ARH 6798-902                                                                                      Professor E. Fraser
University of South Florida                                                                     Office: FAH 272
                                                                                                               Tel: 974-4549 (no voice mail)
                                                                                                               Email: fraser@satie.arts.usf.edu
 

Books that can be bought (USF bookstore):
Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast, eds., Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre
Lynda Nead, The Female Nude; Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality
Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity; Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France
Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society
Marianna DeMarco Torgovnick, Gone Primitive; Savage Intellects, Modern Lives
Anne Wagner, Three Women (Three Artists): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe
Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds.  Significant Others; Creativity and Intimate Partnership
Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem

Balzac, Cousin Pons (recommended)
Zola, Masterpiece (required)

Brief description
The purpose of this course is to give studio and art history graduate students grounding in the theoretical and visual vocabulary of gender studies.  Gender has been a subject of art history and criticism only since the 1970s.  This class will explicitly contrast early concepts with current ones.  (Many of the readings for this class were published within the last two to three years.)  We will look at three of the most important focus areas of gender studies in visual art: the gaze, the body, and modernism and postmodernism.  In each of these areas, we will look at how original concepts have been challenged and revised by new concerns such as female agency and subjectivity; masculinity as a social construction; racial constructions and exclusions; the body as conduit of agency; and postcolonial studies.  The course is thematically (not chronologically) organized, and will draw on art from the 19th and 20th centuries; it is a discussion-oriented seminar class, where substantial weekly readings are followed by in-depth class discussion (rather than lectures).

ACCESS TO E-MAIL REQUIRED FOR PARTICIPATION IN THIS CLASS
 

Attendance policy
Since this is a seminar, meaning that most of the work takes place during class time and that we meet only once a week, no unexcused absences are allowed.  Two absences (or more) of any kind (except in dire circumstances) will automatically reduce your final grade to a “C” or lower.
 

Assignments
1) substantial weekly position papers of about one page, distributed on E-mail list before class
2) completion of readings by class period, review of all other students’ position papers, and participation in class discussion, which will occasionally include preparation a week ahead of class
3) two essays (5-6 pp. each) OR one 12-page research paper
4) group-led discussions
 

Approximate grade distribution
25% participation in discussion and group-led discussions
 (Good participation is active, thoughtful, and respectful of other students; monopolizing discussion rather than listening and responding to other students will be evaluated negatively.)
25% weekly position papers (distributed on E-mail before class)
25% each for two essays OR 50% for research paper

Introduction

The Gaze: then and now
week 1  Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Visual and Other Pleasures, pp. 15-26; Margaret Olin, “Gaze” in Critical Terms for Art History (R. Shiff and R. Nelson, eds.), pp. 208-219; “Psychoanalysis, Gender and Art,” etc., in Gender and Art (G. Perry, ed.), pp. 229-260.
      Viewing of Hitchcock’s Rear Window

week 2  Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” Vision and Difference, pp. 50-90 and 205-209; Jann Matlock, “Censoring the Realist Gaze” in Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre (Cohen and Prendergast, eds), pp. 28-65; Matlock, “Seeing Women in the July Monarchy Salon; Rhetorics of Visibility and the Women’s Press,” Art Journal 55: 2 (Summer 1996), pp. 73-84; Sharon Marcus, “Open Houses,” Apartment Stories; City and Home in 19th-Century Paris and London, pp. 1-82.
      Recommended: Balzac, Cousin Pons

week 3  bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Reel to Real, pp. 197-213; Malek Alloula, Colonial Harem, pp. 3-5 + skim texts and photographs; Emily Apter, “Figura Serpentina: Visual Seduction and the Colonial Gaze,” Spectacles of Realism, pp. 163-178.
     By this class meeting: choose essays or research paper, and deadline for first essay.

Gendered Bodies
week 4  The Model’s Body : Marie Lathers, “Modeling, Mothering, and the Postpartum Belly in Zola” and “Raphael, Balzac, Ingres”; and “The Social Construction and Deconstruction of the Female Model in 19th-Century France” (all on reserve)
    Visiting speaker: Marie Lathers on the model in 19th-century Paris
 
     Required: Zola, The Masterpiece

week 5  Ann R. Jones, “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l’écriture féminine” in E. Showalter, ed.  The New Feminist Criticism; G. Pollock and R. Parker, “Painted Ladies,” in Old Mistresses, pp. 114-133; Janet Wolff, “Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics” in Feminine Sentences, pp. 120-141.

the male body, the female body; sexual difference, and modern art
week 6  Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity  (ch 1, 2, 5, 7)
week 7  Lynda Nead, Female Nude (entire book)

the “primitivized” body
week 8  Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in H.L. Gates, ed. “Race,” Writing, and Difference, pp. 223-261; Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: “Going Primitive,” pp. 3-72; “Engendering the Primitive,” pp. 141-158.
    Viewing of Tarzan

    Recommended: Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
 

The Artist and Modernism: Authorship
week 9  Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” in Image, Music, Text, pp. 142-148; Nancy Miller “Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader”in T. de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, pp. 102-120; Nanette Salomon, “The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission,” in D. Preziosi, ed., Art of Art History, pp. 344-355.

week 10  Whitney Chadwick, “Gender, Race, and Modernism after the Second World War,” Women, Art, and Society, pp. 316-354; Anne Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women), pp. 1-103

week 11  Anne Wagner, rest of book

modernism and partnership/collaboration
week 12  Significant Others; Creativity and Intimate Partnership (Ch 1, 4, 6, 11)

Postmodernism and Feminism
week 13  Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernists” in M. Garrard and N. Broude, eds., Expanding Discourse, pp. 487-502; Whitney Chadwick, “New Directions: A Partial Overview,” Women, Art, and Society, pp. 378-422; Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Feminism and Postmodernism” in Subversive Intent, pp. 181-205.

Explanation of assignments

Position papers
Approximately one full page, due weekly: send on class E-mail list by Sunday (day before class) at 5:00 p.m.  Bring hard-copy with you to class to be handed in.  (Save all your graded position papers to the end of class.)

Position papers are your responses to the assigned readings.  You are meant to focus on the main issues, raise questions or problems you have with the reading, and consider the author’s interpretive position; we will use them in class discussion.  It is not necessary for the position papers to be written with all the polish of a carefully drafted essay; you may write in a somewhat fragmentary fashion, although you should use full sentences so that your thoughts are clear.  You will not be graded on the literary form but on the content and thoughtfulness of your position papers.  It is very important to realize that the position papers are not summaries or re-statements of the authors’ position, but your own reactions to the readings.

After summarizing in two sentences or so the main thrust or argument of the reading, some questions you might want to consider include:
 - What is the central “problematic” that the text addresses?  How does the author demonstrate the importance of this issue and perspective?
 - What are the overt perspectives and themes that the author addresses, and what are the implicit, unstated ones?
 - What currents of thought do you recognize in the author’s approach (e.g., semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, social history of art, etc.)?
 - How does this author’s view or method differ from others we’ve read?  How is it like or unlike earlier/later work in gender studies?
 - What are unsatisfying points or limitations in the reading?
 - How has the author’s approach contributed to or changed your understanding of this period or subject?
 - What are the implications of this author’s ideas?  How might they be applied to other areas, periods, artists, etc.?

The position papers are meant to help you come to class prepared to discuss, ensuring that you have digested the reading with some critical distance.  You should read all other students’ position papers before class meeting each week, and come prepared with questions and points of contention about them.  If you are absent from class, whether with or without an excuse, you are nonetheless required to turn in a position paper for that class meeting by the next class period.
 

CLASS LISTSERV SIGN-UP INSTRUCTIONS
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PAPER ASSIGNMENTS

You may choose to write either two short essays or one long research paper.  Once you have made the choice, it is written in stone, and cannot be altered.  You may also choose your own deadline for essay number one, based on your other class schedules, and dates when you know you will have time.

ESSAY #1 [due dates variable, as in explanation above, by 4:30 p.m. of your chosen date]
Re-reading the body, re-reading the gaze: using ideas from readings in these two sections of class, reinterpret the works of a specific artist.  (5-6 pp.)

ESSAY #2
Using Nanette Salomon’s essay, “The Sins of Omission,” as a model, choose a canonical modernist text and analyze it, considering the way that the “subject” of modernism is socially constructed and “gendered.”  How is the subject of modernism created?  (5-6pp.)

Some recommended texts:
Essays by Clement Greenberg or Harold Rosenberg; Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence; Giorgio Vasari, sections of Lives of the Artists; Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”; Michael Fried, Three Painters.

OR

RESEARCH PAPER

Research and write a focused 12-page research paper, choosing a single artist and considering any of the issues raised in class.