· How will you utilize your own word to describe the visual culture? What will be included and/or conflated inside?
-Visual culture includes arts, crafts and design, performing arts, and the media. It includes imagery visually perceived and meaning self-defined through the viewers understanding, history, and experiences.
· Why it is important to be able to ask “new and alternative” questions in visual culture?
-It is important to ask “new and alternative” questions in visual culture because the mass understanding of many topics comes from what we are fed through visual media. If western society attempts to define its own ideas and expectations of what certain culture is through false imagery and cultural appropriation/stereotypes, then the people of those culture are negatively affected and portrayed in unfair, ignorant, and harmful ways. However, when one questions those depictions, and works to present visual culture that shows the reality of those people, how they are nothing like those depictions imagery leads western society to believe and accredits them for their own cultural work, one can understand and respect those peoples. It is important in legitimating new perspectives.
· How will you utilize your own word to restate Rogoff’s arguments on “speaking about” and “speaking to?”
-“Speaking about” involves using your own opinions, experiences, and knowledge to make generalizations about an image. It is often done by those who do not truly understand the nuances of the situation. On the other hand, “speaking to” involves altering the narratives, so that we have a different understanding of how we move throughout society, how we “organize and inhabit culture”.
· Rogoff mentions her opinions about using “curious eyes” to replace “the good eyes.” How do you think about her comments? Agree or disagree? Please make your own arguments.
-I agree, because “the good eyes” involves staring at an image until you fully understand it, and can speak as to its history, presence, and significance. However, “curious eyes" gives a much more inclusive, less definitive form of looking: there is room for the unknown and it allows for things to be viewed through different lenses and perspectives of understanding the world.
· What does the term “gaze” mean in visual cultural studies?
-In visual cultural studies, the term“gaze” is defined as desire. This “splits spectatorship into the arena of desiring subjects and desired objects” (Rogoff 31). This binary results in the initial sexual and racial identities to be formed through “processes of negative differentiation” (Rogoff 32). In other words, it fits into one category or the other, without gray areas or in betweens.
· What possibilities could be brought to us by making, seeing, and living critically in visual culture?
-Rather than just looking and letting imagery subconsciously effect our implicit biases and ways of understanding the world, without taking time to think about it or question it, one can look at things with a critical lens. When making things to put out into the world, and when seeing the images other people have created, one can take the time to critically process. This involves asking questions, acknowledging where and who it came from, who/what it depicts, and how it positively or negatively depicts the subject matter. It is being an active viewer, rather than a passive viewer.
· Discussion Question: How does the contemporary artist work to challenge the societal understanding of minorities and marginalized identities through visual culture? Can it be understood without being “explained” by the artist, so that it challenges societies expectations in visual culture?
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