This evening’s celebration at the McMaster Museum of Art 6-8 pm launches both a new exhibition and a book by the exhibition’s co-curators:

Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography

Sarah Brophy is an associate professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.
Janice Hladki is an associate professor of Theatre and Film Studies in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

From reality television to film, performance, and video art, autobiography is everywhere in today’s image-obsessed age. With contributions by both artists and scholars, Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography is a unique examination of visual autobiography’s involvement in the global cultural politics of health, disability, and the body. This provocative collection looks at images of selfhood and embodiment in a variety of media and with a particular focus on bodily identities and practices that challenge the norm: a pregnant man in cyberspace, a fat activist performance troupe, indigenous artists intervening in museums, transnational selves who connect disability to war, and many more.

The chapters in Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography reflect several different theoretical approaches but share a common concern with the ways in which visual culture can generate resistance, critique, and creative interventions. With contributions that investigate digital media, installation art, graphic memoir, performance, film, reality television, photography, and video art, the collection offers a wide-ranging critical account of what is clearly becoming one of the most important issues in contemporary culture.

CONTENTS

Introduction. Visual Autobiography in the Frame: Critical Embodiment and Cultural Pedagogy (Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki)

I: Proliferating Monstrosity
2. Quickening Paternity: Cyberspace, Surveillance, and the Performance of Male Pregnancy (Sayantani DasGupta)
3. “Virtual” Autobiography? Anorexia, Obsession, and Calvin Klein (Mebbie Bell)
4. Big Judy: Fatness, Shame, and the Hybrid Autobiography (Allyson Mitchell)

II: Rupture and Recognition: Body Re-Formations
5. Sex Traitors: Autoethnography by Straight Men (Richard Fung)
6. Looks Can Be Deceiving: Exploring Transsexual Body Alchemy through a Neoliberal Lens (Dan Irving)
7. Visceral (Auto)biographies: Plastic Surgery and Gender in Reality TV (Simon Strick)