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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
"And Nothing She Needs": Victoria's Secret And The Gaze Of "Post-Feminism", Marc Ouellette
"And Nothing She Needs": Victoria's Secret And The Gaze Of "Post-Feminism", Marc Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
A study of the Victoria’s Secret catalogues, which frames the period 1996-2006, reveals that the models’ poses and postures manipulate the formulaic gaze of objectification with seemingly empowering themes. Instead of the indeterminate, averted looks that Berger (1972) and Mulvey (1989) considered in their analyses, the more recent versions of Victoria’s Secret photographs confront viewers with pouts, glares, and stares of defiance. In this essay, I contribute to current conversations regarding mixed messages that concern post-feminism and third-wave feminism (Duffy, Hancock, & Tyler, 2017; Glapka, 2017; McAllister & DeCarvalho, 2014; McRobbie, 2009). In this regard, the Victoria’s Secret catalogues constitute …
"Saying 'I Do' All Over Again": The Throwaway Ornamentalism Of Promises Weddings Vow To Break, Marc A. Ouellette
"Saying 'I Do' All Over Again": The Throwaway Ornamentalism Of Promises Weddings Vow To Break, Marc A. Ouellette
English Faculty Publications
This article details a project that involved collecting the necessary items to produce a set of wedding pictures. While photographs have long been understood as indexical signs, the process of collecting the items via trips to thrift stores reveals a host of additional indexical signs through the set of underlying contextual cultural constraints surrounding the difference between the rituals of the marriage rite and the wedding as a public, performative practice. Indeed, the second hand items leave indexical and material traces of the excess and the disposability of weddings, while the pictures offer the material connection to the ostentation of …