques Derrida: - All binary oppositions are encoded with values and concepts of power, superiority and worth - These categories of difference are themselves overlapping and not mutually exclusive - How racism and sexism function - Concepts of dominance and superiority Edward Said: - Book Orientalism - The orient is not strictly a place or culture itself, but rather a European cultural construction - Orientalism is about the Orient s special place in European Western experience - Orient is not only adjacent to Europe, it is also the place of Europe s greatest and richest and oldest colonies - Concept of the Orient as other serves to establish Europe and the West as the norm - Orientalism creates a binary opposition between the West (the Occident) and the East (the Orient) with negative and fetishistic fantasies to the latter - Orientalism functions to reinforce cultural stereotypes that have their roots in the colonial era Malek Alloula: - Book The Colonial Harem - The figure of the harem woman was invoked in France as a visual and literary icon of female sexual submission among painters and photographers enmeshed in the broader tradition of Orientalism in the arts and sciences - Eroticism is implied not only in the availability of the women s bodies to the viewer but also in the implication that they are objects of eroticism to each other Deborah Cherry: - Volume Orientalism s Interlocutors - Be aware of the potential agency of the women in some of these cultural settings - Some women who achieved social status through their role as the Sultan s favored members of the harem negotiated their own portraits by 19 th century British artists during the period of the Ottoman Empie known as the Reign of Women - Orientalist gaze on the nude female body is what defines the image

8 Jean-Louis Baudry: - Concept of the unconscious is crucial to theories of cinematic spectatorship - In cinema, the darkened theater and conditions of watching a mirror-like screen invite the viewer to regress to a childlike state - Viewer undergoes a temporary loss of ego as they identify with the powerful position of apprehending bodies on the screen - Viewer is in a regressive state (analogy between child s ego and experience of film viewing) Jane Gallop: - Lacan posits that the mirror constructs the self, and the self as organized entity is actually an imitation of the cohesiveness of the mirror image - Lacan s theory is not about the mirror as a reflection of the self but about the mirror as the constitutive element in the construction of the self Griselda Pollock: - Modernity and spaces of femininity has much to do with commerce of art as it did with the social roles and sexual stereotypes of men and women - Most collectors were men - Primary viewing audience of art was composed overwhelmingly of men John Berger: - Men act, women appear - Former tradition of imaging men was to show men in action - Every drawing or painting that used perspective, proposed to the spectator that he was the unique center of the world Laura Mulvey: - Argued that Hollywood cinema offered images geared toward male viewing pleasure - Concept of the gaze about the relationship of pleasure and looking in psychoanalysis - Scopophilia is the pleasure in looking and exhibitionism (taking pleasure in being looked at) - Voyeurism is the pleasure one takes in looking while not being seen o Carries the negative connotation of a powerful, if not sadistic, position within the gaze - The camera is used as a took of voyeurism and sadism, disempowering those before its look Tania Modleski: - One can reread the interplay of gazes and power in Rear Window in quite a different way - Hitchcock s films are defined by an ambivalence about femininity, in which women who know too much threaten patriarchal structures Mary Ann Doane: - Used psychoanalysis to theorize about female spectators of films made specifically for women viewers, such as the genre of the woman s film of the 1940s (known as weepies ) Linda Williams: - Book Hard Core - Analyzed pornography through psychoanalytic film theory, taking it seriously as a kind of cultural text that creates a variety of desires and subject positions - Opened the way for feminist film scholars to offer more nuanced theories of the function of pornography, and, in the field of porn studies, to take up questions such as the agency of women workers and produces in the industry, as well as subgenres such as lesbian and gay pornography - Spectatorship theory is important in this field because it provides a method by which to consider the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which viewers identify not only within their own identity category but also with different social and gender positions, crossing categories and identities often within the same viewing situation Patricia White - Book Uninvited - Argues for a theory of lesbian spectatorship, mining works such as Hitchcock s Rebecca to make a case for lesbian representability in texts previously unrecognized as being open to readings of lesbian texts and subtexts

9 Robert Goldman: - Reebox ad o Women in action o Exercising in her apartment, oblivious to our gaze and determined in her body movements o Sells self-empowerment and self-determination o Male gaze still operates in this image in what we are invited to assess thie woman s appearance in looking at her, no matter our gender or sexual orientation o Woman s active stance and defiant words are resistant to the traditional power dynamic of the gaze - Example of commodity feminism o Feminist concepts of empowerment and strength are translated into the mandate that working out, producing a tight, lean, muscled female body, and consuming products such as running shoes is equivalent to having control over one s life Lynn Spigel: - Described the introduction of the home theater in postwar culture- the social space of the living room in which the family assembles as a group before the tv set, which took the place of the earth - Televisual spectatorship and the field of the gaze are radically different from that of the movie theater or the museum gallery KEY TERMS Spectator(ship): Term derived from psychoanalytic theory that refers to the viewer of visual arts such as cinema. In early versions of this theory, the term spectator did not refer to a specific individual or an actual member of the viewing audience but rather was imagined to be an idea viewer, separate from all defining social, sexual, and racial aspects of viewer identity. In contrast, in film theory in the late 1980s and 1990s emphasized specific identity groups of spectators, such as female spectators, working-class spectators, queer spectators, or black spectators. This work shifted away from the abstraction of the category to include more specific aspects of identity and processes such as identification and pleasure that are shaped by specific embodied experience. In addition, film theory has increasingly emphasized how one need not occupy an identity group to identify within that group s spectator position. For example, in action films, one does not have to be male to take up in fantasy the position of the male spectator. Gaze: Term used to describe the relationship of looking in which the subject is caught up in dynamics of desire through trajectories of looking and being looked at among objects and other people. E.g. The gaze can be motivated by the subject s desire for control over the object it sees, and an object can likewise capture and hold back the look. The gaze is a relation in which one is caught up In traditional psychoanalytic theory, the gaze is intimately linked to fantasy. Jacques Lacan put the gaze at the center of his approach to how individuals enact desire. Applying Freud s and Lacan s theories to film, 1970s psychoanalytic film theorists posited that in cinema, the gaze of the spectator on the image was an implicitly male one that objectified the women on screen. Since the 1990s, theories of the gaze have complicated this original model and have introduced discussion of a variety of different kinds of gazes (e.g. gazes distinguished by sex, gender, race and class) Michel Foucault uses the term gaze to describe the relationship of subjects within a network of powerand the mechanism of vision as a means of negotiating and conveying power within that network- in a given institutional context. Social institution produce an inspecting, normalizing or clinical gaze in which their subjects are caught and through which institutions keep track of their activities and thereby control and discipline them. The gaze is not something one has or uses, rather, it is a spatial and institutionally bound relationship into which one enters. There need not to be a real subject who looks in order for the subject who is watched over to feel caught in the controlling gaze of an institution (such as surveillance system). Modernity: Refers to the time period and worldview beginning approximately in the 18 th century with the Enlightenment, reaching its height in the late 19 th and 20 th centuries, when broad populations in Europe and North America were increasingly concentrated in urban centers and in industrial societies of increased mechanization and automation. Modernity is a time of dramatic technological change that embraces a

10 linear view of progress as crucial to humankind s prosperity and an optimistic view of progress as crucial to humankind s prosperity and an optimistic view of the future at the same time that it embodies an anxiety about change and social upheaval. An embrace of technology and progress, a sense of revolutionary change, and anxieties about this upheaval characterize it. Flaneur: Term popularized by poet Charles Baudelaire, and subsequently theorized explicitly by cultural critics such as Walter Benjamin, that refers to a person who wanders city streets, taking in the sights, especially those of consumer society, in the era of industrialization and modernity, when consumer goods were first put on display in store windows and architecture was beginning to adapt to the need for spaces of consumption and display. Flaneur is a type of window shopper, with the implication that the act of looking at the gleaming offerings of commodity culture is itself a source of pleasure whether or not one actually ever purchases anything. Flaneur is simultaneously in the world of consumerism and detached from the cityscape around him. Originally, the fameur was understood to be male, as cultural criticism, such as the work of Anne Friedberg, has sought to theorize the concept of the flaneuse as a female shopper consuming the seductive sights of the city. Discourse: The socially organized process of talking about a particular subject matter. Michel Foucault describes it as a body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something. Although there is no set list of discourses, the term tends to be used for the broad bodies of social knowledge, such as the discourses of economics, the law, medicine, politics, sexuality, technology and so forth. Discourses are so specific to particular social and historical contexts, and they change over time. It is fundamental to Foucault s theory that discourses produce certain kinds of subjects and knowledge and that we occupy to varying degrees the subject positions defined within a broad array of discourses. Colonialism: The process of a nation extending its power over another nation, people, or territory. Primarily to describe the colonization by European countries of Africa, India, Latin and North America and the Pacific region from the 16 th through the 20 th century (when struggles for independence produced the conditions of postcolonialism). Colonization was motivated by the potential exploitation of one nation s resources and labor by another and involved both the conquest of countries politically and economically but also the restructuring of the culture of the colonized, with enforced changes in language among other things. Postcolonialism: Refers to the cultural and social contexts of countries that were formally defined through relationships of colonialism and to the contemporary mix of cultures in former colonies, including neocolonialist practices, diasporic migrant cultures, and continuing colonial domination and cultural imperialism toward former colonies. Postcolonial refers to the broad set of changes that have affected both former colonies and colonizers and in particular to the mix of identities, languages and influences that have resulted from complex systems of dependence and independence. Most theorists of postcolonialism insist that the breakup of older colonial models is never complete and does not put an end to forms of domination between more and less powerful countries. Orientalism: Term produced by Edward Said that refers to the ways that Western Cultures conceive of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures as other and attribute to these cultures qualities such as exoticism and barbarism. Orientalism sees binary oppositions between the West (the Occident) and the East (the Orient) in which either negative or romanticized qualities are attributed to the latter, social science, and political policy. For instance, the stereotype of Arab people as fanatic terrorists is an example of Orientalism. Identification: Psychological process whereby one forms a bond with or emulates an aspect or attribute of another person and is transformed through that process. It is used extensively to describe the experiences of viewers in looking at film. According to cinema theorist Christian Metz, cinematic identification can involve feeling oneself to be in the position of characters or the cinematic apparatus itself. One example would be to feel as if one were seeing in the place of the camera that appears to go everywhere in a scene. Viewers identify in complex ways that do not always map onto their actual social identities. For example, women may identify with male characters, straight men may identify with gay male characters, and so on.

11 Psychoanalysis: Theory of how the mind works derived from Sigmund Freud, that emphasizes the role of the unconscious and desire in shaping a subject s actions, feelings and motives. Freud s work emphasized bringing the repressed materials of the unconscious to the surface through what was called the talking cure. It focused on the construction of the self through various mechanisms and processes of the unconscious as laid out in his writings and analyses. Psychoanalytic theory is the application of many of these ideas to analyze systems of representation. Jacque Lacan updated many of Freud s ideas in the 1930s through the 1970s in relationship to language systems and inspired the use of psychoanalytic theory to interpret and analyze literature and film. Scopophilia: In psychoanalytic terms, the drive to look and the general pleasure in looking. Freud saw voyeurism (the pleasure in looking without being seen) and exhibitionism (the pleasure in being looked at) as the active and passive forms of scopophilia. The concept of scopophilia has been important to psychoanalytic film theory in its emphasis on the relationship of pleasure and desire to the practice of looking. Voyeurism: In psychoanalytic terms, the erotic pleasure in watching without being seen. Voyweuism has historically been associated with the masculine spectator. Voyeurism is also used to describe the experience of the cinematic spectators who in the traditional viewing context of the movie theater can view the images on screen while themselves being hidden in darkness.