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Confronting the Gaze: Reconfiguring Spectatorship in "Untitled (Kitchen Table Series)" by Carrie Mae Weems

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The photographer Carrie Mae Weems creates narratives which bring marginalized people into the center of focus. Weems mobilizes herself as artist and as subject in order to engage with issues much larger than herself.
creator Donlon, Sophie.
Title Confronting the Gaze: Reconfiguring Spectatorship in "Untitled (Kitchen Table Series)" by Carrie Mae Weems
advisor Anger, Jenny, 1965-
supporting host Grinnell College. Art and Art History Department.
supporting host Grinnell College. Undergraduate Student Symposium (2016)
Index Date 2016
Approx. Date of Creation 2016-05-08
Publisher Grinnell College
Type of Resource text
Genre research paper
Digital Origin reformated digital
Digital Extent 12 pages
Media Type application/pdf
description Final paper for the Art History Course "Art Since 1945"
description Throughout her career, the photographer Carrie Mae Weems has used the medium to create narratives which bring marginalized people into the center of focus. Often using her own body as the subject, she works to reconfigure the historically determined power structures that objectify or erase the experiences of African American women. In this way, Weems mobilizes herself as artist and as subject in order to engage with issues much larger than herself. Her work "Untitled (Kitchen Table Series)" offers a powerful study of the way in which photography, self-portraiture, and self-presentation provide paths for confusing and subverting dominant cultural narratives. This essay asserts that Weems’s photographs work against masculinist and racist modes of spectatorship through their assertion of black women as subjects, producers, makers of art and of their own representation. Moreover, Weems interrupts modes of spectatorship which normally allow these representations to go unquestioned by inviting intimacy between the viewer and the subjects of the photographs while simultaneously creating spectatorial distance through an emphasis on the constructedness of cultural narratives. This structure forces the viewer to situate themselves as subject and perpetuator of such narratives, and thus works to reconfigure racist and sexist modes of spectatorship.
Language English
Topic African American photographers.
Topic Weems, Carrie Mae, 1953-
Geographic United States.
Temporal 20th century
Classification TR
Related Item Digital Grinnell
Related Item Student Scholarship
Related Item Undergraduate Student Symposium
Identifier (local) grinnell:13257
Access Condition Copyright to this work is held by the author(s), in accordance with United States copyright law (USC 17). Readers of this work have certain rights as defined by the law, including but not limited to fair use (17 USC 107 et seq.).
Identifier (hdl) http://hdl.handle.net/11084/13257
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