“New Approaches to the Gaze in American Literature and Culture”

Since Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”appeared in 1975, explorations of and variations on gaze theory have continued to appear, addressing almost every possible angle of vision: the male gaze, the female gaze, the imperial gaze, the oppositional gaze, the tourist gaze, the raced gaze, and so on. It has proved to be a remarkably versatile way to think about power structures in literary and cultural productions, especially in terms of race and gender.  However, gaze theory has also had its detractors, particularly from those who argue that the gaze, as manifested in western literature and culture, is by its very nature white, male, and heteronormative. Can the gaze ever be female/black/queer? How does the “owner” of the gaze change its purpose and function? These are the kinds of questions that critics continue to ask. This proposed roundtable will invite scholars from a broad range of American literary and cultural studies to explore a variety of approaches to gaze theory. The emphasis will be on current debates around gaze theory, contemporary applications of gaze theory to American literature and culture across historical periods, and new theoretical formulations of the gaze. It will engage such questions as whether gaze theory remains a viable way to think about representations of acts of seeing and being seen in texts and images, how gaze theory can help us understand shifting power dynamics in society at large, and whether one can ever supplant the gaze. Abstract and brief c.v. due Sept. 30, 2019, at the NeMLA site: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers.html