Visual Culture and Gender

Abstract

Though visual culture is present in numerous aspects of contemporary culture, feminist and gender theorists are especially interested in how visual culture represents, constructs, and perpetuates gender roles and stereotypes. Privileging vision over the other senses is often described as ocularcentrism, and understanding the scope and breadth of ocularcentrism within the world is important in exploring why feminists and other theorists consider certain visual representations of gender problematic. Certainly human vision is not always reliable, but mediated representations (like a photograph in a fashion magazine or the digital portrait of a celebrity on a website) cannot always be considered accurate either. Though these mediated images are typically considered to be “true to life,” a photographic, filmic, or digital representation is just that – a re‐presentation of an object and not its actuality. Print publications for both men and women can arguably create unrealistic standards for viewers to emulate through the production and presentation of digitally altered images. Fashion and fitness magazines, for example, distort images of women and men by using digital software to edit and enhance the images in numerous ways. Photo editors use computer programs to edit the images of models.