Visualizing Difference: Feminist Theory

Proceeding from theory to practice, this volume offers an original approach to visual pedagogy while demonstrating how intersectionality can be experienced and taught. In the wealth of literature on intersectionality as a concept, theory, political option and methodology, little has been published on how it might be taught. The book fills in this lacuna and recommends a pedagogy that recognizes the necessity of integrating difference, and inspires a relationship with the visual whereby students negotiate meanings that directly bear upon their lives.

The book addresses subjectivity as lived experience in its physical, political and socio-cultural contexts. Written student narratives constitute platforms of the diverse ways in which the classroom experience stimulates a retrospective look at their own lives, and through their performance of narration, they reveal a dynamic interplay between self and experience.

The volume proposes a novel approach to the empirical investigation of the visual, documenting how interconnections between various social differentials, such as gender, disability, sexuality, race, ethnicity and nationality, intersect in a particular lived experience and shape the reception of visual texts. It explores how a critical analysis of films empowers students and gives them incentive to oppose normalizing power effects.

Elzbieta H. Oleksy is Professor of Humanities at the University of Lodz. She chairs the Department of Transatlantic and Media Studies and is Founding Director of the Women’s Studies Centre.