Art today is an increasingly multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing transgressive works that intervene in war and ecological disasters, in inequalities and revolutionary changes in technology. Carnal Aesthetics is a fascinating, new examination of this aspect of contemporary visual culture. Employing recent theories of transgressive body imagery, trauma, affect and sensation, it provides a fresh look at the meeting point between the politics of representation and the politics of perception through the prismatic lens of feminist theory. Acclaimed scholars analyse a wide range of seminal case studies coming from different media: digital photography, painting, video, film and multimedia art. They explore here a number of transgressive movements that significantly reconfigure the relationship between the body and the image. Unlike other books on the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics, Carnal Aesthetics seeks to provide a novel approach to art and culture by challenging the primacy of vision and by injecting an intersectional perspective into the fields of visual studies, film and media studies, as well as trauma studies. It is a significant contribution across these dynamic fields of exploration for scholars who deal with the socio-political nature of contemporary visual culture in their work.

Art today is a multifaceted phenomenon,encompassing transgressive works that intervene in war, inequalities, ecological disasters, and changes in technology. Carnal Aesthetics is a fascinating new examination of this aspect of contemporary visual culture employing recent theories of transgressive body imagery, trauma and sensation to do so.

About the Author
Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka are both Assistant Professors at the Graduate Gender Programme in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

Reviews
'They show how open the discussions still are as to how to write the aesthetic, affective event in both a descriptive and a transformative way. It's a document of an exciting, transitional time.' Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago, author of Cruel Optimism 'This exciting, important collection offers ethical, politically urgent possibilities for multiple feminist engagements with artistic and cultural practices, suggesting "alternative sensorial modalities" - hearing, smell,feeling and touch - through which to reconfigure aesthetic encounters.' Jill Dolan, Princeton University, author of Utopia in Performance and The Feminist Spectator as Critic 'Carnal Aesthetics is a must have for anyone interested in phenomenological issues of identification, visuality, affect, meaning and value in visual culture, the politics of art and the ethics of interpretation.' Amelia Jones, McGill University, author of Seeing Differently 'Carnal Aesthetics contains a great number of exciting essays by a felicitous mix of established and emerging scholars. It offers a palette of visions and of artworks worth collecting like pearls that, strung together, open up the domain of art to approaches closer to experience than to past conventions.' Mieke Bal, cultural analyst and video artist, University of Amsterdam



Book Information
ISBN 9781780760131
Author Marta Zarzycka
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint I.B. Tauris
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Weight(grams) 414g