Art today is an increasingly multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing transgressive works that intervene in war, inequalities, ecological disasters, 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, affectivity 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, including Griselda Pollock,...

Photographic stills of women, appearing in both press coverage and relief campaigns, have long been central to the documentation of war and civil conflict. Images of non-Western women, in particular, regularly function as symbols of the misery and hopelessness of the oppressed. Featured on the front pages of newspapers and in NGO reports, they inform public understandings of war and peace, victims and perpetrators, but within a discourse that often obscures social and political subjectivities.

Uniquely, this book deconstructs in a systematic, gender-sensitive way the repetitive...