I’ve just found out that the articles for Studia Patristica 52 have been sent to the printers and will hopefully be out by August. The abstract for my article, co-authored with Serafim Aldea, is below.
Sight and Perception: The Male Gaze and the Desert Fathers
Andrew Brower Latz and Fr. Serafim Aldea, Durham
The male gaze is a term of feminist film theory denoting the way that films structure the viewing of the audience, specifically the way films represent women as erotic objects and draw the audience along with this representation. This structuring of the gaze is common in advertising and in the multiple images in contemporary cities as part of the aestheticization of everyday life. It is problematic from feminist and Christian perspectives as objectifying women and denying their agency. The Desert Fathers lived in a very different situation, yet this paper will argue that it is possible to learn something from them in contemporary attempts to respond to the male gaze, and that their concerns in this regard are surprisingly closely related to male gaze theory. It is well known that sex, fornication and mental fantasies thereof were important matters of concern for the early monastics. This paper will look in particular at the attitude of ‘violence to oneself’ and the practice of watchfulness developed by the monks as available for contemporary appropriation. It seeks to contextualize these practices within the approach of the desert tradition to perception more generally.
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