Reading in „Broken Accents“ – the Cyber Stroller through Mediascape –

  • Mirjana Stošić Singidunum University, Belgrade

Abstract

This paper deals with gender performativity in media practices, with interweaving realms of flâneur figure and scopophilia phenomenon seen through cyborgian mythology. Not so much a research on media representations of women, this paper is an attempt to investigate the (im)possibility of women gazing back, transforming the mediascape into imaginary of the flâneuse, the female stroller. Paradoxical figure of the flâneur becomes the aporetic figure of the flâneuse, measured not by the aesthetic distance between the subject and the object of the gaze, but by proximity, dangerous connectivness and disruptive kinships that escape the „regulated scopophilia“ of falogocentric male gaze. Female gaze has too often been associated with consumerist voyeurism, on the one side, or with public invisibility, on the other. The pervert gaze of the flâneuse, feminine gaze,  can be looked upon from a critical viewpoint and from semiotic „stitches“ in Shelley Jackson’s hypertext Patchwork Girl, or the Modern Monster (1995). Patchwork Girl  utilizes the collage technique in creating the flâneuse gaze that destabilizes depictions of the female body as a commodity, domestic figure and patriarchal projections of desire. This feminine gaze is strolling on the boundary of the imaginable, patchworking the plural body, cut through by intertextual practices. The assembled stitched female body as the hypertext-body (Shelley Jackson's hypertext) creates a challenging mediascapes for questioning dominant gender discourses.

References

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Published
2015-09-15
How to Cite
STOŠIĆ, Mirjana. Reading in „Broken Accents“ – the Cyber Stroller through Mediascape –. Култура/Culture, [S.l.], v. 5, n. 11, p. 113-120, sep. 2015. ISSN 1857-7725. Available at: <http://journals.cultcenter.net/index.php/culture/article/view/169>. Date accessed: 19 feb. 2025.
Section
English Articles

Keywords

mediascape, cyberspace, flâneuse, hypertext, skin, body