Representation and the Politics of Difference

This text is devoted to a consideration of the ways in which difference - of gender, race and age - is articulated and negotiated in visual (and sometimes also verbal) forms of representation. Thematic correspondences link the examination of objects and images from varying cultures and readers are invited, in these essays, to consider both how such objects and images are constituted and the ways in which they functioned at particular historical moments and in particular circumstances. Photography, in Smith's chapter on Carroll, is the medium through which childhood rituals are produced and defined as different from adulthood, and yet implicated with it in a politics of dissent. In Stanworth's chapter on 18th-century portraiture, consent is also an issue. Contemporary anxieties and legislative control of sexuality are manifest in the ways in which a family deploys portrait images to affirm a normative masculinity. The defining characteristics of female (as opposed to male) royal imagery at the Benin court are described in Kaplan's chapter in relation to rituals of power and control.
The court of Marie de' Medici in 17th-century Europe is the focus of Johnson's attention in an essay that addresses the difference constituted when a female ruler is commissioner and viewer of images that posit her as viewed. Theories of racial and sexual difference are brought into play in Lomas's chapter based on the canonical image of Picasso's "Les Demoiselle d'Avignon", a work which is not only here located firmly within a tradition of anthropological writing, but also opened up to new interpretation.