Gender Critique of The Scientific and Medical Construction of the Female Body in Women’s Artworks

Abstract

In this paper I will develop a gender critique of scientific and medical idealizations of the human body and its health, which was performed out of gender and feminist studies, pointing also to women’s art. In the discourses of medicine, healthy and beautiful human – and especially the female human – body is revealed as an ideological construction, an affective agent and a biopolitical ideal that controls and regulates gender differences. My intention is to demonstrate that the discourses of medicine, feminism, and art are in a dialogue historically in relation to these topics. Following Tasha N. Dubriwny’s discussion of medical discourse and practice, I will map three phases in the development of Western medical discourses and point to the fact that they are in dialogue with feminist discourses and with the way how art treats and represents beautiful bodies, and/or sick bodies, with particular focus on female bodies. Discussion of the first phase of medical development points to the fact that visual art and photography were used to performatively help doctors to construct the female body as sick and deviant, as Didi Huberman showed. The second phase was the medicalization era, in which human bodies are expected to adhere to a standardized norm. In this period, within the framework of second wave feminism, feminist health activists appeared, forming the women's movement for health. Special attention will be directed to the third phase, the biomedicalization era or inclusion-and-difference paradigm, in which postfeminist discourses appeared and in relation to which I will discuss artworks by Hannah Wilke, Katarzyna Kozyra, and Orlan.