VISUALITY AND FEMINISM: THE DISCOURSE OF ADVERTISEMENT, SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND GENDER REALITY

Abstract

This essay stresses the effects of a reflexive gaze in visual arts as well as in their representation of both sex and gender. The reflexive gaze involves a spectator in an image thus depriving him of its subject while at the same time returning it as an object of desire. Sexuality, in the advertisements represents not only a commodity but the latter, according to the Marx’s definition of the fetishism of commodity, reveals both the dimension and the aspects of sexuality that previously escaped visualization. The effects of retroversion are the outcomes of the modes of commodity. In contrast to previous concepts, according to Lacan sexuality represents commodity. A monitoring position of a reflexive gaze is not defined via binary oppositions such as subject-object, active-passive, masculine-feminine. It is rather an inter-space situated between constitutive and objected identifications. The latter, seen in the context of the grounding perspectives, are senseless and impossible to grasp, but the entire visual field along with the range and horizon of the image is situated in «their shadow».