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Show 96 Whitney Seferos college of social & behavioral science While men are given agency in popular media imagery, women are stereotyped as empty vases to be filled with male fantasy, or worse, aren't available in images as whole women at all, but as sexy bits, which put together would form the ultimate caricature of a woman. I hypothesize that a deconstructive gaze can be employed to interrogate the above characterizations. Deconstruction, a critical exercise introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, exposes the incoherencies inherent in a text (broadly conceived as a literary text, speech act, image, film, relationship, physical act, body, etc.) in order to undermine the ideol-ogy it ultimately represents. A typical act of deconstruction involves identifying the binary oppositions a text rests on and revealing the constructedness of said binaries. I hypothesize that the gaze can be used to interrogate the body for cracks and fissures in the coherent presentation of the body as sexed. Through an act of looking, a queering gaze if you will, one can discover the ways in which our physical embodi-ments already violate our sex and gender identities. I propose a redefinition of the gaze as an act which participates in the gendering/sexing of the bodies it falls over and a locus of subversive action. By subject-ing the male form to the same fragmenting and feminizing photographic gaze women have been subject to, I have rendered the bodies in front of my lens ambiguously sexed and highlighted the feminine traits which infringe upon readings of them as masculine. The images produced force viewers to confront the re-pressed physical traits which must remain repressed for the bodies under my lens to be read as definitively and appropriately sexed. I hope that the experience of viewing the photographs will leave viewers reeling from the experience of having their own gender identities shaken. AN ACT OF LOOKING: THE GAZE AS A (DE)CONSTRUCTIVE EXERCISE Whitney Seferos (Angela Smith) Gender Studies Program University of Utah UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ABSTRACTS Angela Smith |