I’ve been looking into how women are portrayed through photography recently especially through the works of photographers and artists such as Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke, Francesca woodman as well as reading and making notes on a few essays by Joan Riviere, Eva Russ, Alice Kaufman and Rosalind Krauss among others.
What interests me is the marked difference between how women are portrayed. The female body versus female identity which are two very different things, but more on that later.
What I hope to achieve is the masquerade of the woman/feminine. Reading the unit guide it thankfully doesn’t state that self means my actual self for personal reasons I don’t particularly wish to delve into my own psyche but I am quite happy to go into traits and characteristics and other things that I share with others. So I hope to achieve the meaning of the masquerade and collective self as a woman.
Recent national and international events that I read, watch or listen to have encouraged me in this endeavour specifically the capture of 12 British soldiers by Iran, one of whom is female. A lot has been made about the fact that she is a woman and a mother – should she really be going into war the media screams? The soldier – Faye Turney, has gone into a ‘man’s world’ against the usual characteristics of female identity. This woman doesn’t adhere to the usual characteristic of feminine ideal.
So what is feminine identity?
In Alice Kaufman’s essay, traditionally women in paintings and sculpture are seen as a passive object, the receiver of a male gaze. Women are there to be seen by men, their identity is formed through a male subconscious.
Modern artists attempt anti objectification through their work by displaying women as masculine, disrupting the female body (subversion of the gaze?) or alternatively man is made feminine. Masculinity is thus not ‘sexed’ but gendered in an androgynous way, prescribed to neither sex.
