From reality television to film, performance, and video art, autobiography is everywhere in today's image-obsessed age. With contributions by both artists and scholars, Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography is a unique examination of visual autobiography's involvement in the global cultural politics of health, disability, and the body. This provocative collection looks at images of selfhood and embodiment in a variety of media and with a particular focus on bodily identities and practices that challenge the norm: a pregnant man in cyberspace, a fat activist performance troupe, indigenous artists intervening in museums, transnational selves who connect disability to war, and many more. The chapters in Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography reflect several different theoretical approaches but share a common concern with the ways in which visual culture can generate resistance, critique, and creative interventions. With contributions that investigate digital media, installation art, graphic memoir, performance, film, reality television, photography, and video art, the collection offers a wide-ranging critical account of what is clearly becoming one of the most important issues in contemporary culture.

"What an ambitious and absorbing book about autobiography and the visual! This collection of provocative essays offers a range of responses to the problem of visualizations of selfhood." -- Julie Rak, Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta "The essays in this collection engage with important questions in a set of intersecting fields - autobiography studies, new materialist analyses, studies in visuality, and studies of bodies and embodiment." -- Sidonie Smith, Director, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan

About the Author
Sarah Brophy is an associate professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Janice Hladki is an associate professor of Theatre and Film Studies in the School of the Arts at McMaster University.

Reviews
'This is an important book for those who wish to answer the summons of an uneasy relationship with one's gaze and what is looked at so that we might reencounter the narratives, the biographies, that have enabled us to see what we do and perhaps come to perceive our stories differently. Such double vision is indispensable.' -- Tanya Titchkosky Imaginations Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, Issue 5-2, June, 2015



Book Information
ISBN 9781442616097
Author Sarah Brophy
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint University of Toronto Press
Publisher University of Toronto Press
Weight(grams) 480g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 155mm * 20mm