The female body as spectacle in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western art

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:A spectacle denotes an impressive or deplorable sight, and necessarily involves thepower and politics of viewing. The female body exists as a sexualised object of theseprocesses of looking within Western culture, not only in high art, but also indiscourses such as medicine and science. In both art and medicine the female bodyhas been treated as a passive object to be studied, analysed and classified. Powerrelations and patriarchal ideologies have played a great part in the resultingobjectifying representations, firmly locating images of the female body within therealm of the spectacle.Bodily perceptions, in terms of the female body, have changed much, particularlythrough the reinterpretation of sexuality through feminist theory. Modem culture andtechnology have opened up many new possibilities for the redefinition andunderstanding of the body. Modem bodies seem to be under as much closesurveillance and scrutiny as their nineteenth century counterparts. This study exploresthese ideas through a wide range of examples from painting, photography andperformance art, and non-art objects such as anatomical objects and medicalillustrations.Central to the construction of the body as spectacle, are issues of looking and viewing.Chapter 1 examines ideas around the gaze; the politics and processes of vision,objectification and fetishisation are explored in relation to the functioning of themedical and aesthetic gaze. The concept of spectacle is also elaborated upon in termsof ideas around the nineteenth century carnival and freak show, and in terms ofsocietal taboos and transgression.Aspects of aesthetic and medical discourse focus on the display and scrutiny of thefemale body. Chapter 2 examines the way in which these discourses attempted toreveal the female body by rendering it in highly visual terms. The dominantideologies informing both discourses played an instrumental role and resulted inrepresentations that defined the female body in normative standards and ideals ofbeauty and health. Pornography is considered as a modem discourse in which thefemale body is defined and displayed as an object of scrutiny. Feminist theorychallenged exclusively male representations of the female body and the subversion oftraditional forms of representation of women is studied by examining the work ofAnnie Sprinkle and Cindy Sherman.Many representations of the female body by feminist artists are considered highlydisturbing and transgressive, precisely because they traverse traditional andacceptable representations of it. The idealised nude forms the epitome of containedideals of health and beauty, and the work of Orlan and Cindy Sherman is examinedwithin these terms in Chapter 3. These artists' representations of the female body arein direct opposition to such norms, rather settling for an open-ended, unconfined andabject representation. However, such transgressive cultural images produced bywomen artists are often regarded as pathological acts, and dismissed in terms ofdeplorable spectacle.The research concludes with a commentary on the candidate's practical work, whichin dealing with the representation of the human body explores some issues ofvisuality, spectacle and fragmentation.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University