The Gaze

a term used to describe the relationship of looking in which the subject is caught up in dynamics of desire through trajectories of looking and being looked at among objects and other people.

Modernity

Refers to the time period and worldview beginning approximately in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment, reaching its height in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when broad populations in Europe and North America were increasingly concentrated in urban centers and in industrial societies of increased mechanization and automation.

Modernism

In literature, architecture, art, and film, modernism refers to a set of styles that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that question traditions and conventions of representation (such as pictorialism, decoration and concealment of form, narrative structure, and illusionism) in writing, architecture, and the plastic arts.

Older term used first by cultural theorist

 Edward Said to describe the tendencies

of  westerners to fetishize, mythologize, and fear the cultures, lands, and peoples of Asia and the Middle East: it Is a European cultural construction.

• A term used by French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe the technologies of power through which modern states rely on institutional practices to regulate, subjugate, and control their human subjects.

• Refers to the ways that power is enacted on a collective social body through the regulation and discipline of individual bodies in realms such a social hygiene, public health, education demography, census taking, and reproductive practices among others.

Psychoanalytic Theory

Derived originally by Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Binary Opposition

The opposition such as nature/culture, male/female, mind/body, and so forth.

Discourse

• in general, the socially organized process of talking about a particular subject matter. 

• More specifically, according to Michel Foucault, discourse is a body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something.

Power/Knowledge

A term used by Michel Foucault to describe the ways that power affects what counts as knowledge in a given social context and how, in turn, knowledge systems within that society are caught up in power relations.

Lacan’s“mirror phase”

 A stage of development, according to psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, in which the infant first experiences a sense of alienation in its realization of its separation from other human beings.