Refracting Representation: Photography, Women, and Subjecthood
Session will present: On locationPhotography has been used to construct and disseminate essentializing depictions—stereotypical or tokenistic—of marginalized individuals and communities. Yet the medium has also provided a means of articulating fluid or critical visions of identity to contest static categories of race, ethnicity, or gender. This panel offers a comparative investigation into twentieth-century practices of photographic portraiture and self-portraiture by women artists of Kemalist Turkey, Soviet Uzbekistan, and the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York. Expanding the definition of photographic authorship beyond the person who operates the camera, these artists used photographs, sometimes in conjunction with other media, to define or evade categories propagated or reinforced by the mass media. From the interwar period to the present, the papers bring to life shifting attitudes towards women’s prominence in public life and photographic negotiations of citizenship and belonging. Across these diverse geographies and periods, Sabiha Bengütaș, Shamsroyi Khasanova, Umida Akhmedova, and Sophie Rivera employed material, compositional, intermedial, and conceptual strategies to challenge how subjecthood is articulated photographically in colonial, post-colonial, and post-revolutionary terms. By avoiding the limiting framework of “the female gaze,” the session proposes other methodological tools for understanding how the category of gender intersects with the politics of representation. In particular, we argue for the importance of drawing together women who have not featured in mainstream modernist narratives in order to chart new networks of exchange and alliances. Ultimately, this panel foregrounds the centrality of women artists in the intertwined histories of photography, revolutionary nation-building, and identity construction in the twentieth century.
Keywords:
Medium: Photography (history and studio)
Time Period: Twentieth Century
Topics: Gender and Sexualities
Topics: Postcolonial Studies
Transnational
Chair:
Alexandra Dennett, Harvard
Discussant:
Hannah Feldman, Northwestern University
Abstract Submissions Closed