(Ebook) Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts by Amelia Jones ISBN 9780415543828, 9780415543835, 9780203146811, 0415543827, 0415543835, 0203146816

(Ebook) Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts by Amelia Jones ISBN 9780415543828, 9780415543835, 9780203146811, 0415543827, 0415543835, 0203146816

The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and a political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are "beyond" or "post-" identity. In challenging this latter claim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we "identify" works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are "post-identity" given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject "is," and offers a new theory of how to think this kind of identification in a more thoughtful and self-reflexive way.

Ultimately, Seeing Differently offers a mode of thinking identification as a "queer feminist durational" process that can never be fully resolved but must be accounted for in thinking about art and visual culture. Queer feminist durationality is a mode of relational interpretation that affects both "art" and "interpreter," potentially making us more aware of how we evaluate and give value to art and other kinds of visual culture.