Images of female coming of age: From structural to semiotic analysis of adolescent subjectivity in Francesca Woodman's photography.

摘要

The dissertation is directed at using Carol Gilligan's theory of moral development and Roland Barthes's semiological analysis to explore the levels of meaning construction with regard to coming of age/adolescence in selected photographs of coming of age/adolescence by Francesca Woodman. It does so by exploring the prevalent notions about women's early development by use of the following: Gruber's case study approach, Gilligan's structural Ethics of Care theory, and Barthes's semiological framework. From the entirety of Woodman's oeuvre, only photographs portraying a young woman between the ages of 13 and 22 were chosen. The aim was to show that Woodman's photographs bear on both individualized adolescence as a phase in the evolution of subjectivity and the coming of age as a cultural process of reading (ecrivance) that engages and promotes the formation of the subject, in relation to its various interpretive positions. Based on the structural-conceptual analysis of Woodman's selected photographs, features of social conventions in her work were illuminated, while the post-structural or semiotic features allowed for a denaturalizing of the myth structure of a woman's coming of age, which permits examination and critique of the notion of a woman's coming of age. The findings of the study were based on the following themes: Gilligan—Silencing as Self-Sacrifice, The Act of Altruism, The Self and Selfishness, Achievement as Violence; Barthes—Objects, Death and the Photograph, The Other, Nature, Mourning and Melancholia. The predominant limitations of the approaches revealed were that Gilligan's theory applies to images in only a limited way while Barthes's lacks a theory of female gender.