Being and Becoming Visible ? Women, Performance, and Visual Culture (A Feminist Formations Reader)

Spanning geographical, cultural, and methodological boundaries, the essays in Being and Becoming Visible examine female representation in a variety of performative and visual media. Olga M. Mesropova and Stacey Weber-Fève situate the disciplines of visual culture and performance studies within two conceptual frameworks―multicultural and feminist―through the overarching thematic trope of visibility.

The contributors offer a mix of sociohistorical, ethnographic, ideological, postcolonial, and cultural approaches to the study of female representation in performance, visual, and consumer cultures. They examine curatorship, mythological representation of women, the interrelationship of mother and child, domestic gender roles, domestic abuse, and indigenous female representation. The volume includes case studies related to such diverse genres and media as theater, cinema, painting, television, performance activism, and photography from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Instructors in feminist, cultural, and media studies who are looking for global perspectives will find that this fresh and provocative volume encourages students to see new connections among a variety of trends in contemporary scholarship.

Olga M. Mesropova is an associate professor of Russian at Iowa State University.

Stacey Weber-Fève is an assistant professor of French at Iowa State University.