Vanishing Women

[Dave Monroe]

Well, I'm reading it keeping an eye out for passages
applicable to V.  I hadn't yet thought of M&D. That's
precisely why I post much of what I post here, simply
to see if anyone can do anything with it.  Thanks ...

--- hilary y <hilbeanie at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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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