Born Digital: Visual Culture & Gender

Karen Keifer-Boyd
Pennsylvania State University

Deborah L. Smith-Shank
The Ohio State University

Introduction

Visual Culture & Gender (http://vcg.emitto.net) was born digital more than a decade ago in 2005 as the first multimedia online journal in the field of art education, and the first online journal devoted to visual culture and gender. Co-founders and co-editors, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Deborah Smith-Shank conceptualized Visual Culture & Gender (VCG) as an online, international, freely accessible, and critical annual publication that focuses on the intersections of visual culture and gender.

     We launched VCG after negotiating with our respective universities, and with the Women's Caucus of the National Art Education Association (NAEA). We poured our hearts, minds, and energies into creating VCG as a scholarly journal. Our co-editorship is truly a collaboration, with equal division of tasks and with decisions made jointly. We have rotated the order of our names in each volume to convey an equitable division of a labor of love. We were committed to exploit the media potentials of new technology and to include a plethora of color images and hyperlinks to extend context. We experimented with embedded video and include several, even in the first years of publication.

     There was controversy. At that time, juried scholarship was not generally presented in online journals. There was skepticism about whether university boards would consider online publications for promotion and tenure. To ensure that VCG carried the same parameters for quality that are found in esteemed print journals, we established an international review board of notable feminist scholars and worked to develop VCG as a scholarly publication so that it is listed in important databases. Today, VCG is included in the following databases: Proquest ARTbibliographies Modern, Feminist Periodicals, Wilson Database, CNKI SCHOLAR, and EBSCO.

     VCG reached its 10-year anniversary in 2015 and thrives as a freely accessed journal that uses visual images as the focus of interrogations into issues of gender. VCG exposes culturally learned meanings and power relations that surround the creation, consumption, valuation, and dissemination of images of gender in relation to race, age, sexuality, (dis)ability, and social class. Our purpose continues to be promotion of international dialogues about visual culture and gender and to encourage the use of multimedia for analysis and presentation of such inquiry. In this multimedia essay, we discuss examples of visual and performative analysis from VCG.

Gender Research

Feminist theory, social justice education, and visual/material culture informs our research. Gender equity requires research into visual culture from a gender consciousness. VCG is built on five key concepts about gender:

1. Gender is a lived experience, socially constructed, and political in affordances of power and privilege. Gender is both lived and symbolic of relationships of power.

2. Gender body politics concern exclusion and marginalization in representations, collections, archives, and generative perpetuity.

3. Feminist research emphasizes equity and social justice and starts from the premise that gender and sexuality intersect with race, class, (dis)ability, age, religion, geography, and others, which are identity aspects historically conditioned by social and political power.

4. Feminist scholars investigate how gender is constructed, represented, and treated.

5. Gender includes issues of girls and women, men and boys, gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, and other socially constructed identities.

     Central issues faced by feminist researchers of visual culture are power, social structures, property, symbols, and periodization/cartographies or lineages that connect ideas and artworks. Gender is implicated in all of these central issues. "Gender is a critical means by which power is expressed or legitimated" (Rose, 2010, p. 13). Gender has been a way of signifying power relations. Decades ago, in Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, authors Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (1981) critiqued the erasure of women artists from twentieth-century art historical narratives and exposed gendered social realities. VCG encourages continued investigation of these issues.

     VCG explores issues of equity and social justice through visual culture. Gendered visual culture surrounds us and influences our perceptions of reality. Whether we pay attention or not, we learn from the visual experiences of our everyday lives. The dialogue between image and text provides multifaceted opportunities for making meaning.

Early Multimedia Publishing

When we first envisioned VCG, we expected traditional articles that included images but we hoped to exploit the potential of multimedia in online publishing. To this end, we support authors who use various forms of multimedia in their scholarship. In our first volume published in 2006, we began presenting research in visual form by including video clips from the films of a German feminist filmmaker, Ula Stöckl, analyzed by Claudia Schippert (2006). At this time, few videos, especially those by women filmmakers, were published online. The following video clip (Figure 1) brings engaging research to international audiences.

	Figure 1. A page with Ula Stöckl's film clips embedded in Schippert's (2006) article, Survival and Rebellion: Recovering Ula Stöckl's Feminist Film Strategies in the first volume of Visual Culture & Gender.

     In volume 2 of VCG, we include video excerpts of a performance, "Who's in Bed with the Handmaiden" as an example of presenting multimedia research (Keifer-Boyd & Smith-Shank, 2006; 2007). Like the Handmaiden in Margaret Atwood's (1998) novel, our Handmaiden sheds assumptions of what may be assumed "normal" by interrogating visual culture beyond the obvious. With this as a first step, we encouraged submissions that take us further beyond traditionally accepted published formats so that we may, in VCG, push the limits of research. Our Handmaiden videotaped performance gave us the opportunity to explore ways to embed digital discourse into the journal (Figure 2). By digital discourse we are referring to discourse in the form of a performed conversation that challenges the very nature of a master narrative.

International Perspectives

The inclusion of international perspectives is essential in our global village. To this end, Kryssi Staikidis (2006) provides readers with insights into her work with Mayan women artists. Miwon Choe (2006) explores her Korean family history and tells a personal and sensitive but traumatic story of her great aunt Hae-Seok Rah, who was a remarkable artist and pioneer for Korean women artists.

     We invited authors whose first language is not English to include an abstract in their home language and if possible, the whole article. For example, in volume 11, Christina Han (2016) provides the abstract and primary source texts in Korean that she translated into English. Reviewing, revisions, and editing are first completed in English prior to the translation and then we have been fortunate to have international colleagues who can serve as reviewers for languages other than English.

     For the first time, in volume 3 of VCG, three of the articles include video streaming as either a primary focus or as a supplement to the text. While a few bugs had yet to be worked (including how to work with the large amount of data required by video streaming) out, we were committed to challenging the limits of the print-based journal format. In this issue, we also broke the hegemonic language barrier in a significant way to engage with international audiences. Spanish translations are available of articles by Kryssi Staikidis (2006, 2008, 2014) in volumes 3 and 9, and retroactively in volume 1. Staikidis's video, presented in volume 3 enables the privileging of the artist's voice in Spanish, with English subtitles, which is possible with the digital nature of the journal (Figure 3).

Multimodal Research

It is important to consider the merits and challenges of continuously emergent methodologies that vie for acknowledgment in the rapidly expanding constructions of worldwide research communities and communication technology. New methods of considering, doing, and reporting research as well as reconsidering the value of older methods that have been traditionally used by women are often challenging for VCG editors and reviewers. What are the criteria for assessing appropriate methodological techniques, research findings, and standards for emergent and/or technologically changing ideas of criteria? Reviewer, Sheri Klein challenged us to revisit our (relatively traditional) review questions, and in collaboration with VCG reviewers, we revised the tool that we use for assessing submissions. Below we list the criteria in which three reviewers rate VCG submissions from excellent to inadequate:

1. Fits the purpose of VCG. The purpose of the journal is to encourage and promote an understanding of how visual culture constructs gender in context with representations of race, age, sexuality, social units, and social class.

2. Clarity to an international readership

3. Succinct/Relevant

4. Exposes culturally learned meanings and power relations that surround the creation, consumption, valuing, and dissemination of images.

5. Conceptualization of topic

6. Insights on gender issues

7. Visual culture insights

8. Strength of argumentation

9. Coherence of organization

10. Knowledge of related "texts"

11. Clear research methods including the feminist disclosure of positionality

12. Style of presentation

13. Grammar, structure

14. Relevant figures/images

15. APA reference style

16. Other (please specify)

     While some of these criteria categories are scholarship standards, we believe that the significance of the international focus, emphasis on visual culture, gender and the notion of "text" can be more than words, which facilitates focus on our mission.

Dialogic Research

Every year new advances in user-friendly technology allowed us to expand beyond the limitations of traditional print journals. We experimented in volume 4 with an "architecture of participation" (O'Reilly, 2004, ¶ 1), i.e., a new space for exchanges among the readers of VCG. Readers were invited to record or write text to share with others concerning the issues raised by authors in volume 4 of VCG. We offered prompts related to the articles in our VCG volume 4 editorial to generate stories. We encouraged readers to share their own stories about visual culture and gender from a feminist perspective. While the prompts were used in teaching and in conversation with the editors, none were shared at the VCG platform for volume 4. Perhaps in 2008, participation in multimedia journals was still too unfamiliar. Replying or commenting within a digital journal in 2008 may have been too new to many readers of VCG.

     In volume 4, we open our editorial with excerpts from some of our email exchanges over the past year, because it's important to us for our readers to have access not only to content, but also to the methods we use to think through the content and possibilities that are available to us as editors of a unique online journal. In our editorial, the dialogic research not only reflected on our yearlong conversation, we also included an interview that related to a theme that emerged in volume 4 on motherhood. Karen remembers seeing Benjamin Spock's (1946) book on her mother's bookshelf and with her brother's help, interviewed her mother to see what effects it had on her family dynamics. Since the early 1950s, Benjamin Spock's (1946) psychoanalytic revelations about child-rearing practices have been popular. By 1998 the book had sold more than 50 million copies and had been translated into 38 languages and was a touchstone for more than one generation of parents and teachers. The audio excerpt from the interview is linked below (Figure 4).

	Figure 4. Click on the image above to listen to a mother describe how she followed Dr. Spock's advice of loving the child but also leaving the child alone, which was a controversial idea of permissiveness in the 1950s (Smith-Shank—Keifer-Boyd, 2009).

     Dorothy Lander and Anita Sinner's (2010) multimedia article, "Naming West Coast Women Artists as Popular Educators: An Appreciative Inquiry" took readers on a journey to Vancouver Island and to the diverse art practices of Canadian popular educators involved in the women's movement. Their conversations illustrate dialogic research with arts practitioners illuminating the art practices that constitute arts-based popular education and show how as feminists they continue to play with embodied enlightenment, and listen to intuitive and tacit knowledge (Figure 5).

	Figure 5. A page from Lander and Sinner's (2010) article, Naming Ourselves as Popular Educators: An Appreciative Inquiry into West Coast Canadian Artists' Identity, filled with hyperlinks to video posted on YouTube of each person in the group introducing herself.

     Second Life was popular in 2009, so much so that students with whom we worked—Hsiao-Chen (Sandrine) Han (2010) and Christine Liao (2011) researched in Second Life, and focused their dissertation on this virtual world. In VCG, volume 4, Christine Ballengee Morris's (2010) arts-based narrative inquiry uses a conversation/play format to interrogate her relationship with her Second Life avatar (Figure 6). She plays with notions of time, aging, and the ideal self through social presence theory (Egoyan, 2007) and virtual aesthetics as theorized by Lev Manovich (2005). She "glances at the clock and realizes that this self-exploration must end," using an afternoon in a rocker in front of her computer as a real time and place literary device for readers' self-reflection on the passing of time and social assumptions about aging (p. 33).

	Figure 6. A page from Ballengee Morris's (2009) article, A Raining Afternoon Growing Younger and Wiser, formatted as a playscript embedded with images. On this page is Pamela G. Taylor's photography of her virtual self "tied in knots" (p. 28).

     Even in virtual worlds we have not moved to a gender-neutral culture. Meanings and identities are always produced through intertextual channels scanned and consumed. Identities and attitudes are never solid or complete. The rampant proliferation of cultural, social, and historical codes makes it inevitable that we will use them as mirrors with which to assess ourselves, our cultural networks, and the usefulness of feminist research and ideas. Serious feminist scholarship comes only through reflective consideration of cultural mirrors. Unlike Alice (Carroll, 1871), we can't wander through the looking glass to get away from ourselves and our daily lives. Time can't run backward no matter how many jars of face cream or botox injections. In spite of the plethora of do-it-yourself self-improvement shows that are found on nearly every channel (and provide an ocean of data for contemporary feminist researchers to consider and deconstruct) our work is not yet done. Feminist research is dialogic research. According to Douglas (2010), "The time is long overdue for us to reclaim the F-word" (p. 305). We agree.

Public Pedagogy

VCG is a form of public pedagogy. We publish the work from those who explore and challenge patriarchy and others who disrupt, challenge, or solicit public action as well as those whose interventions in knowledge production allow us insights that might ordinarily remain outside our consciousness.

     In the first decade of the 21st century, online courses proliferated and there were few visual and gender critiques of this type of pedagogy. In VCG's volume 3, Alice Lai and Lilly Lu (2009) interrogate an online course and offer readers insights into patriarchal images of women from the Paleolithic Period to the Roman Empire. They explore strategies that can be used in feminist pedagogy online and off line. Lai and Lu interpret their case study from third wave feminism and feminist pedagogy perspectives, interfused with an interaction analysis model developed by social psychologists, Gunawarden, Lowe, and Anderson (1997). By presenting their critique in VCG, it becomes public pedagogy.

     Over and over again, we are reminded that as we expose ourselves to the narratives of others, our own memories are evoked. Then, as our memories juxtapose with others' narratives, insights are triggered that interface with history, relationships, and with both small and large cultures. Shared narratives become public pedagogy, and this is the central theme of VCG, volume 6. These public narratives that come from the authors' poignant desire to investigate and share insights are text- and art-based, self- and culture-reflective. In these articles, readers are invited to consider multiple ways our social experiences are, most of the time, unreflexively taken for granted. Stepping outside of our comfort zones often encourages us to reflect on invisible habits of understanding.

     LGBTQ issues are regular visual and cultural issues explored in VCG. Joni Boyd-Acuff's (2011) Outliers in Research: The Narrative of an Ally, and Kevin Almond's (2011) Masquerade in Clubland, share different aspects of LGBTQ communities. Boyd-Acuff takes us into the world of an after-school program for LGBTQ teens, while Almond invites us into the glamorous world of LGBTQ clubs and shares his insights as an observer and participant. In each of these articles, the authors challenge readers to reconsider the routine ways that we understand others and ourselves.

     Girls' issues are also central to our mission as exemplified in articles by Marissa Vollrath (2006), Meghan Chandler (2011), Shari Savage (2015), and Olga Ivashkevich (2011). Chandler (2011) looks at Surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer and Riot Grrrls band to reconsider the use of images of girls and dolls for political purposes. She considers the ways in which images of girlhood and dolls were reappropriated and re-presented by Bellmer and Riot Grrrls, and launches an investigation into their motivations. Savage (2015) uses arts-based research to juxtapose the narrative and structure of Little Red Riding Hood with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Ivashkevich (2011) considers Preteen Girls' Subversive Gender Play as her young female research participants resist and transgress what culture understands as normative/iconic femininity.

     The article and video by Barbara Bickel and Tannis Hugill (2011) Re/Turning to Her: A Co-A/r/tographic Ritual Inquiry uses art as a catalyst (Figure 7). It is an a/r/tographic ritual-infused inquiry into the intersections of research, art, spirituality, and education as thresholds of collaborative learning. These and the other articles as public pedagogy critique the multiple ways images impact beliefs about entitlement and social equity, and work toward increasing methods of understanding and being discriminate interpreters of visual culture. Moreover, the accessibility of the articles online in an open publication is public pedagogy.

	Figure 7. A page from Bickel and Hugill's (2011) article, Re/Turning to Her: A Co-A/R/Tograhic Ritual Inquiry, with embedded video of their performance.

Contemporary Witnessing

Witnessing has a long history, and in a digital age when information is flowing non-stop, it's especially vital for intersectional and decolonial feminist scholarship, teaching, and action as witnessing to be present. In 2013, with Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Newton, Connecticut, and escalations worldwide of wars and violence against women, children, and homosexuals, we asked, "what are my personal responsibilities to be an active contemporary feminist witness?" The foundation of feminist scholarship is criticality focused on social, economic, environmental, and other injustices. Acts of witnesses become advocacy. Many VCG authors witness, address, and deconstruct stereotypical habits of looking and understanding related to aspects of gender, culture, and identity in multiple ways that challenge dominant culture understandings.

     One cultural understanding is patriarchal control of what a person should wear or not wear. Recently, the burkini has made headlines, when French police forced a Muslim woman to remove her burkini in public (Quinn, 2016). This is an outrageous act of patriarchal control. Two VCG authors discuss Muslim women's choices to wear or discard the hijab. Fiona Blaike's (2013) and Sarah Abu Bakr (2014) confront notions of the veil and trouble non-Arab understandings of veils, weaving together two narratives of the hijab, from conducted interviews and from memories. They both challenge oversimplified notions of the hijab and should be required reading for French (and other) police forces.

     Claudia Wobovnik (2013) uses multimedia, arts-based research to investigate how high heeled shoes have become significant cultural indicators of both social and physical capital (Figure 8). In her article, she directly engages with stereotypes of high heel shoes and the people who wear them, noting that men and women think of these special cultural objects very differently.

     Identities, such as woman, Muslim, Black, White, trophy wife, trophy hunter, athlete, historian, diva, and other positionalities are standpoints and produced in relation to cultural systems and environments. Patti Lather (1991) writes, "Feminist researchers see gender as a basic organizing principle which profoundly shapes/mediates the concrete conditions of our lives" (p. 71). Social justice witnesses critique signs from visual culture and engage in research that opens emancipatory windows as a form of intervention, providing alternatives to dominant views of desire of power. This is the type of research praxis Lather (2004) describes and many VCG articles exemplifies.

Masculinity Critiques

For the first time in the history of the journal, we had four male authors in VCG's volume 9. Each considered masculinity visual culture constructs that together highlight the inadequacy of dichotomies that denote opposites in which one position is privileged and the other marginalized, in this case: enabled/disabled and superhero/queer. Joe Festa's (2014) visual essay analyzing Wolfgang Tillmans's portraiture for BUTT magazine marks a moment in VCG history, where the male body is privileged in such a way that an inversion of masculine gaze is evoked. Festa expands upon socially constructed notions of masculinity and femininity, and illustrates how Tillmans's images represent a contemporary portrayal of the fluidity of contemporary gender.

     The fluidity of notions of gender is reflected in the other articles by male authors as well. Sharif Bey (2014) considers his own and his family's use of bodybuilding/posing/posturing in his autoethnographic study. He explores aesthetic experiences, both formal and performative, in order to deconstruct the visual archetypes of bodybuilding and their impact on formative notions of maleness. Gary Johnson (2014) studies the complexity of gendered images in superhero comics. His study of perceptions of masculinity of first-year college students demonstrates the omnipresent of graphic novels in male identity formation and conformation to hegemonic expectations of masculinity. John Derby (2014) provides an historic overview of how representations of mental disability in Western cultures rely on multiple and overlapping types of oppression. Patriarchal codification of disabilities, what Derby terms animality-patriarchy, implies an absolute difference between disabled and non-disabled people. The significance of these four articles together is that they give readers the courage to challenge the uncritical gaze of the male self (Figures 9, 10, 11, 12).

	Figure 9. A photo discussed in Festa's article, Constructing the Sexual Self: Wolfgang Tillmans's Portraiture and BUTT Magazine, with the caption: "Wolfgang Tillmans, Untitled, Bernhard Willhelm (2001). Image courtesy of the artist; reproduced with permission" (p. 50).

	Figure 10. "My brother (at age 17 in 1989) demonstrates a side chest pose. He trained me each day after school. Our focus was on getting strong and getting big. He kept me off the streets and kept me out of trouble" is the caption for this photo in Bey's (2014) article, An Autoethnography of Bodybuilding Visual Culture, Aesthetic Experience, and Performed Masculinity (p. 39).

	Figure 11. A drawing discussed in Johnson's (2014) article, Understanding Perceptions of Masculinity through Superhero Iconography: Implications for Art Educators, with the caption: "Drawing by a Black male student with a Black Studies background showing deviation from a traditional superhero persona, particularly in the areas of attire and ethnicity. The drawing does articulate strength through superhero action" (p. 67).

	Figure 12. A photo discussed in Derby's (2014) article, Animality-patriarchy in Mental Disability Representations, with the caption: "Hugh W. Diamond. [ca. 1850–1858]. Patient, Surrey County Lunatic Asylum. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Albumen silver print from glass negative. 19.1. cm x 14 cm" (p. 19).

Conclusion: Quests for Gender Justice

We have had the opportunity to work with many authors worldwide and share their ideas in a free, international, multimedia format. We started this journal because we saw a niche that needed to be filled. We felt strongly that visual culture was important and that by combining it with our own interests in feminist scholarship, we could do service to our communities of inquiry.

     We could not have done this work without the thorough, thoughtful, and dedicated commitment of our review board. Nor could we have survived without the several graduate students who helped us in various ways throughout these past 10 years, or the support of our institutions.

     VCG has changed over the last 10 years. We started with articles primarily focused on girls and women. Today the journal still includes articles on girls and women, but we have also published articles on masculinities and queer issues. Gender is multifaceted and complex, and always includes issues of race, socioeconomic status, aging, discourses of abuse, and love for oneself and others. One of the most interesting things about each volume of VCG is that while we do not do a thematic call for papers, the articles not only work individually, but together as a gestalt of the times in which they were published.

     As we worked on VCG several global issues of social justice surfaced in the news and in our lives. The rise of heroin addiction, refugee migration, child prostitution, violent deaths of Black children, and the political move to the right throughout the world. The lack of respect by politicians for teachers and the diminishing number of arts teachers in schools worry us. All of these issues relate to visual culture and gender. These issues are addressed in articles and in our editorials, and we continue to ask authors to share their passions as they quest for gender justice.

     We believe in the power of art and art education, and that Visual Culture & Gender has taken an important step in collecting and disseminating cutting-edge research presented in mixed and multiple formats. We believe the value of this journal is its edginess in presenting new forms of research methods in concert with our commitment to the importance of visual communication. We hope that worldwide free access to this publication supports and informs scholars who come from wealthy countries, but also those who may not otherwise be able to afford print-based or subscription-based journals.

     The journal journey for us has been, and continues to be a labor of heartfelt service, feminist praxis, and love—and we see our most important contribution to the discourse as the public pedagogy that is Visual Culture & Gender. VCG's 10th anniversary volume includes a group of 10 authors who come from very different places and research traditions and we believe this volume exemplifies the strengths of this journal.

     As we move forward, significant issues loom on the horizon. The fluidity of gender means that people may embody identity positions that they are comfortable. Media surveillance of bodies and identity theft are huge issues that a journal such as VCG must address so that the critical understanding of the effects of these intrusions into our lives can be assessed and made visible.

     Our editorials over the years embody feminist scholarship and pedagogy. They make the personal public and global challenges personal. We truly care about making changes to a world that is unjust, and strive to contribute through Visual Culture & Gender to create a world in which everyone has food, clean water, shelter, education, healthcare, broadband access, and other human rights. We don't know how to fix everything but believe that our small efforts have engaged radical critical witnesses who have the metaphorical balls to challenge patriarchy to reform what we do and who we are as human beings.

References

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