Sara Marcus is a professor of the Department of English at Princeton University, and a founding editor of New Herring Press. Her scholarship focuses on 20-century American cultural practices, with special attention to gender, race, sound studies, and political feelings, particularly political disappointment. She is the author of Girls to the Front: The True Story Behind the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010), as well as several publications appearing in places such as the New Republic, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Professor Marcus will be on campus for her lecture, entitled "Owning the Gaze: Voice and Vision in an Age of Feminist Disappointment."
Abstract: What do political movements produce during those times when their objectives seem out of reach? This talk tells the story of one such moment—the late-1970s beginning of the anti-feminist backlash—and discerns a sea change in feminist thought, from an initial dominance of the figure of “voice” to an embrace of metaphors of vision and visibility. At the beginning of second-wave feminism, the presiding metaphor was that of voice, and its counterpart, silence; image was suspect from the outset. Yet by the late 1970s, the previously imagined power of women's voices to break imagistic oppression had become compromised as thousands of American women were mobilizing to oppose the ERA, and as feminists waged bitter internecine battles over sexuality. In addition, the terminology of “voice,” with its connotation of authentic self-expression, was losing theoretical as well as political salience; feminists, rethinking their initial mistrust of the visual, spoke increasingly of feminist vision and visibility. Drawing on essays and poetry by Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Hortense Spillers, this talk proposes an important overlap between women of color feminism, sex-radical feminism, and feminist theory, and it offers a new account of the historical conditions of feminist theory’s rise.
Please join us in welcoming Professor Marcus to campus!
This event is hosted by the Department of English.
