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

Authors

  • Dubravka Đurić Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i28.579

Keywords:

medicine; feminism; feminist art; sick body; beauty; visual representation; difference; Otherness.

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.

Author Biography

Dubravka Đurić, Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia

Dubravka Đurić graduated and earned her master’s degree from The Department of General Literature and Literary Theory of the Belgrade Faculty of Philology. She earned her PhD from the Department of English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad. She is a Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, where she teaches several courses on media studies and popular culture, as well as a course on experimental literature. From 2015 onward she has served as president of the Serbian Association for Anglo-American Studies. With Miško Šuvaković she co-edited the book Impossible Histories: Avant-Garde, Neo-avant-garde and Post-Avant-Garde in Yugoslavia 1918–1991, 2003. With Biljana D. Obradović she co-edited Cat Painters: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry, 2016. She was co-founding co-editor of ProFemina: magazine for women’s literature and culture (1995–2011). She writes poetry and translates American poetry, with a focus on language poetry. She works in the area of comparative post-Yugoslav poetries.

References

Alfano Miglietti, Francesca. Extreme Bodies: The Use and Abuse of the Body in Art. Milan: Skira, 2003.

Baldwin, Elain et al., Introducing Cultural Studies. Peking: Peking University Press, 2004.

Brodzinski, Emma. “Performance Anxiety: The Relationship between Social and Aesthetic Drama in Medicine and Health.” In Medicine, Health and the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities, edited by Victoria Bates, Alan Bleakley, and Sam Goodman, 165–185. London: Routledge, 2014.

Brook, Barbara. Feminist Perspectives on the Body. London: Routlegde, 1999.

Budgeon, Shelley. Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Gender in Late Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230319875

Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Selpêtrière, translated by Alisa Hartz. London: The MIT Press, 2003.

Dubrinwny, Tasha N. The Vulnerable Empowered Woman: Feminism, Postfeminism, and Women’s Health. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Đurić, Dubravka. “Feministička avangarda i feminisansa u američkoj poeziji i vizuelnim umetnostima [Feminist avant-garde and feminism in American poetry and visual arts].” Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU 69, 2 (2021): 275–287. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2298/GEI2102275D

Fahrenholz, Matt. “Katarzyna Kozyra: Sculptor, Installation and Video Artist in Poland’s ‘Critical Art’ Movement.” The First News, May 19, 2018. https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/katarzyna-kozyra-sculptor-installation-and-video-artist-in-polands-critical-art-movementhttps://www.thefirstnews.com/article/katarzyna-kozyra-sculptor-installation-and-video-artist-in-polands-critical-art-movement. Accessed on June 11, 2023.

Frueh, Joanna. “Hannah Wilke: The Assertion of Erotic Will” [1993]. In Art and Feminism, edited by Helena Reckitt, survey by Peggy Phelan, 267–268. New York: Phaidon Press, 2001.

Garb, Tamar. “Gender and Representation,” in Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Francis Frascina et al., 219–289. London: Yale University Press and Open University, 1993.

Hall, Kim Q. “Reimagining Disability and Gender through Feminist Disability Studies; An Introduction.” In Feminist Disability Studies, edited by Kim Q. Hall, 1–10. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

Kozyra, Katarzyna, Maryla Sitkowska, Hanna Wróblewska. Casting. Katarzyna Kozyra. Warsaw: Zachęta National Gallery of Art, 2010.

Lippard, Lucy R. From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art. New York: A Dutton Paperbook, 1976.

Löffer, Petra. “’I-object’.” In Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century, edited by Uta Grosenick, 554–559. Köln: Tachen.

Pilcher, Jane and Imelda Whelehan. 50 Key Concept in Gender Studies. London: SAGE Publications, 2004. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446278901

Schor, Gabriele. “The Feminist Avant-Garde: A radical Revaluation of Values.” In The Feminist Avant-Garde: Art of the 1970s The Sammlung Verbund Collection Vienna, edited by Gabriele Schor, 17–71 Munich: Prestel, 2016.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: Now Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: HarperCollins e-book, 2002 [1991].

Downloads

Published

15.10.2023

How to Cite

Đurić, D. (2023). Gender Critique of The Scientific and Medical Construction of the Female Body in Women’s Artworks. AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, (32), 29–40. https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i28.579