Seeing Differently

<p><em><strong>Seeing Differently</strong></em> offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond.</p><p>The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latter claim, <em>Seeing Differently</em> critically examines how and why we "identify" works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "post-identity" given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "is," and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way.</p><p>Ultimately, <em>Seeing Differently</em> offers a mode of thinking identification as a "queer feminist durational" process that can never be fully resolved but must be accounted for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode of relational interpretation that affects both "art" and "interpreter," potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture.</p> <p>Chapter 1. Introduction, The Leaking Frame of the Argument on How to See Differently Chapter 2. Art as a Binary Proposition; Identity as a Binary Proposition Chapter 3. Fetishizing the Gaze and the Anamorphic Perversion: "The Other is You" Chapter 4. Multiculturalism, Intersectionality, and "Post-Identity" Chapter 5. Queer Feminist Durationality: Time and Materiality as a Means of Resisting Spatial Objectification Chapter 6. Seeing and Reconceiving Difference, Concluding Thoughts, without Final Conclusions</p>