Vanishing Women

[hilary y]

okie - dokie, so there is an interesting essay on vanishing women in cinema.  what is the connection to pynchon's books?
  
  I could say that the connex between vanishing women and M & D would  be that the most "present' female character in the book is Rebekah and  she is only a ghost. She is not there and yet she is. (Also of note,  the two main characters spend a lot of time trying to "see" the elusive  Venus and the more refined  woman (more-so than Rebekah) that  Mason never marries and continues to try to peek at through his  telescope- The desired object.)
  
  
  A case could be made, in a weird way, that Oedipa from "Crying" might  be related to Carol Clover's Final Girl of her book Men, Women and  Chain Saws. 

  Anyway, spectatorship is always interesting and it brings up a lot about gender.
  
  (Heh-heh, men are not supposed to be very good at trans-gender  spectatorship but, I believe there are a few exceptions out there.)
  
  cheers,
  Hilary
  
  p.s. Has anybody gotten into the Lacan thing about the "woman" not  existing?  I think there is some interesting theory related stiff  that talks about race/gender using Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man"  re: visibility and invisibility in our culture. 
  
  
  
Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:  Beckman, Karen.  Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and
   Feminism.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.

With the help of mirrors, trap doors, elevators,
photographs, and film, women vanish and return in
increasingly spectacular ways throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Karen Beckman
tracks the proliferation of this elusive figure, the
vanishing woman, from her genesis in Victorian stage
magic through her development in conjunction with
photography and film. Beckman reveals how these new
visual technologies projected their anxieties about
insubstantiality and reproducibility onto the female
body, producing an image of "woman" as utterly
unstable and constantly prone to disappearance.

Drawing on cinema studies and psychoanalysis as well
as the histories of magic, spiritualism, and
photography, Beckman looks at particular instances of
female vanishing at specific historical moments—in
Victorian magic's obsessive manipulation of female and
colonized bodies, spiritualist photography's search to
capture traces of ghosts, the comings and goings of
bodies in early cinema, and Bette Davis's multiple
roles as a fading female star. As Beckman places the
vanishing woman in the context of feminism's
discussion of spectacle and subjectivity, she explores
not only the problems, but also the political utility
of this obstinate figure who hovers endlessly between
visible and invisible worlds. Through her readings,
Beckman argues that the visibly vanishing woman
repeatedly signals the lurking presence of less
immediately perceptible psychic and physical erasures,
and she contends that this enigmatic figure, so
ubiquitous in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century
culture, provides a new space through which to
consider the relationship between visibility, gender,
and agency.

http://tinyurl.com/oavvx

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