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Reviewed by:
  • Being and Becoming Visible: Women, Performance, and Visual Culture
  • Liedeke Plate
Olga M. Mesropova and Stacey Weber-Fève, eds.Being and Becoming Visible: Women, Performance, and Visual Culture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. xv + 264 pp.

If you think a collection of essays composed entirely of previously published articles is redundant, think again. In Being and Becoming Visible: Women, Performance, and Visual Culture, Olga M. Mesropova and Stacey Weber-Fève collect some of the best essays on women and visual culture the National Women’s Studies Association Journal published in the first decade of the twenty-first century. As such, they offer a state-of-the-art view of feminist cultural criticism today. Responding as it were to Margaret Stetz’s suggestion, in the volume’s opening article, that women’s studies professors reach new audiences by acting as curators for feminist work, Mesropova and Weber-Fève select and present twelve essays on performance and visual culture, celebrating feminist scholarship and making it visible. Telling an important story about gender, race, ethnicity, class, and visibility, the collection forms an inspirational tool for research and teaching.

The collection deals with a variety of visual media. Essays engage with painting, photography, film, television, and theater, and discuss issues that range from curating as feminist work to the relationship between images, public policy, and collective action from feminist perspectives, both of the [End Page 409] critical and of the affirmative variety (and often as part of the same work). Because of its focus on visual culture, much of the volume deals with questions of representation, showing how absolutely crucial its critique remains to understand and transform its real material effects. Whereas political philosopher Nancy Fraser, in her compelling 2009 New Left Review essay “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,”2 took feminist cultural critics to task for transforming feminism into “a variant of identity politics” by “overextend[ing] the critique of culture, while downplaying the critique of political economy” (108), this volume demonstrates that, on the contrary, feminist cultural theory and practices do real and important social work. Visibility in these essays is not about recognition only, but integrates it with the questions of representation and redistribution to address—and think of ways to redress—injustice conceived not just as an issue of gender, but as integrating many dimensions, including those of race, class, ethnicity, and location.

This can be seen most explicitly in the essays by Vivyan Adair and Kim Miller, both of which deal with iconographies of poverty and antipoverty activism, the former in relationship to US policy and welfare reform, the latter as part of a nationwide antipoverty project in South Africa. Adair’s essay is one of the most powerful indictments of US policy’s reading of poor women and their stigmatization as “welfare queens” I have ever read. Its impact is strengthened by its position in the volume where it follows Diana Shoos’ essay on the representation of domestic violence in Brian Gibson’s 1993 biopic about Tina Turner, What’s Love Got to Do with It, in which the film is shown to conform to “Hollywood’s much-analyzed penchant for narratives of individual triumph over those that chronicle collective action or the possibility of social intervention or systemic change” (127), its representation of domestic violence conforming to stereotypical Hollywood cinema’s representations of black men and women. In light of Shoos’ warning about how the film’s focus on a celebrity figure “obscures the problems of material resources, childcare, and custody that confront many victims of abuse, and serve as powerful obstacles to leaving” (127), Adair’s personal narrative of awaking in a shelter for battered women, with “four missing teeth, a broken clavicle, and bruised ribs,” her 8-month-old daughter “still traumatized by the brutalization we had suffered at the hands of her own father” (134), all the more effectively brings home her point about the importance of education as a means out of poverty and dependency. Adair shows US welfare reform to have resulted in poor single mothers being prevented from seeking “fulfilling and secure career employment through the pathway of higher education” (139) and being...

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