Ruth D. Post 6

Ruth E. Day

What role does gender play in art? This is the question that Brand and Devereaux endeavor to answer. “Virtually all feminist interpretive strategies give rise to the philosophical question of whether and how the gender of artists – as well as their other socially marked identities - are to count as properties of works of art and to be recognized as aesthetically relevant,” (Brand, 16). They have two general theories that answer this question. The first is that most art takes on a male “gaze”. Most art is seen through the male point of view and when viewing art, women generally take on a male perspective. The perspective does not stop at art; it applies to the rest of the world as well. “Both men and women have learned to see the world through male eyes,” (122). Feminists see this as very sad because it as though women have buried their own perspectives and personalities so as to take on those of the dominant male. The male gaze saw women as either sexual objects or as mothers. Here are two examples of paintings that come from the beginning of the 1900s and the end of the 1800s women as seen from the male gaze:

The first painting, by Mary Cassat, is an example of a female painter taking on a male gaze. This painting shows a woman in her “natural place” as the male gaze would see it. A woman viewing this painting may take on the male gaze herself and believe that her purpose in life is to get married, have kids, and sit passively at home doing household tasks such as sewing while her husband goes to work and support her and the family. The second painting shows woman in a totally different light. It is titled “Madame X”, which suggests that the woman in the painting is a prostitute. Her face is turned away, because the viewer supposed to be paying attention to her body. Yes, it is a beautiful depiction of the female form but it implies that women should only be valued as the objects of men’s desires. Both of these images are degrading to women because they undermine women’s ability to be more than just mothers and sexual objects. These paintings also exemplify the two separate categories women were put into during this time in history. A woman was either a “good girl” or a “bad girl”. “The good girl was the dutiful daughter who preserved herself (that is, her virginity) for the right man ‘to take’ from her. The bad girl, in contrast, flaunts her sexuality indiscriminately, ‘losing’ her virginity or ‘giving it away’,”(Devereaux, 128). Such a division of women into one group or another is degrading and has developed by the vast majority of people being conditioned into seeing things through the male gaze. The solution to this way of thinking, according to Devereaux, is to create a female gaze. “This strategy is most often described as creating a female voice of female gaze. It allows women to write their own texts, their own history,” (Devereaux, 138).

The second theory put forth by Brand and Devereaux is that art created from the newly established female gaze tends to link art to the sexual politics whereas art from the male gaze tends to steer away from that area. “What is original to feminism is the linkage of art with sexual politics,” (Devereaux, 124). Art from the male perspective is more concerned with tradition and other areas of politics. Feminist art is out to make a statement about what it is to be a woman and contradict the misconceptions about the female role in the world as created by the male gaze. Below are some examples of art from this new female perspective.

These images were all created by feminist artists during the 1960s and 70s. A lot of the feminist art seems erotic and a little contradictory. Isn’t the whole point of feminist art to end the display of women as erotic objects? The answer to this question is yes. The first image is a photograph of the artist covered in chewing gum that she has molded into the form of female genitalia. The point of the photograph is that the artist no longer wants to be defined by her sexuality. She wants her existence to mean more than that. That is why the abbreviation “SOS” is an important part of the title of this piece. The second image, by Georgia O’Keefe, is a more abstract piece. O’Keefe was best known for her paintings of extreme close ups of beautiful flowers. Most of the time, these paintings resembled female genitalia. They weren’t meant to be sexual. Instead, they were meant to express the beauty of the female body as something very natural. Male genitalia had been shown in this light many times before (note the number of times phallic symbols have been used throughout history to represent power and fertility) but now that females were expressing the natural beauty of their anatomy it was considered overtly sexual and erotic by man viewers. For this reason, feminist art was frowned up and was not widely accepted as art until the early 90s. The last image, by Miriam Shapiro, is a collage of images associated with the traditional role of women. The female form in the center of the image is wearing an apron and seems ready for a change. She is held back by these traditional ideas of the female gender and is ready to create her own path.

Feminist art is meant to reestablish the role of women. It challenges tradition and calls for a change in how women are depicted in art. They stress that traditional art is not for everyone. It is created by men and women who see every thing through a male gaze. It is time for females to create their own gaze and see things through their own eyes. “They [feminists] replace reverence for art with skepticism. They ask that we be willing to rethink what we value and the reasons we value it,” (Devereaux 137). Feminists create an alternate way of looking at art that they call the female gaze and add an aspect of sexual politics to art.