"The Art of the Look: Reconsidering Gender and Occularity in the Long Eighteenth Century"
The renewed interest in beauty and aesthetics in the academy calls for a reconsideration of the critical models we employ when attending to gender and occularity; indeed popular theories of scopophilia often limit our perspectives by essentializing the act of looking (hence, mastery and control) as masculine and the bearer of that look as feminine. This panel seeks to generate new insights on genders and visuality by looking into a range of literary and cultural documents from the long eighteenth century. How might reading texts as theory further our understanding of the visual technologies and politics that shape bodies, genders, and sexualities? Of particular interest are papers that explore how typically marginalized or objectified figures engender the visual and visualize gender and, thus, augment current theories, call for new critical methodologies, or suggest new approaches to visual analysis.

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