{"title":"My Mother's Bones: The Photographic Bodies of Camera Lucida and Halving the Bones","authors":"Chelsea Oei Kern","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2021.0004","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay brings together Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Ruth Ozeki's documentary Halving the Bones in order to situate the conceit of maternal photography within discourses of social and racial reproduction. Although Barthes's theory of photography neglects race, it prepares the ground for a logic of maternal reproduction through photography that is not realized within Camera Lucida. Ozeki extends Barthes's theory of photography-as-mothering to posit film as a medium that meets the needs of a contentious, mixed-race Asian body—both to escape narratives of race as enforced through the photograph, and to ensure the continued visibility of that body.","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":" ","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2021-11-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2021.0004","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:This essay brings together Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Ruth Ozeki's documentary Halving the Bones in order to situate the conceit of maternal photography within discourses of social and racial reproduction. Although Barthes's theory of photography neglects race, it prepares the ground for a logic of maternal reproduction through photography that is not realized within Camera Lucida. Ozeki extends Barthes's theory of photography-as-mothering to posit film as a medium that meets the needs of a contentious, mixed-race Asian body—both to escape narratives of race as enforced through the photograph, and to ensure the continued visibility of that body.
期刊介绍:
Founded in 1990 as a groundbreaking experiment in scholarly publishing on the Internet, Postmodern Culture has become a leading electronic journal of interdisciplinary thought on contemporary culture. PMC offers a forum for commentary, criticism, and theory on subjects ranging from identity politics to the economics of information.