Lisa Larsen and the Bandung Conference of 1955
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2025
The striking image of three local Chinese women spectators at the Bandung Conference of 1955 was taken by Lisa Larsen, who was a photographer commissioned by LIFE magazine to cover the conference. What does this photograph tell us about international diplomacy? Was it a coincidence that the female photographer happened to take one of the most visually arresting photographs of women as diplomatic spectators? This chapter proposes to probe further the significance of gender in constructing images of international diplomacy. In general, visual sources of international diplomacy tend to portray women in multiple capacities as actors on the international stage. However, this stands in stark contrast to textual sources, which reveal very little female agency, mostly due to the narrowly defined notions of who constitutes a diplomatic actor in traditional approaches to studying diplomacy. Elsewhere, the author has argued that the invisibility of women in diplomacy can in itself be seen as a performative stance. In this chapter, she explores how we can ‘recover’ the lost female presence in diplomacy by privileging the female gaze, through the iconic female photographer.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.