Death and the erotic woman: the European gendering of mortality in times of major religious change

This paper explores the use of European erotic death imagery produced in the Death and the Maiden (D&M) genre in two time periods. It compares and contrasts D&M imagery produced by the Germanic-speaking proto/early-Reformation artists, Hans Baldung (alias Grien) (c1484–1545), Niklaus Manuel (known as Deutsch) (c1484–1530) and Sebald Beham (known as Hans Sebald Beham) (1500–1550) which highlighted the folly, futility and transience of earthly vanities during the transition from Roman Catholic to Protestant Christianity, with contemporary calendar art produced by Cofani Funebri (from 2003) and Lindner (from 2010) which advertise coffins manufactured in the increasingly secular countries of Italy and Poland. Drawing on Biblical narrative, Augustinian theology and European socio-cultural perceptions of gender, this paper argues that these D&M images are highly eroticised and place woman as signifiers of transcient life (vanitas) and earthly pleasure (voluptas), juxtaposing her with a masculine/male representation of death; Death being imaged as an individual in the sixteenth century, and as a coffin in the contemporary works. The paper also contextualises the imagery in terms of traditional European Christian notions of life and death, as informed by the Biblical Fall narrative, with its elucidations of sin, concupiscence and punishment. It thus asserts that both socio-cultural and religious attitudes towards gender are highly significant in D&M imagery and indeed in terms of the artworks, argues that the masculine signifier of Death can be placed as Adam, whilst the Maiden, as fecund life, represents Eve. However, the overt eroticism of both sets of artworks also allows for a reading that draws on Messaris' [(1997). Visual persuasion; the role of images in advertising. London: Sage] notion that visual images ‘make a persuasive communication due to iconicity; the emotional response to the visual image presented’. Thus, this paper contrasts D&M imagery produced over 400 years apart to examine consciously erotic gendered thanantological allegories of women as vanitas and voluptas, and the male/masculine as representations of Death.     

living a body myth,performing a body reality: reclaiming the corporeality and sexuality of the Indian female dancer

This paper investigates the dilemma that has been projected upon Indian female dancers' bodies by contemporary Indian audiences when female desire occupies the centrality of a performance and projects the female body as sexual, articulate and independent of the discipline and propriety of classicism. Locating this dilemma in the nationalist construction of Indian womanhood and femininity as ‘chaste’, this paper adopts Victor Turner's notions of liminal and liminoid phenomenon and Brechtian defamiliarization technique as a feminist strategy to construct a framework within which the contemporary Indian dancer can reclaim her sexuality in performance. To investigate the complex nationalist trope of chaste Indian womanhood, and to analyse the subversion of this trope by placing agency on the female body as sexual, I locate my argument in the discussion of The Silk Route: Memory of a Journey by Kinaetma Theatre, UK, which was performed in Kolkata in August 2004.     

Imagining Mary in Theology and Visual Culture: Between Constraint and Resistance

This contribution focuses on the Virgin Mary’s continued relevance as a polyvalent signifier that straddles the secular-religious divide. Interlacing feminist theology and visual studies, I trace Mary’s ambiguous significance between oppression and liberation, and between religious and secular realms in texts and images. The extended analysis of the contemporary transformation of the traditional motif of the Guadalupe in the digital collage Our Lady (1999) by Chicana artist Alma López shows that contemporary reimaginations of Mary as a self-confident woman at one with her body and sexuality both echo and reinforce tendencies in feminist theology. Combining religious and cultural dimensions, the work and reactions to it uncover the intricate ways in which religion has shaped and continues to shape cultural views of gender, both in terms of consolidating a binary, hierarchical gender order and providing a source of alternative visions.     

Jean Rhys,William Orpen and the Frames of Modernist Representation

The female body as artist’s model and its exchange value—both the woman and her painted image—are deployed by Caribbean modernist Jean Rhys to question representational structures as they exist in the modernist art context. This article considers the relation between literary modernism and the visual arts, between text and image, in her unpublished novel Triple Sec and short story ‘Tea With an Artist’. Using the fleeting relationship between Rhys and English painter Sir William Orpen, for whom she posed nude aged twenty-three, as my basis, I examine Rhys’s presentation of the power politics that constrain the female model in the contemporary art world. Her allusions to artists, models and artworks in her texts widen out to issues of frames and framing, where narratives of framed pictures, or the female model’s body within a picture’s frame, speak of social acts of framing, containment and objectification within modernist representational structures.     

Guys and Dolls

The doll has become a figure for the objectification of women, especially in the form of the sex doll, which is routinely taken to be the image of the woman reduced to a condition of pure passivity. But the doll is also, and perhaps even predominantly, a means of ‘guying’ the putative man (the word ‘guy’ entering English with the burning of Guy Fawkes in effigy) and presenting the simplest possible idea of male desire in comically petrified form. Effigies of women indirectly figure the assumed fixation of male desire throughout post-classical European culture. This guying is a repeated feature of stories of the animation of female dolls and statues, from Ovid onwards, which regularly put male protagonists to a kind of mock death, or death by mockery. The author considers the anonymous poem Adollizing: Or, A Lively Picture of Adoll-Worship (1748) alongside the most celebrated instance of doll fetishism in twentieth-century art history—the doll that Oskar Kokoschka had made of his wife Alma Mahler after she left him. The author concludes with a discussion of the contemporary sexual cult of ‘living dolls’, in which men act out the fantasy not of owning, but being a female doll. Here, perhaps, the doll is not only adored as a substitute for some other real object, but is envied as what it is—that is, as a thing, with a thing's power of declining to be subjected to subjecthood. This passion for passivity suggests that there is something that intervenes between the he and she, with swelling erotic force: the it.     

The Liquefaction of Desire: Music,Water and Femininity in Victorian Aestheticism

This article reconsiders Victorian images of mermaids and sirens through a detailed examination of two images: Frederic Leighton's Lieder ohne Worte (1861, oil on canvas, Tate Britain) and Edward Burne-Jones's The Depths of the Sea (1886, oil on canvas, private collection). It demonstrates that the themes of water, music and femininity were entwined in the Victorian imagination, by setting these two paintings within the context of Victorian artistic, literary and cultural production. It shows that musical images were prevalent in the emerging Aesthetic movement. Musical subjects freed artists and audiences from the conventions of narrative interpretation, and allowed them instead to concentrate on exploring mood and colour.

Pictures of mermaids add a further twist to the Aesthetic preoccupation with music. This article reveals that mermaids made explicit the underlying connection between musical performance and sensuality. It also suggests that the idiosyncratic depiction of the mermaid by Burne-Jones and the ambiguous sexuality of Leighton's figures could be read as symptomatic of changing conceptions of desire. It argues that these images embodied the shift from ardour to libido. In other words, love was no longer described as burning and fixed, but as fluid and shifting. This transformation in the way desire was theorised was most urgently presented in Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality (1905). However, this article suggests that the same ideas were being made visible in Aesthetic art and writing from the mid-nineteenth century.     

Revolutionary Spaces: Photographs of Working-Class Women by Esther Bubley 1940-1943

This article had several purposes. First, I wanted to highlight the work of Esther Bubley, an American photographer whose documentary work for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information in the early 1940s is largely unknown. Second, I wanted to show how her images complicated and undermined the traditional themes of Depression era photography in the United States. Third, by looking at her images of women, my intention was to reveal how she worked against depictions of femininity during the Depression, and in confrontation with one-dimensional portrayals of women as America entered the Second World War. In conclusion, I contend that Bubley's images were fundamentally portrayals of working-class femininity represented as being an individual - rather than a symbolic - experience. Most specifically in the images I have examined, Bubley deconstructs an ideological image of female working-class identity which was central to documentary photography in 1930s America. For example, unlike in photographs by Dorothea Lange, Bubley did not portray working-class women as metaphoric sites of passive endurance which would eventually lead to the rejuvenation of American nationalism. Rather, she showed working-class women to be potentially subversive in the ways they defined themselves against the legacy of 1930s photography and in opposition to the ideological impositions of wartime propaganda. As a result, Bubley's images of working-class women waiting in bars for lonely soldiers, or looking for a future beyond the confines of their boarding house existences while remaining outside the middle-class boundaries defined by capitalist consumerism, set out a pictorial foundation for working-class female identity which exists beyond the context in which the photographs were taken. Consequently, Bubley's work highlights individual self-identity, personal empowerment and self-conscious desire in working-class women which was - and still is - confined and repressed by economic disadvantage and systematic marginalization from an American society defined from a middle-class point of view.     

Carnal teachings: raunch aesthetics as queer feminist pedagogies in Yo! Majesty's hip hop practice

This essay puts forward a notion of “raunch aesthetics,” theorizing raunch as an aesthetic, performative, and vernacular practice: an explicit mode of sexual expression that transgresses norms of privacy and respectability. Raunch aesthetics describe creative practices that often blend humor and sexual explicitness to launch cultural critiques, generate pleasure for minority audiences, and affirm queer lives. The author activates her formulation of raunch in analyzing Yo! Majesty, a hip hop group comprised of black female emcees who openly describe their sexual desire for women, and explores how the queer youth of color she works with have responded to their music. Working beyond the unexamined moralisms that give critiques of raunch culture their legitimacy, the author argues that Yo! Majesty's raunch aesthetics transmit queer and feminist teachings. While celebrating carnal pleasures, these artists critique heterosexism, subvert narratives about the incompatibility of belief in Christ and queer sexualities, and trouble notions concerning the emancipation of coming out of the closet and declaring a stable homosexual identity. In demonstrating how raunch aesthetics generate consciousness raising, the author discusses how her youth participants critically read and consume hip hop while negotiating unwieldy meanings of sexuality and gender presentation.     

Rethinking Constructs of Maternity in the Novels of Elena Ferrante and Alice Sebold

This article explores how Alice Sebold and Elena Ferrante place the feminine—and indeed often the maternal—body at the very centre of their narratives. The body—as a locus that filters the broader tensions and conflicts experienced by their female protagonists—in fact emerges as a key site of ‘contestation’ in their works. Through a close analysis of a selection of ekphrastic images, and photographic metatexts in particular, the author draws attention to how the two authors employ textual negotiations of the feminine body to question and problematize normative conceptions of femininity and motherhood. Ultimately, the author suggests that they not only challenge but also shift the perspective of, or indeed refocalize the dominant visual narrative of, the maternal/feminine body and the long history of objectification of the latter. In so doing, the author situates the two writers at the forefront of rethinking contemporary constructs of maternity and femininity.     

Weird Lullaby Jane Campion's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Piano</Emphasis>

This article examines the construction of woman's voice, gaze and desire in Jane Campion's Oscar-winning film The Piano, 1993, with particular reference to the film's central character, Ada, and to the traditional female figures which her character suggests - siren, mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard's wife. It investigates the ways in which The Piano interrogates and disturbs traditional patriarchal narratives, ways of speaking and seeing, and patriarchal constructions of bodily pleasure and desire; revealing these as partial, hard of hearing, short sighted and incapable of pleasure. It argues that while the film succeeds in this interrogation, it goes further in its attempt to envisage forms of speech, sight and pleasure which do not conform to traditional models based on the notion of rigid oppositions between self and other, masculine and feminine, active and passive. Instead, by focusing on mutual pleasure, sensuality, communication and the ability to be moved, it sets in motion ‘other’ ways of experiencing and understanding women's voices, looks, desires.It concludes that The Piano articulates a demand for an encounter with men, in which women are neither marginalized as ‘the feminine’ nor re-incorporated into a patriarchal order; and imagines the possibility of both autonomy and connection, power and pleasure.     

Soap,pin‐up and burlesque: Commercialization and femininity in Danish television

The article takes a close look at the performance and mise‐en‐scène of some new young Danish television hostesses in relation to commercialization and deregulation of television. It is observed that the female hosts not only incarnate visual pleasure as sexual objects and emotive images, but also personify extravagance and visualize abstract ideas. Thus female hosts are of vital importance in deregulated television, which is based on form and style and the ability to catch the eye. It is further observed that the hostesses perform in a detached and ironic mode. Their various pastiches on female stereotypes and their ambiguous playing with surface identify the new hostesses with the postmodern masquerade of the media. Postmodern television provides a space where some female performers can transcend the norms and turn the conventional image of women inside out.     

BROTHERHOOD

In April 2011 a group of young male Australian Defence Force Academy Cadets conspired to prey upon an unsuspecting female colleague. Their plan was to broadcast one of their mates having consensual sex with an unsuspecting female cadet colleague for their viewing pleasure and fratriarchal bonding. The incident generated a strong and heated public debate about military culture and the ways soldiers behave. But it also marked a long end enduring history of such scandals that have developed into a reputation for the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) as obdurate and resistant to reform. Indeed, the ADF has consistently neutralised their responsibility for such practices by naming bad behaviour as merely the practices of a few bad apples. This paper unpacks the technologies of camouflage that the ADF and its military subjects' use to justify the role and place of militarism in contemporary Australian cultural relations. The paper focuses on the ideal of brotherhood and the way in which the Skype men, and the ADF as an institution, engage in forms of homosociality to naturalise the inherently violent disposition of the military. The practices and forms of fratriarchal bonding are implicated in the desire to generate and sustain a totalising masculinist economy that seeks wholeness and certainty at the expense of difference and otherness. These concerns are explored through the investigation of the sexual predation of six cadets and the manner in which the ADF accounts for its cultural practices.     

Symbols and Meanings in Breast Cancer Awareness Campaigns

This article examines symbols and meanings in breast cancer awareness campaigns, and the ways in which multifarious actors draw attention to the disease. We discuss what the various campaigns and initiatives can indicate, above and beyond creating breast cancer awareness. Our data stem from sources such as printed material, the Internet, and events. From these sources we have singled out and explored objects, text, and visual expressions, looking in particular for metaphors and symbolic aspects. In this article we present six “images” indicating the underlying patterns that we found. We have called the images Re-enchantment of femininity, Infantilization, Corporate profit-making, Objectification, Transgression of boundaries, and Exhibition of deviation. These are further discussed in the light of perspectives drawn from the social sciences and feminist theories. One of the article's key arguments is that breast cancer campaigns, to a great extent, build upon and reinforce traditional, stereotypical gender roles.     

Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion Imagery

This paper is concerned with the different forms of pleasure and identification activated in the consumption of dominant and subcultural print media. It centres on an analysis of the lesbian visual pleasures generated through the reading of fashion editorial in the new lesbian and gay lifestyle magazines. This consideration of the lesbian gaze is contrasted to the lesbian visual pleasures obtained from an against the grain reading of mainstream women's fashion magazines. The development of the lesbian and gay lifestyle magazines, in the context of the pink pound, produces a situation in which an eroticized lesbian visual pleasure is the overt remit of the magazine, rather than a clandestine pleasure obtained through a transgressive reading of dominant cultural imagery. In contrast to the polysemic free-play of fashion fantasy by which readers produce lesbian pleasure in the consumption of mainstream magazines, responses to the fashion content in the lesbian magazine Diva suggest that in a subcultural context readers deploy a realist mode of reading that demands a monosemic positive images iconography. The article uses the concept of subcultural competency to consider the different ways lesbians read mainstream and subcultural print media and suggests that the conflict over Diva's fashion spreads may be linked to changing patterns of identification and the use of dress for recognizability.     

Laughing Medusa: Feminist Intellectuals at the Millennium

The role of the intellectual is traditionally gendered masculine, and women are excluded from consideration. Contemporary discussions of the 'death of the intellectual' noticeably make no reference to feminist intellectuals. On the other hand, women in academia have been reluctant to adopt the role of public intellectual as conventionally defined. There is an anxiety about the contemporary place of the intellectual, and about the necessity for the distinction made by some feminists between theory and practice, the intellectual and the activist, and where this might lead. In exploring the role of feminist intellectuals over the last two centuries, three paradigms of the feminist intellectual are proposed for consideration: Cassandra (the prophetess cursed with disbelief), for example Florence Nightingale; the feminist Messiah (the exceptional female saviour who would sacrifice herself to change women's lives), for whom the exemplar is Margaret Fuller; and the Dark Lady (the token woman in a community of men), such as de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag. Indeed, Camille Paglia's rivalry with Sontag lends itself to being interpreted as evidence of her current desire to occupy this 'dark lady' role. In conclusion, after discussing contemporary, late twentieth-century feminism (Natasha Walter, Elizabeth Wurtzel, gurrl power, 'women behaving badly'), the role of Margaret Thatcher in changing perceptions of women's capacity for political power is proposed for celebration. Finally, there is Cixous's image of the feminist intellectual as the laughing Medusa, who turns men to stone, but turns laughter on herself.     

Catherine Breillat's Romance and Anatomy of Hell: Subjectivity and the Gendering of Sexuality

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has consistently challenged viewers to consider the ways women negotiate sexual freedom in light of numerous forces of repression. This essay considers how Breillat's depiction of women's sexuality in Romance and Anatomy of Hell simultaneously evokes abjection and empowerment. Specifically, we consider Breillat's contrast between her female protagonists and male protagonists, her treatment of women and their bodies as infused with desire yet struggling towards sexual subjectivity, and the avenues available to women to define themselves outside of hegemonic masculinity. We argue that Breillat's provocative portrayals provoke consideration of the problems inherent in hegemonic female sexuality while also offering hopeful alternatives to sexual expression, sexual freedom, and changing definitions of power and pleasure.     

Sonia Delaunay: Fashioning the Modern Woman

Focusing on questions of gender and modernity, Gronberg examines representations of Simultaneous fashions designed by the Paris-based artist Sonia Delaunay in the German illustrated press of the 1920s. Simultaneous dress was presented as a means of rendering woman 'modern' both through fashion and through association with Parisian artistic avant-gardism. Gronberg explores the figure of the fashionably dressed Parisian femme moderne in relation to 1920s concepts of the neue Frau. The identity of Sonia Delaunay as an artist turned professional designer marked her out as a 'modern woman' and was crucial in the promotion of Simultaneity to international audiences. Delaunay's persona as a 'modern woman' also related to her status as a wife. The German press depicted Sonia Delaunay and her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay, as a Knstlerehepaar, an artist-couple exemplifying contemporary notions of 'companionate marriage'. Gronberg shows how such concepts of the modern woman were important not only in marketing Sonia Delaunay's fashions but also in claims for Robert Delaunay's post-war painting as a renewed form of avant-gardism. The essay concludes by considering Paris as a milieu in which women interacted with each other professionally-as writers, artists and photographers-engaging with and reformulating the visual imagery of modernity. The production, promotion and consumption of Simultaneous fashion during the 1920s reveals the 'modern woman' as both subject and object of representation. A preoccupation with fashion could be as much to do with challenging and overcoming, as with acquiescing to, stereotypes of femininity.     

Gender,body, and feminine performance: Edna St.Vincent Millay's impact on Anne Sexton

This paper will discuss Edna Millay's influence on Anne Sexton, with particular reference to issues such as gender politics, femininity, performativity, and the female body. Through close comparative readings of some of the two women's most representative poems, I analyze, firstly, how Millay's outspokenness and daring self-presentation as a woman writer facilitated Sexton's handling of material that was previously considered unacceptable for poetry and, secondly, how Sexton expanded the scope of women's writing in a manner that paid tribute to the earlier poet's innovation. My paper maintains that Millay's repeated attempts to explore gender and interrogate the concept of ‘authentic’ femininity anticipated Sexton's overtly feminist works. Ultimately, I am arguing that, despite the literary climate of the 1960s (which urged the rejection of poets like Millay) and despite her own ambiguous feelings for the earlier poet, Sexton eventually recovered Millay as an important literary predecessor for her generation, consistently imitated her artistic posturing, performance strategies, and self-presentation, and finally acknowledged her unique contribution to women's writing.     

Picture perfect: nostalgic femininity and temporal disruptions in the Aqualillies’ water ballets

This article examines nostalgic femininity in the aquatic performances of present-day synchronized swimming performance troupe, the Aqualillies. In spite of their fervent emulation of the iconic images of Golden Age Hollywood's splashiest star, Esther Williams, the Aqualillies’ performances refuse to be only a kitschy nod to the past through the addition of marketable symbols of modern femininity, such as the bikini, to their otherwise nostalgic representation. Through a concurrent multiplicity of temporally diverse femininities, they challenge the neoliberal rhetoric of choice that can arise in reperformance. This article invokes Svetlana Boym's theory of reflective nostalgia ­– an emotional connection to the past that does not foreclose critical reflection – to argue that the Aqualillies’ water ballets use performative temporal vacillation to expose the physical and psychical labor in the picture-perfect images of femininity in order to subvert the image's dominance and to defy capital's linear organization of time.     

You can visit Hotel Mommy: maternal bodies as browsing/consuming biotourists

The technologically charged public domain of cyber(cultural)space, often constructed in opposition to women, femininity, and maternity, can also be a contested scholarly space with the potential to question dominant discourses of gender, race, class, sexuality, and maternity. The cyber-realm has also interconnections to webs of commercialism and the commodification of female and maternal bodies. In order to investigate this topic's interconnections in this paper, I turn to an examination of cybermaternity in the commercial maternity web pages of the Internet. In summary, I argue that mainstream and commercialized maternity websites are domains of paradox, with the possibility of overturning the previously mentioned dominant discourses even as they are saturated in commerce, desire to render maternal bodies completely knowable and conventional tropes of maternity. To further this investigation, I turn to Kim Sawchuk's theory of biotourism to examine discourses of medico-technology and the desire to observe the inner workings of the pregnant body. I argue that this biotouristic desire is enabled by the immediacy of the websites and delivered in the jocular tone of mainstream maternity magazines. In order to further examine possible manifestations of biotourism, I also make use of Jay David Bolter's and Richard Grusin's concept of remediation: the tendency of particular media to represent and refashion other media in response to general Western cultural desires for immediacy.