Interdisciplinary approaches to ancient Egyptian visual culture and visualities: Spectatorship, gender, sexuality, and power

This dissertation begins with the premise that disciplinary conservatism in Egyptology would benefit by engaging in interdisciplinary dialogues and that interdisciplinary theories and methods can be usefully applied to Egyptological research. To this end, I appropriate theories of the gaze from feminist film studies to analyze the relationship between ancient Egyptian visual culture and visualities. Specifically, I focus on the highly sexualized visual representations of ancient Egyptian women and ask why this sexualized mode of representation was used for ancient Egyptian women and not for ancient Egyptian men. Did ancient Egyptian sexual visuality privilege men and their visual pleasure as suggested by gaze theories? Was a gendered power relationship at play in ancient Egyptian visual representations?;The application of gaze theories suggests that visual representations of ancient Egyptian women were deliberately sexualized partly because they were catering to male visual pleasure's ideation of beauty. A gendered power relationship that consistently privileged ancient Egyptian men was also at work. These conclusions, however, do not detract from but add to the generally accepted interpretation of associating highly sexualized female representations with fertility. Instead, I suggest that findings from applying gaze theories simply add one more dimension to the multivalent meanings conveyed by these visual images. Furthermore, the application of gaze theories to ancient Egyptian data is not an end but a point of departure for future research.