Visual Regimes of Discipline in U.S. Higher Education

This book employs an intersectional feminist lens to examine how U.S. national, social, and cultural ideologies surrounding health and intelligence have been shaped and sustained through racist, gendered, and ableist scientific practices and photographic technologies. Focusing on posture photography programs implemented at women’s colleges throughout the 20th century, the chapters trace the entanglements of these visual regimes with the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through a series of case studies and creative interventions, the authors analyze how these photographic practices functioned as tools of bodily discipline and normative regulation. They also detail their own use of technology, photography, and the arts to reimagine and recreate posture portraits—challenging narratives of pathology and shame, and honoring bodies historically marked as Other.

This book will be of interest to scholars in Gender and Women’s Studies, Studies of Race and Ethnicity, Disability Studies, Visual and Performance Studies, Digital Humanities, Sociology, History, and Technology Studies.