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Overview
It is the aim of this collection of essays to take a hard look at gender and visual culture. Gender and visual culture traverse in quite and often fascinating ways. On the one hand, gender subject fields. As such, gender contributes to establishing a much-needed theoretical and functional platform spanning across many fields of enquiry, from where gender practices can effectively be critiqued and ideally changed. On the other hand, the growing popularity and ubiquity of visual culture in a global context create an increasing need to reflect on and interrogate this phenomenon in an academic manner. Although Visual Culture Studies is an established subject at many Northern institutions, it is fairly new and relatively under-theorised in the global South. In response to the growing need to investigate issues dealing with gender and visual culture, and particularly how they creatively intersect, this selection of essays (first presented as papers at the international conference Taking a Hard Look: Gender and Visual Culture, 20-21 June 2007, Institute for Gender and Women's Students, University of Pretoria, South Africa) are collected here in the hope of making a purposeful contribution to this burgeoning discourse, However, in addressing the creative intersection between gender and visual culture this volume is no novelty. In fact, the topic of gender and visual culture has been addressed over the past decade in several essay collections. It is in this proud tradition that this book aims to take its place and to create a dialogue with international theory on gender and visual culture studies from a Southern perspective
The key questions explored in this volume are: What typeof gendered visual culture is being presented and created in the South particularly (but not exclusively)? How is visual culture gendered? Can one refer to a move beyond gender in terms of a trans-gendered visual culture or are we still caugh up in the same debilitating role models? How does one address the ever-increasing alienation between gender studies and the younger generation of student and scholars moving into higher education? What is the role of gender as an interdisciplinary tool in the academic analysis of visual as it spans across several subject, such as science, social work, technology, psyschology, medicine, philosophy, sociology, engineering, communication, economics, rehgious studies, business management, anthropology, geography, historical studies, cultural and media studies, visual studies, art history and literature studies?