The Presentation of Gender in Diane Arbuss Work in the Context of the Cold War Era

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Institut fr Amerikanistik), course: PS: Cold War Culture, language: English, abstract: In most of the cases of critics discussing Diane Arbus work it is in a psychoanalytical context. Taking her pictures of dwarfs, giants or actors of freak shows they relate them to Diane Arbuss own feelings of despair, alienation and depression which she expressed in her images. "In this view she exists in a psychoanalytic twilight world, out of time, in which her pictures carry a charge of pain that is both highly subjective and transhistorical." (Budick 123) Her pictures of men, women and transvestite show us a different way of seeing Arbuss work and makes it necessary to see the photographs in a social and historical context.