Hello again,
I'm wondering what most interested you or troubled you about the Sander Gilman article?
I'd like everyone to send in an answer to this question (it can be as short or long as you like and you are also welcome to respond and build on someone else's answer) so that I can do a class count and make sure everyone is signed up on the blog.
Thanks.
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12 comments:
I was very interested in the bell hooks essay, it tied in with the the autumn essay about the female body. I had no idea that women were put on display like that. I am interested in learning more.
This article highlights the history of racial discrimination, in a visual art form. It was troubling to view the artists work, when deliberate measures were taken to overtly sexualize a specific ethnic group, while being covert about the sexualizaton of the white female.
Jacki
Over all I thought the article was very interesting, but one thing that surprised me was how parts of the Hottentot's body was put on display, that to me really stood out cause it seems like such a bad/unnatural thing to do. I can't imagine being like "oh so this weekend im going to the museum to stare at a dead womens butt and stuff cause its so big." It just seems so wrong to devaluate a person to the point that theyre no longer a person, theyre just "abnormal" body parts, you knw what i mean?
~Karen Guzman
The writing style of Gilman does at first require a bit more concentration. After the first couple pages it was easier to digest, especially as you get absorbed in the message itself. Some of the artworks mentioned I recognized but never analyzed. My favorite discovery was learning the crane is a symbol of prostitute. It made me question as to how it is such a prominent Japanese figure in art.
-Ness is for Vanessa. Vanessa Arnold
I was also completely horrified by the fact that women and their body parts were put on display. It is even more horrifying that it was perfectly socially acceptable.
I really enjoyed this article because it showed me just how much I still have to learn about the struggles that women over time have had to deal with. I was so incredibly shocked to learn of how women were put on display like that! It's amazing how they thought that that was an expectable or natural way of exhibiting sexual differences. This article really opened my eyes to this type of discrimination and I want to learn more!
The juxtaposition between how it was appropriate to display the bodies of different 'types' of women was both fascinating and disturbing.
Gilman is interesting, but dense, and requires quite a bit of concentration.
I thought the Gilman essay was incredibly interesting...it really blew my mind i guess...I really had a hard time swallowing the fact that some of these observations about a certain female's genitalia grew into generalizations about all of the females of that race... I also couldn't believe that some of the theories were at one point valid or significant in the fields of science and medicine (ex: the observation by Edward Turnipseed about the difference in white and black women of the positioning of the entrance of the vagina leading to anatomical evidence of "non-unity of the races")... and then the narrow pelvis as a sign of racial superiority?!? there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of generalizations made through observations of male "specimens", which i found alarming...
...and the obsession with the butt!!!! ....yeah ....
and it was real civilized of the Duchess Du Barry to have a naked human being as a prize attraction at a ball (sarcasm)... this article really disturbed me at some points, but it was a page-turner for me and got easier to comprehend after the first few pages...
- Stephanie
I found this article immensely interesting, as I am an art history major and gender roles in art was a focus of the essay. I thought the dissection of "Olympia" was really interesting, and certainly a way I had never heard the painting discussed in any art history textbook, which was refreshing. While I was somewhat familiar with that subject, I had never heard of the Hottentot "venus," and was horrified to read of her being displayed, especially of her genitals being separately displayed after her death. It brought to mind incidents of Native American remains being displayed in museums (and later returned). Both events show how people of color/women of color have been seen as a spectacle throughout history.
I was so surprised at the fact that Sarah bartmann was exhibited, and European people viewed her as an object of curiosity. I wondered that why Enropean people had sought for differences between white people and black people so desperately.
Is it just because they wanted to justify their discrimination? For me, it seems that white people have a strong fear toward their existance.
I found the Gilman piece not clearly written. Specifically, the transitions in thought often seemed abrupt, and the subject in sentences was sometimes omitted, leaving questionable sentences like, "the black female was widely perceived as possessing not only a 'primitive' sexual appetite but also the external signs of this temperment-- 'primitive' genitalia" (p. 213). By whom, I say?
What I did find interesting was how the preserved could be used as symbols of the people: the "criminal head", the "prostitute vagina." I don't think it's inherently wrong to display body parts, as the Bodies exhibit does, but when they are presented as icons of a whole people- things get messy.
-Maya
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