Showing posts tagged culture

(Sorry I couldn’t find bigger photos, click them to make them bigger though)

Rebecca Belmore, Vigil, 2002 (stills from a video of the performance)

Mourning/remembrance/healing performance.

This was a direct reference to the Pickton murders (murders of Indiginous women in Vancouver), which made it a public ritual with political end. The features of the performance were: scrubbing the streets, her arms covered with names of missing women, ripping a flower through her teeth, nailing her dress to a telephone pole and tearing out of it until she was left in her underwear (as recreation of dehumanization process and sexual violence inflicted upon them), and spoke the women’s names.

Her performance brought the women alive again and simultaneously, addressed the invisibility of their absence (they were not given enough priority in the media and in police investigative efforts because of their low status in society as Indigenous women and as sex workers). 

Hello Tumblr Feminist Community! (Please reblog)

I have a proposition for you all!

I am a Women’s Studies student at McGill university in my last semester. I’m taking a course called “Feminist Periodical Culture” (think feminist zines and magazines) this semester and I need your help!

An option for our final project is to create our own zine so what I was thinking is to create a feminist tumblr zine. 

I have loved the feminist tumblr community ever since I got tumblr and I think it would be interesting to go from digital to print media instead of the other way around. Submissions can be anything: text, drawings, original images, poetry, etc. Obviously everyone will be fully credited and I’ll send a copy of the zine to you for free in the mail. =)

I’m not sure yet when I will stop accepting submissions, but it will be far away from now because the project isn’t due until the end of the semester.

If you have any questions or submissions either message me on tumblr or e-mail them to tumblrfemzine@gmail.com

THANK YOOOOU!

(As always, click the images)

Renee Cox and Lyle Ashton Harris, Hottentot Venus 2000, from the series The Good Life, 1994

This photograph is a reference to the “Hottentot Venus” from the 19th century (the image below). The image below was a caricature of Sarah Baartman, a woman from South Africa who was one of the most famous colonial exhibits (It makes me shudder to speak about someone in those terms - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Baartman ). During the 19th century, colonized peoples were brought to Europe and put on display in museums and theatres. These people were meant to serve as educational exhibits for cross-cultural examination, when in reality they just served to justify a racial hierarchy. The people put on display were divorced from their contexts and staged in a certain way; their “otherness” was put on as a performance, they were people exaggerated. 

The Hottentot Venus in particular displayed cultural differences and “otherness” on the body itself. In the 19th century, black women were seen by Europeans as hypersexualized (and the next century saw them asexualized in the Mammy figure). This hypersexualized vision fit the jezebel stereotype, an insatiable sexual appetite. 

The piece by Cox and Ashton Harris shows that her so-called hypersexualized parts are staged, and you see her own body beneath the fake body parts. But at the same time, it recalls that her body is always seen as working in this set of representations and cultural stereotypes than came before. Even today, negotiating the colonialist history and discourse is needed; we have a superficial way of integrating diversity.

(Click on images to make them bigger)

Julie Rrap, Persona and Shadow, 1984

I apologize in advance everyone. This is going to be a long one, but I think the entire quote is very interesting. (Yes, I’m not writing this one because I’m never as eloquent as this. Haha.) 

“Postmodern approaches readily integrate feminist strategies through the critique of patterns of authority, power relationships and hierarchies; the shift in thinking about meaning and representation as multiple rather than binary; the notion of an ideal body deconstructed and represented as fragmented and constructed; and the impact of visual culture on the construction of gender and identity. The dominant gaze in postmodern theory is understood to be that of a white, heterosexual male, and is therefore often challenged by feminist, queer and postcolonial perspectives. Rrap’s work can be approached from the angles of feminist and postmodern ideas, but these are not exclusive readings, and the artist does not necessarily make her works with these theories in mind. When the artist photographs herself naked, in works such as Persona and Shadow, the line between her private and public selves is blurred. The roles of author/spectator/voyeur/subject are confused in pieces like Disclosures [which I didn’t put here], in which Rrap is both photographer and model, and the audience becomes both the viewer and the person looking through the camera. This is a strategy oftenused in feminist and postmodern criticism and artistic practice. Rrap explores these tensions repeatedly in her work by using herself as the subject.  

Recently Rrap commented that when making Persona and Shadow in 1984, ‘One has to realise that at that point [feminism] had hardly been spoken about – not in this country [Australia], not in relation to the visual arts. But we’re speaking as if I was conscious of all this at the time, and I wasn’t. It was synchronicity—there are moments when things happen together and complement and enhance one another. “ http://www.mca.com.au/general/JULIERRAP_EDUCATIONKIT.pdf

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Pink, 1973 I keep on going back and forth between origins of feminist art and more contemporary stuff. Heh. She did this for an American Institute of Graphic Arts exhibition about colour. Hers was the only entry for the colour pink. So basically de Bretteville handed out pieces of pink paper to friends and to women on the street, asking them to describe what the colour meant to them. As you can guess, the colour was associated with stereotypical depictions of “femininity”. This has implications for art and graphic design that incorporates the colour pink for advertisement towards aimed audiences. She arranged women’s answers in a quilt-like manner. Many feminist artists in the ’70s incorporated traditional devalued women’s art such as knitting and quilting into their work to shake up the divide between “high” art and “low” art, as well as to display the value of this type of art.  

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Pink, 1973

I keep on going back and forth between origins of feminist art and more contemporary stuff. Heh.

She did this for an American Institute of Graphic Arts exhibition about colour. Hers was the only entry for the colour pink. So basically de Bretteville handed out pieces of pink paper to friends and to women on the street, asking them to describe what the colour meant to them. As you can guess, the colour was associated with stereotypical depictions of “femininity”. This has implications for art and graphic design that incorporates the colour pink for advertisement towards aimed audiences. She arranged women’s answers in a quilt-like manner. Many feminist artists in the ’70s incorporated traditional devalued women’s art such as knitting and quilting into their work to shake up the divide between “high” art and “low” art, as well as to display the value of this type of art.  


Louise Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 1993 “Stemming from her interest in the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of pain and fear, Bourgeois was drawn to the arch of hysteria as theorized and represented by the nineteenth-century neurologist Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893). While working at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Charcot sought to represent hysteria by documenting the performances of his female patients. The physical tension of the hysterical arch - an intense muscular contraction, resulting in immobility and paralysis of the limbs - is emblematic of an equally extreme emotional state. Bourgeois makes this highly vulnerable position even more so by suspending her male figure from the ceiling. In choosing to represent him in an attitude traditionally associated with the female, the artist transgresses the social and sexual roles assigned to women, challenging the misconception of hysteria as a female malady.” http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=100798 View high resolution

Louise Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 1993

“Stemming from her interest in the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of pain and fear, Bourgeois was drawn to the arch of hysteria as theorized and represented by the nineteenth-century neurologist Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893). While working at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Charcot sought to represent hysteria by documenting the performances of his female patients. The physical tension of the hysterical arch - an intense muscular contraction, resulting in immobility and paralysis of the limbs - is emblematic of an equally extreme emotional state. Bourgeois makes this highly vulnerable position even more so by suspending her male figure from the ceiling. In choosing to represent him in an attitude traditionally associated with the female, the artist transgresses the social and sexual roles assigned to women, challenging the misconception of hysteria as a female malady.” http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=100798