“Ginealogy”: Towards the Revival of Feminine Genealogies in the Works of Contemporary Polish Artists (original) (raw)

2008, Journal of the Motherhood Initiative For Research and Community Involvement

Luce Irigaray argues, that in order to re-evaluate and revive the feminine in culture we need to turn our attention to relations between women, especially mothers and daughters, and revive "feminine genealogies from oblivion" (1995: 13). In the present text, I scrutinize the works of contemporary Polish artists: Monika Zielińska/Mamzeta and Katarzyna Górny demonstrating strategies they employ to retrace the voices of women and to re-interpret the figures of the mother and daughter. Their art can be viewed as an attempt to transgress the established gender order in a very Irigarayan sense: by bringing up the maternal, and by regaining female genealogies, or even creating "ginealogies" instead-the term referring to the work "Genealogy/ginealogy: The Scar After the Mother" by Monika Zielińska, who replaced the supposedly neutral prefix "gyne" with feminine "gine." Through the representations of the maternal body: sensual and desiring, but also aging, sick, disabled or dying, entirely new understanding of female subjectivity can be acquired. Female corporeality, also the non-normative that typically exists on the margins of the patriarchal culture is finally placed in the centre. Artists, whose works I discuss struggle to find visual language(s) that would enable the expression of women's experiences, in line with Irigaray's idea of reviving women's language(s) and representations along with enlivening their-story, making an important contribution to the attempts at recovering the female voice, which is still undervalued and forgotten in our culture(s). Suzanna Danuta Walters (1992), an American researcher and theorist, claims that the relationship between a mother and daughter is "located in culture in the most fundamental sense, where issues of gender, genre, and generation intersect and interact" (4). During the last few decades, the mother-daughter relationship has received increasing attention, both on the conceptual level and in empirical research. In most cases, the point of departure for theorists 212 Volume 10, Number 2