Dictionary

specularize en · VERB

Etymology

From specular + -ize.

Meanings

1. To make specular or reflective.
   • Unlike most of the producing portion of the range, these ores and near-ores were subjected to mountain-building processes subsequent to their formation. These processes tend to specularize, or harden, the hematite. 1938, Lake Superior Iron Ores, page 51:
2. To make visible; to elucidate, bring to light, or put on display.
   • The possession performances also dramatize the social fact of making fabric today, and specularize the threat to male laborers posed by female laborers in a market place now characterized by high unemployment and the increasing feminization of the manufacturing sectors in general and the textiles industries in particular. 1994, Lynne Milgram, Penny Van Esterik, The Transformative power of cloth in Southeast Asia, page 56:
   • Lee likewise refused to specularize herself in the bodily act of preaching but sought instead, much like Nancy Prince was later to do in her travels abroad, to deflect the gaze of her reading public away from her body. 1995, Carla L. Peterson, Doers of the Word, page 80:
   • Both specularize, for condemnation, the same types of domestic behaviors: illegitimate sexual relationships and atypical domestic power economies. 1993, Deborah Lynn Hovland, Rhetoric, Gender, and the Moralizing Function of Late Medieval and Early Modern Farce, page 56:
   • Rising to a perspective that would dominate the totality, to the vantage point of the greatest power, he thus cuts himself off from the bedrock, from his empirical relationship with the matrix that he claims to survey to specularize and to speculate. 1992, Stephen J. Pfohl, Death at the parasite cafe, page 70:
3. To make visual; to transform into or represent as visible image.
   • The task of art education now, the goal of someone as an artist, is to intensify and objectify personality, to specularize- that is, to make visual-sheer difference as a particular kind of artistic subjectivity. 2001, Paul Schimmel, Yilmaz Dziewior, Public offerings:
   • As Karen Morley Brennan suggests, “hysteria, which on one level transforms women into spectacles, at the same time allows them to specularize the interpretations which have framed them.” 2006, Lisa Colletta, Maureen O'Connor, Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O'Brien, page 40:
   • Hence, the written tablet that the woman holds in her hand must be seen as an erotic sign for the way in which it summons up a prohibition in order to specularize the woman's heady transgression of the act of reading. 2009, Anupama Prabhala Kapse, The Moving Image: Melodrama and Early Indian Cinema 1913-1939:
   • This temptation to specularize Canada in terms of its visibly exotic people must be avoided, largely because what this does is allow white power centres to continue to function, invisibly. 1993, Fuse Magazine - Volume 17, page 13:
   • However, if Cleopatra refuses to be signified, to specularize Roman glory, it is made abundantly clear to her that she will pay the price for it. 2004, Andrew Hiscock, The Uses of this World, page 108:
   • Rather than specularize violence, Guzman chooses to let the content of the testimonial sink in as the camera stays on the lines and expression of the now silent subject. 2007, Tina Mai Chen, David S. Churchill, Film, History and Cultural Citizenship: Sites of Production, page 85:
4. To view voyeuristically; to objectify as an object to be looked at.
   • Acis's look transforms Galatea into the desired object, and the catachreses in their "hyperbolic visibility" specularize her in a second and more profound way: they create a visual display for the reader, who becomes a spectator, along with Acis. 2002, Calíope:
   • Voyeurism, theorized as one of the linchpins of the inscription of patriarchy into the cinema, functions conventionally to specularize the feminine and to attribute control over the scenario to the masculine position. 1991, Mary Rhiel, Re-Viewing Kleist, page 76:
   • A division of the body into parts has historically operated to specularize the body for economic and social purposes, developing, as discussed in relation to Arcade, by the nineteenth century as a "visible economy of race, an economy of parts that enables the viewer to ascertain the subject's rightful place in a racial chain of being" (Wiegman 21). 2004, Linda A. Kinnahan, Lyric Interventions, page 113:
   • This analysis uses concepts from film theory to demonstrate how the dispersal of image, voice, and narrative in novels can specularize female characters, denying them subjectivity and authoritative discourse, and, further, how some characterizations can be understood as resistant to that dispersal. 1992, Dissertation Abstracts International, page 817:
   • Yet the overwhelming force of the drive to specularize is manifested by the fact that the second impulse is not concretized through the representation of 'ugly' or even 'unattractive' women. 1990, Manuel Alvarado, John O. Thompson, The Media reader, page 279:

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