Men Picturing Men: Acts of Appropriation in Pursuit of Alignment

• In Event: The Violence of Voyeurism: Theorizing the Vancouver Hockey Riots

Abstract

Given that in today’s world, meanings are made and relayed visually as well as orally and textually (Rogoff 2002), this paper will address the following question: How are masculinities constructed and constituted in acts of looking and through practices of representation while simultaneously conditioning and informing those acts and practices that occur within specific scopic regimes? To address this question, the paper takes as a case study the visual representation of the riots that erupted in downtown Vancouver on June 15, 2011 immediately after the last game of the Stanley Cup Finals.

During the riots, several eyewitnesses took photographs of the scenes that were erupting before their eyes and it is these photographs that included images of rioters (the majority of whom were men) that I analyze and discuss in this paper. Specifically, I analyze photographs that appeared in, and were distributed through online forums, including social networking sites, blogs, microblogs, and the print media on the day immediately following the riots (June 16, 2011) and were attributed to male photographers.

While these images produced by men of men demonstrate the capacity of photographs to convey information, provide evidence and “alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe” (Sontag 1973, p. 3), they too function as images produced within specific ideologies of gender. These photographs demand that we ask of them the following questions: Which men are seen, which men are not seen, and which men are “privileged within [this] regime of specularity” (Rogoff 2002, p. 25). Because these photographs are interpretations and translations that function to visualize and narrate an experience that cannot be reduced to visual qualities alone, they can provide a productive entrance into a discussion about how men display and perform their masculine selves under particularly violent circumstances. Invoking critical visual culture theory, can these images and the act of men photographing other men in moments of uncertainty be read as the pursuit of “shared curiosities, shared subjectivities, shared sufferings” (Rogoff 2011) that come together around or depart from inherited categories of masculinity?

At this time of increased interest in the potential of the visual as a way of inquiring into and representing educational phenomena, it is essential that we consider ways that images function and can be interpreted from particular located positions. This case study offers readings of how masculinities are constructed and constituted in acts of looking and through practices of representation in the knowledge that understandings of masculinities simultaneously condition and inform those acts and practices.

Author

• Donal O'Donoghue, The University of British Columbia