differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies articles from September 2003

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies archives from September 2003

Introductory note.
September 22, 2003... "We live in an age when the detail enjoys a rare prominence" is the opening sentence of Naomi Schor's 1987 book, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. Like so much of Schor's work, the comment, in its description of the then current...

Reflections on Victorian fashion plates.
September 22, 2003... For decades, feminists have analyzed how fashion operates as a psychically powerful sign system for seducing women into becoming narcissistic, passive objects to be looked at by men. (1) In that view, dominant culture enforces femininity as...

Fragonard in detail.
September 22, 2003... I would like to evoke Naomi Schor's notion of detail as a trope through which to investigate--and put pressure on--the relation between aesthetics and femininity. It is precisely this relation that Jean-Honor6 Fragonard's pictorial practice...

A pearl's pleasures and perils: the detail at the foundation of taste.
September 22, 2003... Naomi Schor argues that the transvaluation of the detail in Roland Barthes's aesthetics coincides with its degendering (Reading 97) and asks whether the detail's current critical prominence is also accompanied by defeminization. Schor writes:...

The close-up: scale and detail in the cinema.
September 22, 2003... One of the earliest attempts to produce film theory, that of the French Impressionists in the 1920s, generated a concept--photogenie--which is usually considered to be theoretically incoherent. No doubt this is due to the fact that photogenie...

"Portraits of Grief": telling details and the testimony of trauma.
September 22, 2003... In the summer of 2002, Times Books published a volume containing the 1,910 "Portraits of Grief" that appeared in the New York Times between September 15 and December 31, 2001. The 1,910 stories that readers had consumed in the newspaper along...

The tale of the goldsmith's floor.
September 22, 2003... OTHERNESS BEGINS AT HOME My sister Naomi Schor used as the frontispiece of her 1987 book Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine a black and white reproduction of the outer and inner surfaces of a silver, gold, and diamond...