Linda Williams | Motion and E-motion: A Feminist Perspective on the “Frenzy of the Visible”

To what extent was the invention of pornography a break with previous forms of erotic art? Why did such images arise especially in modernity? Many scholars assume that this invention simply extended the ever-increasing verisimilitude of all technological visual forms of representation. This lecture argues that the intrusion of techniques for exciting lust in viewers was less a product of the rise of the greater verisimilitude in the invention of photography and more a product of the way new visual technologies redefined vision itself as an irrational excitation of sensations that have no necessary link to a referent.

Linda Williams (*1946) is an American Professor in Film & Media and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley.