Visual Studies/Visual Culture/Visual Culture Studies

Abstract

Visual culture studies is a contemporary, emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry that employs a variety of approaches to analyze and interpret visual images. Visual culture studies does not designate a discipline so much as what John Walker and Sarah Chaplin call “a hybrid, an inter‐ or multi‐disciplinary enterprise formed as a consequence of a convergence of, or borrowing from, a variety of disciplines and methodologies” (1997: 1). Visual culture studies borrows from many disciplines in the arts and humanities, such as art history, cultural studies, media studies, literary criticism, feminism, queer studies, postcolonial theory, anthropology, and sociology. As a result of these borrowings or convergences, visual culture studies offers us a variety of interpretive ways of engaging with our past and present visual cultures – including semiotics, Marxism, feminism, historiography, social history, psychoanalysis, queer theory, deconstruction, postcolonial studies, ethnography, and museology. From these interpretive strategies, visual culture studies enables a wider range of analyses. It sustains investigations that are concerned with the production, circulation, and consumption of images; the changing nature of subjectivity; the ways in which we visualize or reflect upon or represent the world to ourselves; what Irit Rogoff (1998) has called “viewing apparatuses,” which include our ways of seeing and practices of looking, knowing, and doing, and even sometimes our misunderstandings and unsettling curiosity in imagining the as yet unthought.