The Body
Theories of the body are particularly important for
feminists because the female body has historically been denigrated as weak,
immoral, unclean, or decaying.
In her essay "Women's Time" in New
Maladies of the Soul,
originally published in 1979, Kristeva argues that there are three phases of feminism.
She rejects the first phase because it "seeks universal
equality and overlooks sexual differences. Kristeva also rejects what she sees as the second phase of
feminism because it seeks a uniquely feminine language, which she thinks is
impossible. Kristeva does not agree with
feminists who maintain that language and culture are essentially patriarchal
and must somehow be abandoned.
On the contrary, Kristeva insists that culture and language are the domain of
speaking beings and women are primarily speaking beings. Kristeva endorses what she
identifies as the third phase of feminism which seeks to reconceive of identity and
difference and their relationship. This current phase of feminism refuses to
choose identity over difference or visa versa
Kristeva proposes that there are as many sexualities as there
are individuals. Especially in the contemporary culture of a fluid gender identity this seems prescient.
It is generally accepted in feminist theory that the male gaze presents women from a masculine and heterosexual point of view, representing women merely as objects
of male pleasure
As the art historian John Berger said, women in painting don’t usually look out at the viewer: they aren’t considering the viewer, but considering how the viewer sees them. They have an inward gaze, rather than an outward gaze.
Professor Andrew Lear MOMA
The term male gaze was coined in 1975 by the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in her essay1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. , .[The male gaze is comparable to scopophilia. Women are depicted in the passive role of the observed
:Her feelings, thoughts and her own sexual drives are less important than her being “framed” by male desire
Visual media that respond to masculine voyeurism tends to sexualise women for a male viewer. As Mulvey wrote, women are characterised by their “to-be-looked-at-ness” in cinema. Woman is “spectacle”, and man is “the bearer of the look”.
I have been exploring this concept by placing my roughly stitched and patched life size female figure in the poses of past paintings by famous artists thus taking the place of the idealised, romantic, available, woman depicted
I added a crocheted incubus to the Fuseli intending that the use of "Female Crafts" would subvert the male gaze.
I
Those who have seen the pose have still found it disturbing, I assume this is partly because the patriarchal culture that persists still holds the power to remind women of their vulnerability even by a cuddly toy
The print of Fuseli's painting The Nightmare sold by the thousands in the eighteenth century
