How do I look? Viewing, embodiment, performance, showgirls, and art practice.
type: CreativeWork
description: My research explores the possibility of a revitalised language around viewing, pleasure and embodiment that can result from a consideration of the figure of the showgirl: her live performance, her representation in art, film, and images, as well as how showgirls articulate their own experiences and my own pleasures in viewing showgirls can yield in terms of a revitalised language around viewing, pleasure, and embodiment. I look at the showgirl, and the debates she has triggered, in order to unpack how the relationship between embodiment, spectatorship, and feminism has been seen in a range of literatures. In the process, I suggest what is closed down in these debates, and through my art work I point to the possibilities she offers. I suggest that literature on the gaze, powerfully shaped by the significant works of John Berger and Laura Mulvey, has reduced the complexity in how the showgirl is seen. While the discursive contexts in which Mulvey and Berger wrote allowed for reflexive accounts of the gaze, their ideas have circulated so widely and forcefully as to become monolithic; taken too literally without putting into context. I felt an important aim was putting Laura Mulvey's essay, 'Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema' into context in ways that would destabilise its status as a monolith. I do this by looking at how technologies have shaped the critical and theoretical approaches to viewing the showgirl.I avoid making the assumption that our culture with its prevalence of bodily display creates feelings of emancipation and empowerment for women. Rather, I am alarmed at the inadequacy of the critical tools applied to showgirls and showgirl culture particularly within popular feminism---tools that seem only to uncover a limited set of conclusions. These conclusions are that women are led blindly into practices of bodily display and femininity, that exposure of their body only signals a desire to please men and get ahead in financial terms, that women only feel jea…
abstract: My research explores the possibility of a revitalised language around viewing, pleasure and embodiment that can result from a consideration of the figure of the showgirl: her live performance, her representation in art, film, and images, as well as how showgirls articulate their own experiences and my own pleasures in viewing showgirls can yield in terms of a revitalised language around viewing, pleasure, and embodiment. I look at the showgirl, and the debates she has triggered, in order to unpack how the relationship between embodiment, spectatorship, and feminism has been seen in a range of literatures. In the process, I suggest what is closed down in these debates, and through my art work I point to the possibilities she offers. I suggest that literature on the gaze, powerfully shaped by the significant works of John Berger and Laura Mulvey, has reduced the complexity in how the showgirl is seen. While the discursive contexts in which Mulvey and Berger wrote allowed for reflexive accounts of the gaze, their ideas have circulated so widely and forcefully as to become monolithic; taken too literally without putting into context. I felt an important aim was putting Laura Mulvey's essay, 'Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema' into context in ways that would destabilise its status as a monolith. I do this by looking at how technologies have shaped the critical and theoretical approaches to viewing the showgirl.I avoid making the assumption that our culture with its prevalence of bodily display creates feelings of emancipation and empowerment for women. Rather, I am alarmed at the inadequacy of the critical tools applied to showgirls and showgirl culture particularly within popular feminism---tools that seem only to uncover a limited set of conclusions. These conclusions are that women are led blindly into practices of bodily display and femininity, that exposure of their body only signals a desire to please men and get ahead in financial terms, that women only feel jea…
author: Carr, Alison J.
language: en
date published: 2013
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:31:14Z
provider: Sheffield Hallam University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Sheffield Hallam University (United Kingdom).