Uneasy bodies,femininity and death: Representing the female corpse in fashion photography and selected contemporary artworks
Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This mini-dissertation serves as a framework for my own creative practice. In this \nresearch paper my intention is to explore, within a feminist reading, representations of \nthe female corpse in fashion photography and art. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall's \ntheories on the concept of representation are utilised to critically analyse and \ninterogate selected images from fashion magazines, which depicts the female corpse \nin an idealised way. Such idealisation manifests in Western culture, in fashion \nmagazines, as expressed in depictions of the attractive/ seductive/fine-looking female \ncorpse. Fashion photographs that fit this description are critically contrasted and \nchallenged to selected artworks by Penny Siopis and Marlene Dumas, alongside my \nown work, to explore how the female corpse can be represented, as strategy to \nundermine the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body. Here the \nstudy also explores the selected artists' utilisation of the abject and the grotesque in \nrelation to their use of artistic mediums and modes of production as an attempt to \ncreate ambiguous and conflicting combinations of attraction and repulsion (the \nsublime aesthetic of delightful horror), thereby confronting the viewer with the notion \nof the objectification of the decease[d] feminine body as object to-be-looked-at. This \nnecessitated the inclusion of seminal theories developed by the French theorist, Julia \nKristeva (1982) on the abject and the Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) on the \ngrotesque.
Author: Thelma Van Rensburg
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2612468293