Skip to main content

Linda Williams | Motion and E-motion: A Feminist Perspective on the “Frenzy of the Visible”

Datum
Time
Organisational Units
Academy
Location Venue (1)
Studio Building
Location Address (1)
Lehárgasse 8
Location ZIP and/or City (1)
1060 Vienna
Location Room (1)
Prospekthof, gate 2

Organized by the Network for the Advancement of Women.

To what extent was the invention of pornography a break with previous forms of erotic art? Why did such images arise especially in modernity? Many scholars assume that this invention simply extended the ever-increasing verisimilitude of all technological visual forms of representation. This lecture argues that the intrusion of techniques for exciting lust in viewers was less a product of the rise of the greater verisimilitude in the invention of photography and more a product of the way new visual technologies redefined vision itself as an irrational excitation of sensations that have no necessary link to a referent.

Linda Williams (*1946) is an American Professor in Film & Media and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley.