Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910

"Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910" is a Master's thesis that takes a historical approach to the visual in order to better understand the construction of the prostitute in Victorian culture. Recent scholars have noted ways in which the prostitute was routinely depicted as a threat and victim in nineteenth-century institutional discourse. This thesis complicates these readings by examining the construction of the fallen woman in commercial imagery. Far from depicting the streetwalker as a source of pity and disease, commercial culture redefined the image of the prostitute as a source of ambiguous visual pleasure. This allowed the signifiers of prostitution to extend through pornographic representation, entertainment advertisements, actress pin-ups and fashion magazines. Making illicit female sexuality a readily consumable pleasure, however, ultimately fostered greater efforts on the part of authorities to push prostitutes back into invisibility.

Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910

"Sex for Sale: Prostitution and Visual Culture 1850-1910" is a Master's thesis that takes a historical approach to the visual in order to better understand the construction of the prostitute in Victorian culture. Recent scholars have noted ways in which the prostitute was routinely depicted as a threat and victim in nineteenth-century institutional discourse. This thesis complicates these readings by examining the construction of the fallen woman in commercial imagery. Far from depicting the streetwalker as a source of pity and disease, commercial culture redefined the image of the prostitute as a source of ambiguous visual pleasure. This allowed the signifiers of prostitution to extend through pornographic representation, entertainment advertisements, actress pin-ups and fashion magazines. Making illicit female sexuality a readily consumable pleasure, however, ultimately fostered greater efforts on the part of authorities to push prostitutes back into invisibility.

Beyond “Commercial Realism”: Extending Goffman’s Gender Display Framework to Networked Media Contexts

Erving Goffman’s gender display framework is a typology of nonverbal posing codes that connote the subordination of women in commercial imagery and a prominent tool for assessing visualizations of gender stereotyping in mass media. Researchers have recently begun to apply the advertisement-based framework to a new context: user-generated social media photos. Despite findings that gender display appears prevalent in such images, deeper critical examinations of how the framework changes when applied across media contexts have not been meaningfully undertaken. Drawing from the interplay of Goffman’s concepts of hyper-ritualization and commercial realism, I argue that the manifestations and interpretive implications of gender display are contingent upon the standard of realism at play, proposing a standard of networked realism that differently modulates gender display in user-generated photography. Ultimately, I suggest that gender display must be more thoroughly contextualized in networked media research and provide a groundwork for future feminist studies of visual gender stereotyping.

Tarrying with the elephant: Queer villainy and aesthetic pleasure in Steven Klein’s photography

Through a close reference to Steven Klein’s photo spread ‘John Robinson’ for L’Uomo Vogue in 2003, this article tracks the appearance of the fictional character of the queer villain in fashion editorial photography. It discusses specifically how the register of ‘affectlessness’ is embodied and aesthetically performed by the queer villain. Affectlessness is contextualized within the repertoire of neutral affects that were circulated in fashion photography in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an aesthetic stance that counteracted the normative depictions of ‘happy feelings’ in commercial imagery as well as normative styles of masculinity. Affective states of sadness, alienation and neutrality were enacted beginning in the 1990s primarily by androgynous and sexually ambivalent figures: the stylized representation of such states signalled a challenge to binary ways of embodying and performing masculinity and femininity. After a critical reading of ‘John Robinson’, the article concludes by tracing a speculative trajectory for thinking about aesthetic pleasure in relation to queer amoral characters in fashion visual narratives.

Seeing the Colonies

This chapter examines colonialists’ use of visual culture to develop metropolitan Germans’ identification with the distant colonial territories. Colonialists mobilized a variety of visual forms, including posters and photography, to reach Germans who had seemed unresponsive to their written and oral propaganda. These images, which colonialists believed had a unique power to transcend viewers’ critical distance, would provide an “experience” of the colonies. Broadly speaking, colonialist visual culture focused on three themes: the creation of a German Heimat in the African landscape, the heroism of colonial Germans, and Germans’ protection of an “authentic Africanness” through their benevolent colonialism. In this arena as well, however, colonialists faced a wealth of visual representations of Africa created by other sources. As case studies of these other representations, the chapter examines Werner Peiner’s African paintings, the commercial imagery of Reklamesammelbilder (illustrated trading cards), and feature films with colonial or African themes.

Recent field experiments with commercial satellite imagery direct downlink

US Pacific Command's strategy includes assistance to United States government relief agencies and nongovernment organizations during humanitarian aid and disaster relief operations in the Asia-Pacific region. Situational awareness during these operations is enhanced by broad interagency access to unclassified commercial satellite imagery. The Remote Ground Terminal—a mobile satellite downlink ground station—has undergone several technology demonstrations and participated in an overseas deployment exercise focused on a natural disaster scenario. This ground station has received new commercial imagery within 20 minutes, hastening a normally days-long process. The Army Geospatial Center continues to manage technology development and product improvement for the Remote Ground Terminal. Furthermore, this ground station is now on a technology transition path into the Distributed Common Ground System-Army program of record.

When corporations come to define the visual politics of gender

While stock photographs have come to saturate media and have been mocked for their clichéd nature, for example where women are pictured laughing alone with salad, a powerful corporation like Getty Images that disseminates commercial imagery globally has sought to challenge these stereotypes by making more politicized images. This article examines one such case, that is, Getty’s Genderblend visual trend, which claims to portray gender identities and relations in ways that are both more inclusive and diverse, harnessing feminist theory as part of its promotion. Taking a multimodal discourse and visual design approach, the article looks at how corporate imagery can be styled as political and, in turn, how a politics of difference itself is shaped in the interests of the ideologies of consumer capitalism.