Looking and Seeing: Bodies and Images

Abstract

This chapter explores some of the processes of looking and of being seen and looked at in the context of enfleshed experience which is understood as constitutive but not necessarily determining in the processes through which discursive regimes are made and remade, in particular relating to gendered, enfleshed selves. It is a matter of putting bodies and enfleshed selves into the process of understanding the relevance of being there and being seen to be there in relation to making identities and having a presence. Some of the feminist critiques, such as Irigaray’s, which was discussed in Chapter 5, have also demonstrated some of the problems of volubility and silence, which are connected to invisibility and absence, with particular emphasis upon bodies and especially sexed bodies. Irigaray presents a critical analysis of patriarchy which goes some way towards suggesting alternatives and the possibility of a female imaginary where, for example, women speak their own embodied selves and desires and the mother-daughter relationship is one that is made visible, and audible, within culture.