Dismantling the Gaze: Julia Margaret Cameron's Sri Lankan Photographs

Abstract

Through an analysis of Julia margaret Cameron's Sri Lankan photographs, I will argue that not only are the monolithic constructions of the colonizer and colonized disrupted, but that the colonial gaze becomes multiple and contradictory, the white authorial gaze splintering in reference to colonial Ceylon, Ceylon emerging as a space of disruption, facilitating alternative representations of Victorian womanhood in the colonies.