Preview

Lesbianism, Feminism and Identity in Art

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
3850 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Lesbianism, Feminism and Identity in Art
Lesbianism, Feminism and Identity in Art

CS3 - 2009/10
Kayley Healy

Contents Page
Introduction
Chapter 1 – Robert Mapplethorpe (Self Portraits)
Chapter 2 – Marcel Duchamp
Chapter 3 – The Guerrilla Girls
Chapter 4 – Lesbianism
What is Lesbianism?
History of Lesbianism
Lesbian Identity
Chapter 5 – Lesbianism and Gender in Art.
Dyke Action Machine
Toxic Titties
Jocelyn Schneider Foye (Gender Identification Cards)
Stacey Halper (Drag Kings)
Conclusion
Illustrations

Introduction
The subjects I have chosen to talk about are lesbianism, feminism and identity in art. I have found some artists as well as some activists very interesting and find that my work has similar ideas and thoughts behind them.
I am going to talk about artists who use lesbianism, feminism and identity in their work. I will talk about Robert Mapplethorpe who uses identity as a theme for his work and was one of the first artists to make work that was exactly about his alternative sexuality. I will also briefly talk about Marcel Duchamp. I will talk about The Guerrilla Girls who are feminists; here I will also talk about ‘Itty Bitty Titty Committee’ (a film inspired by The Guerrilla Girls). I am also going to talk about ‘Dyke Action Machine’ (DAM!) who are a lesbian activist art group and I will also talk about ‘Toxic Titties’. In my conclusion I will say how this kind of art is still important, because although attitudes change prejudices still remain.

Robert Mapplethorpe
In this chapter I shall write about the self-portrait, the idea of truth and the idea of role-playing as a way to disguise the truth to come up with something artificial – which all art is anyway.
The main focus in this chapter will be the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and my theme will be transgender and the sado masochistic elements in his self-portraits.
Robert Mapplethorpe worked in the New York of the 1970s and 1980s and the art scene the and there had

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    While the theories on the artist intent are of plenty, there is no mistaking that this piece provokes deeper contemplation on the depiction of beauty and the power of “ugly” imagery in this painting. One can argue that over vast time periods and amongst culture the defined interpretation of beauty has seen many profound depictions and interpretations displayed in infinite works of “beautiful” art. We must ask ourselves, can only works of “beauty” be aesthetically pleasing to the eye or can we find it in a variety of work through…

    • 627 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Robert Heinecken was an American artist whose art ranged from the 1960s to the 1990s. His work focused around this idea of picking apart the American society, revealing it’s imperfections and faults. As a result, his pieces always faced controversy. Many claimed his artwork was pornography, due to the large number of pieces he produced featuring nudity and sexual themes. Heinecken’s work was meant to be more than pornography, it was meant to reveal the true faults of American society.…

    • 670 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Danto begins “The Artworld” by going after Socrates’ and Plato’s view of art as imitation or a mirror. He calls this the “Imitation Theory” or “IT”. If this were accurate then any image reflected in a mirror would also be considered an artwork. Although, many artists during Socrates’ and Plato’s time and later tried to imitate nature into their art. The advancements of photography ultimately ended this as an artform and proved the Imitation Theory to be false.…

    • 875 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Art Quiz 1

    • 875 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The author suggest that we ask ourselves: “What is the purpose of this work of art (and what is the purpose of art in general)? What does it mean? What is my reaction to the work and why do I feel this way? How do the formal qualities of the work-such as color, its organization, its size and scale-affect my reaction? What do I value in works of art?”…

    • 875 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    2 Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. (London:Routledge, 1988), 172.…

    • 1369 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Gordon Bennett

    • 1352 Words
    • 4 Pages

    “When the artist is alive in any person... he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for better understanding and seeing.” Robert Henri, an American painter and teacher, expresses this statement in his book, ‘The Art Spirit’ (1939). He provides us with a subjective context that requires thoughtful reflection. In his statement, the person does not have to be a painter or sculptor to be an artist; they look beyond this simplicity and embrace the creature inside by becoming inventive, searching, daring and self-expressing in the way they use media. Viewers are lured towards their works and their attention is captured. Gordon Bennett, an Australian Aboriginal artist, demonstrates this theory through his work. Possession Island (Appendix 1), 1991 and Notes to Basquiat (Jackson Pollock and his Other) (Appendix 2), 2001, will be discussed in relation to Henri’s statement.…

    • 1352 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Society by default places people into categories. The most prominent example of this is the gender binary, where each person is labeled and judged based on where they fall within that binary. Male versus female, one side is already at a disadvantage. Described in the films The Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture and Miss Representation, women face many obstacles in today’s society, such as objectification and scrutinization. Media illustrates and reinforces these issues by portraying women as subordinate sexual objects for a man’s pleasure. Codes of gender breaks down the methods in which photography portrays the subordinate female. In Miss Representation, we see the analysis of the hypersexualized objectified female.…

    • 1734 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    This is a divisive strategy that aims to produce a consumable queer, fit for a mainstream audience. Subsequently, this strategy risks straight culture subsuming both lesbians and the queer community (Moody 2011). To subsume lesbian and queer culture would erode the common political identity that allows for community organization against heterosexism. Like bell hooks (1992) contends, “Communities of resistance are replaced by communities of consumption” (33). Effectively, the apolitical representation of lesbianism obliterates the movement’s historical allegiance to working class culture, butches, interracial socializing and feminism (Moody 2011). Both productions exemplify this shift from queer sexuality to homonomative-domestic lesbian, although The Kids Are All Right epitomizes this because it fails to acknowledge the oppressive culture and diverse identities. Homonormative representations normalized the broader lesbian community and foster…

    • 720 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Cindy Sherman

    • 481 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Cindy Sherman was one of the well known and most respected photographers in the late twentieth century. Rather than doing self portraits for her photographs, Sherman depicted herself in the roles of B- movie actresses. On one level, Sherman’s work appears to be subversively linked to ‘low’ art characterized by ‘b-grade’ film and photography, on another level, her work is regarded as the modernist ideal of the ‘high' art object. Sherman has raised challenging and important questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art. Sherman has been acclaimed as the subversive feminist that has boldly confronted issues concerning the female body. Even though some critics look at Cindy’s works as demining the women and exposing the women into low standards through her photographs, Cindy had a strong message for the viewers. In 1992 Sherman embarked on a series of photographs now referred to as "Sex Pictures." Sherman is not in any of these photographs for the first time in her career as an artist, yet she uses dolls and prosthetic body parts posed in highly sexual poses. She chose to often photograph up close and in color both female and male body parts which were purposely meant to shock the viewers. Sherman continued to work on these photographs for some time and continued to experiment with the use of dolls and other replacements for what had previously been herself. Critiques imply that the viewer is guilty for the negative readings of Sherman’s images. In a way Sherman’s constructed image of woman is innocent, and the way we interpret it is based on our social and cultural knowledge. Referring to the reaction of a gallery visitor who criticized Sherman for presenting women as sex objects, I would say that the visitor’s anger comes from a sense of his own involvement because the images speak not only to him but from him. Critiques depicted Sherman as a whore for producing such photographs but…

    • 481 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The women in these paintings were treated and/or portrayed as objects, and this view still exists today. It is an unequal relationship that in Berger’s words, “still structures the consciousness of many women.” The insecurities women feel in a large part comes from the way they have been…

    • 390 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Monique Wittig’s works, The Lesbian Body (1975) and “One is Not Born a Woman” (1980), might seem similar to Cixous’s, in that she engages in a political project designed to create a non-phallogocentric discourse, but she turns to “lesbianization” rather than bisexuality. She posits an opposing model to the heterosexual mode of language that transcends the categories of sex and gender, and she calls it the “lesbianization of language”. She claims that, saying, “lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex” (20). For her, the ‘lesbianized language’ serves both men and women to engage in the same space. Expectedly, Bernard Shaw also uses the ‘lesbianized language’ as a tool to enable his females to break free…

    • 267 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The article I chose from the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) was written by Laura M. Pelton-Sweet and Alissa Sherry, titled, “Coming Out Through Art: A Review of Art Therapy With LGBT Clients.” They found that the potential between LGBT clients and the use of creative art interventions is an area that deserves more research. It states that AATA does not publish guidelines for working with LGBT clients because homosexuality is no longer classified as a mental illness or disease. However, this does not make the realities people within the LGBT population face in their daily lives. We can still provide help and support specifically designed to suit the specific needs of this population; we are not trying to help, cure, or…

    • 1317 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Alison Bechdel

    • 1348 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist who was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. She interested in the underground comics and she began to write in this field. She is lesbian feminist artist and her works consist of the feminism and lesbianism movement. Her work, Dykes to Watch Out For, was one of the earliest ongoing representations of lesbians in popular culture. The strip mainly follows the life and times of a group of lesbian friends in an unspecified location in the USA. But as time passes, some straight and male characters are also introduced. The strip focuses on a wonderful group of counterculture friends, most of whom are lesbians. And this book gathers a rich collection of the strips spanning from 1987 through 2008. This book also contains an introduction, also in comic form, about how Alison Bechdel came to spend her career writing this incredible…

    • 1348 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In their paper “The Woman-Identified Woman” (1970), the collective Radicalesbians, much like Wittig will do in the following decade, focuses on the marginalized sexual standpoint of ‘women’ and ‘lesbian’ that emerge from the intersection of the personal and the political circa late 1960’s/early 1970’s. It is the agenda of the political environment of the day, Radicalesbians argue, that the former is policed in part by weaponizing the latter as a stigmatizing ‘spoiled’ identity (Goffman 1963). And, as will Wittig years later, “Woman-Identified Woman” notes that this shaming can only be as effective as it is as a social control mechanism from within the tightly-framed, highly regulated framework of…

    • 577 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The chapters I would likely focus on are about the politics of street art and the contrast between museums and outlaws when it comes to street art. These chapter provide a great deal of insight for both sides of the argument. Because of the focus on individual artists there is room for the comparison between artist and vandal in the sense of graffiti. For this reason, I will likely use this source in my final essay.…

    • 690 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics