Sexuality, the Female Gaze, and the Arts: Women, the Arts, and Society

The second of three volumes in a series on women, the arts, and society, this collection of essays presents a range of definitions of the female gaze and considerations of how gender and sexuality influence artistry and criticism. Bringing together important new perspectives on music, the visual arts, theater, film, literature, television, philosophy, and psychology, these essays taken together represent a cohesive revisionist look at the arts.
Bisexuality and the female grotesque are subjects of essays devoted to how l'ecriture feminine presents ways of seeing that challenge long-held assumptions about the artistic vision. Three essays discussing cinema look variously at sexuality in the earlier films of Susan Seidelman and in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as well as female madness as it is constructed in mainstream film.
Subversions within the eighteenth-century romance novel, the voice of woman and Ovid's Echo and Narcissus, the quests for personal freedom by three Old French heroines - these are subjects of three essays providing historical context to the issues raised in this volume. The poetry of Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Denise Levertov, Tess Gallagher, and Julia de Burgos is examined for images of women, sexuality, and perspective that each author creates.