Beyond the Frame explores the complex, subtle and volatile interplays between this new visual culture and an organised movement to change the asymmetrical relations of power between women and men. What is offered here is by no means a deductive model which will settle or fix the definitions of either feminism or visual culture, but an enquiry which shifts the ground of 'Victorian' art to set painting alongside sculpture, graphic and decorative art, photographs and reprographic prints, illustrated magazines and the pageantry of demonstrations to argue that the elite forms of fine art were shaped by and understood within a visual culture in which art collided with politics, visual representation with political representation. And that to explore visuality, modernity and imperialism is to consider the sexual politics of vision in the modern city and pictorial perception in a colonial theatre.