Introduction What’s (Still) Wrong with Images of Women?

Abstract

Confronting Visuality in Multi-Ethnic Women’s Writing argues that women’s literature has an important role to play in bridging a divide between critical analyses of women’s images and the reliance on objectifying structures in mainstream media. The works considered here were published between 1970 and 2010, a period during which visual representations of women came under intense critical scrutiny, and as a result, representational practices evolved, though not in ways that early feminists would have anticipated or approved. Throughout this period, writers (in addition to feminist scholars, media workers, and activists) sought to understand, as Griselda Pollock put it in the title of her 1978 article, “What’s Wrong with Images of Women?” and to intervene directly in visual relations to change the ways women were represented, the low status afforded to “women’s genres,” and working conditions for female artists and media workers. Despite this intensive engagement with visuality, however, women’s very real social and political gains have been met with a “postfeminist sensibility” in the media that draws on feminist ideas and rhetoric but frequently puts these to the service of decidedly antifeminist aims and representations (Gill 247).1 KeywordsCritical Race TheoryLiterary ReadingWoman WriterContemporary PeriodRepresentational PracticeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.