The Presentation of Gender in Diane Arbus´s 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 für 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 Arbus´s 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 Arbus´s work and makes it necessary to see the photographs in a social and historical context.