Controlling Women’s Bodies: the Black and Veiled Female Body in Western Visual Culture. A Comparative View (original) (raw)

The Representation of the Female Body in the Feminist Art as the Body Politics

The article presents an overview of the feminist theory on the female body and its representation in the Western culture. Moreover, it examines the examples of feminist works of art that pertain to the female body and issues concerning the woman's experience of her embodiment. It is demonstrated that the contemporary feminist art can be treated as a part of the feminist body politics, that strive for a transgressive understanding of the female body within the Western culture, provides a significant mode of expression of women's corporeal subjectivities and makes the woman not an object, but a meaningful subject and a primary viewer of art.

Redefinition of the Body in Feminist Art (1960s and 1970s)

Bagh- e Nazar, 2017

In the contemporary era, the body has been the focus of attention of different human life aspects and has been one of the issues undergoing serious critical rethinking. In the past few decades, contemporary art has witnessed transformation of artworks revolving around the body. The presence of the body in these works is set predominantly in opposition to the Western aesthetic discourse until the end of modern art period. The feminist art emerging in the late 1960s, through anti-war, civil and feminist movements, is regarded as one of the most important origins of changes in the status of the body in contemporary art. The present research aims to study feminist body art in the 1960s and 70s and examine its theoretical and social context, as one of the major origins of changes in the meaning and status of the body in the contemporary Western art. The assumption of this research is the transformation in the meaning and status of the body in connection with changes in the social configuration and theoretical foundations of feminist artworks, which shows a position in contrast to traditional (and modern) representations of the body in Western art. For this purpose, first the relationship between key concepts and categories, as concurrent theoretical trends, is analyzed based the post-structuralist approach and ideas of feminist theorists. Then, the transformations in the status and presence of the body in the selected feminist artworks as compared to previous eras, are explained and analyzed. This study, which is of qualitative type, has been conducted using descriptive-analytical methodology, and the library method has been utilized to collect data. The findings of the study indicate that the representation of the body in feminist art (in the period in question) has been in contrast with the aesthetic norms of the body dominant in Western art up to the end of modernist art period. In these works, body is depicted as an active, dynamic agency in interaction with the audience and social issues, with an emphasis on the process rather than the end product of art. From this point of view, the most important transformation in the status of the body in the works of feminist artists is the metamorphosis of the status of traditional body from an objectivized and metaphorical image into a self-conscious subject in connection with identity categories.

Redefinition of the Body in Feminist Art (1960s and 1970s) Keyword

The Awareness of the Body: Contemporary Narratives on Feminist Art

This paper considers Nicholas Mirzoeff ́s observations on visual analysis on the contemporary online world and connects it with subjects related to the making of feminine and feminist art in the XXI century. Contemporary art practice in women ́s context is related to matters of visuality and matters of narrative that share points of connection with Mirzoeff ́s theories, being these the points of analytical thinking in this study.

The Feminine Body: The Celebrated and the Censored Skin

This is an historical exploration of identification features of the feminine body. Specifically addressed are body modification markings and imprints on the skin, (e.g. tattooing, branding, scarring). The feminine body described in this paper includes all gender bodies. However, the focus is particular to women’s bodies. It is an explanatory review of aesthetic communal empowering body modification practices juxtaposed with a contrasting review of these practices commodified within power structures intent on measures of profit gain by management, oppression and ownership of the feminine body. It explores a socio-cultural systemic valuation of the physical attributes of the female body in relation to family, spirituality, and romantic relations.

Body of Work: Deploying Feminist Phenomenology in Gender Based Art

takes as its premise distinctive aspects of female embodiment that yield particular ways of being in and perceiving the world, informing subjectivity and identity as well as the creative process and approaches to art-making. This paper is part of an ongoing series of projects which aim to provide a variety of platforms to critically explore the practices and production of women artists who work in a variety of media to re-imagine the body as gendered, sexed, raced or living within specific cultural situations and environments. 1 Feminist theorists and philosophers such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Gayatri Spivak, along with critical race theorists and LGBT theorists, have found embodiment, as it interacts with social and cultural variables, to be central to identity formation: an embodied self embedded within dynamic environments. The formation of embodied subjectivity as constitutive of notions of self, and the persistent interrogation analyzing biological, social and cultural embodiment, are critical concepts informing the art work of the five artists I discuss here. Samira Abbassy, Maria Brito, Kate Gilmore, Julia Kunin, and Anahita Vossoughi imagine, visualize and stage what historically had been the narrative domain of masculinist metaphysics and artistic values. Informed by feminist and postcolonial discourses, these artists create objects and spaces where new social orders and alternative histories can be manifest. Feminist philosophy and phenomenology employ useful methodologies to uncover hidden presuppositions which underlie taken-for-granted notions of human experience, with the aim of offering more comprehensive descriptions of experience. Phenomenology, as articulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone

The Non Binary Body in Western Art and Culture

2020

My proposal is that whilst non-binary bodies have been represented throughout art history, they have usually been created by artists not outside the mainstream but thoroughly within it, therefore operating with the privilege that comes with being an accepted artist – and that those who did challenge the accepted order would see their work criticised, marginalised or erased altogether. This is due to such bodies being variously classified as ‘low culture’, transgressive, or representative of the Other. I view this condition as a manifestation of the dichotomy which cuts across Western political, social and cultural life: namely, the ‘high/low’ opposition rigorously interrogated by Stallybrass & White in The Poetics & Politics of Transgression. For Stallybrass & White, this “high/low opposition...is a fundamental basis to mechanics of ordering...in European cultures”1 in which the low is marginalised and rejected and yet paradoxically remains an essential component of the élite’s construction of itself. Thus, “the ‘top’ attempts to reject...the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover...that the top includes that low symbolically...”2; therefore “what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central (like long hair in the 1960s)3 ” and so becomes problematic when Outsiders attempt to express themselves in the imagery of their own perceived and constructed Otherness 4. Even well into the 20th Century, Piet Mondrian articulated the archaic attitude of the patriarchal heteronormative: “The female and the material...hamper the male tool of spiritual expression. A futurist manifesto’s proclamation of hate of the female is perfectly valid5.” Thus, this topic has very far-reaching consequences. 1 P Stallybrass & A White, The Poetics & Politics of Transgression, Methuen, London, 1986, p. 3 2 Ibid., p. 5 3 Ibid. Or, in the 2010s, the policing of gender-specific toilets, for example. 4 For example, the sort of outrage spewed against 1970s feminist artists (e.g Carolee Schneemann) who used their own naked bodies, menstrual blood, and other ‘taboo’ aspects of their femininity to create work critical of the patriarchal norm. 5 Quoted by M Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, p. 280. Wigley adds, in a summation of Foucault’s historical construction of homosexuality, “The threat posed is not women as such, but the feminine qualities identified with them that can be found within the man” (my italics). Wigley’s expressed irony is that to present masculine spirituality, men must master and employ the feminine zone of control: the surface, the appearance.

Women and abjection: margins of difference, bodies of art

Visual Culture & Gender, 2007

The production and performance of the postmodern subject depends upon constituting and regulating processes of the social. Gender as a constructed category may be contrasted to that of “sex,” with its contested links to a pre-symbolic, inaccessible “naturalness.” To define the parameters of “human” and “subject” is to redline difference, norms constituted on the back of deviance. The abject challenges the power of the social to shape and regulate human bodies. Women artists in the 1990s deployed the abject through choice of form and content to deterritorialize everyday relations to food, bodies, sex, and death. They may have been attempting to destabilize such 1970s art world notions as “women’s work” and a biologically determined sisterhood by propagating the threat of the “hyper-feminine.” These “shouts-outs” from the art market margins may serve to challenge existing norms of visual culture, or they may serve to further marginalize or constrict boundaries between inside and outside, selves and others.

Controlling Women’s Bodies: the Black and Veiled Female Body in Western Visual Culture. A Comparative View (original) (raw)

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