Elodie Silberstein

To marginalise is ‘to treat (a person, group, or concept) as insignificant or peripheral’ (Cambridge Dictionary). Marginalised Girlhood: Blind Spots, Challenges and Hopes opens the conversation about the representation of girls in popular culture along the axes of race, disability and sexuality. How does it feel to grow up at the periphery of the mainstream norms? To never have role models in dominant narratives; and to have one’s self-experience misrepresented? PhD candidates Elodie Silberstein and Belinda Glynn; and Dr Whitney Monaghan, author of the book Queer Girls, Temporality and Screen Media: Not 'Just a Phase' (Palgrave, 2016) will share their personal experiences in light of the current feminist resurgence. Join the conversation in a Q&A oriented session to have your say on how to empower the new generations of girls.

Asian Cultural and Media Studies Research Group (ACMS)
Postgraduate workshop: Research Impacts and Public Engagement

In this first workshop of the 2018 series, speakers will focus on both academic and non-academic research impacts, and public engagement. We will be joined by speakers from Monash Library, along with Film and Screen Studies Teaching Associate Kirsten Stevens and PhD candidates Britta Jorgensen and Elodie Silberstein, who will share their own experiences with public engagement.

Between innocence and experience: the sexualisation of girlhood in 19th century postcards
The Conversation
Published 14th of December 2017
https://theconversation.com/between-innocence-and-experience-the-sexualisation-of-girlhood-in-19th-century-postcards-87328

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Who is the Fairest of Them All? Colourism and Light Skinned Privilege

THE PIN
Published 16th of May 2017

http://www.thepin.org/think//mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-who-is-the-fairest-of-them-all-colourism-and-light-skinned-privilege

Look Back at It (2016) is a cutting-edge interpretation of Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by African American multidisciplinary artist Rashaad Newsome. The work is a collage of magazine cuttings. The action is set in the vogue ballroom scene, a counterculture sparked in the 1970s by the Black and Latinx Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ+) communities in New York. The muses are disenfranchised African American trans women who have faced a long-standing subjugation anchored in America’s history of racial slavery and classed transphobic capitalism. Their bodies are made of a collage of dazzling jewels cut from glossy magazines that have rendered them invisible. Drawing on beauty politics, this article maps the visual repertoire of Newsome’s aesthetic and its geopolitical implications. A formal and contextual analysis highlights how the use of high jewelry alludes to the global trade in minerals—most specifically, the diamond industry’s spoliation of South Africa’s natural resources, pionered by British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. Special attention is paid to the way Newsome’s subversion of the codes of high jewelry visually and conceptually echoes voguers’ transgression of high fashion in dance competitions. Newsome stages a transnational and transhistorical dialogue between two distinct but interconnected systems of oppression, imperialism and global capitalism, thus sketching a collective history of Black pain and of creative resilience, guided by trans women, that is essential at the time of the resurgence of global populist nationalistic discourses.

16 June 2018. London Stadium. Beyoncé and Jay-Z revealed the premiere of the music video Apeshit. Filmed inside the Louvre Museum in Paris, Beyoncé's sexual desirability powerfully dialogues with Western canons of high art that have dehumanized or erased the black female body. Dominant tropes have historically associated the black female body with the realm of nature saddled with an animalistic hypersexuality. With this timely release, Apeshit engages with the growing current debate about the ethic of representation of the black subject in European museums. Here, I argue that Beyoncé transcends the tension between nature and culture into a syncretic language to subvert a dominant imperialistic gaze. Drawing on black feminist theories and art history, a formal analysis traces the genealogy and stylistic expression of this vocabulary to understand its political implications. Findings pinpoint how Beyoncé laces past and present, the regal nakedness of her African heritage and Western conventions of the nude to convey the complexity, sensuality, and humanity of black women-thus drawing a critical reimagining of museal practices and enriching the collective imaginary at large.

This volume examines the evolution of the depictions of black femininity in French visual culture as a prism through which to understand the Global North’s destructive relationship with the natural world.

Drawing on a broad spectrum of archives extending back to the late 18th century – paintings, fashion plates, prints, photographs, and films – this study traces the intricate ways a patriarchal imperialism and a global capitalism have paired black women with the realm of nature to justify the exploitation both of people and of ecosystems. These dehumanizing and speciesist strategies of subjugation have perpetuated interlocking patterns of social injustice and environmental depletion that constitute the most salient challenges facing humankind today. Through a novel approach that merges visual studies, critical race theory, and animal studies, this interdisciplinary investigation historicizes the evolution of the boundaries between human and non-human animals during the modern period.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, critical race theory, colonial and post-colonial studies, animal studies, and French studies.