Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Female artists use their bodies as organic matter, acting in everyday situations such as sleeping, eating, working, or bathing. They utilize what emanates from the body and its actions or performances to create works of art. Art is intertwined with life, with its hopes, its flaws, and its denunciations. Art (and the body) is used as an instrument of struggle, as a tool of vindication, combat, and self-definition to visually capture, and often, the unnameable, the undervalued, the undervalued… the “feminine,” seen as weakness and transformed by artists into strength and resistance, as the key motto of the feminist movement suggests. Janine Antoni, Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic, Claude Cahun, and Doris Salcedo, among other artists, use their bodies and their hair, whether real or metaphorical, to give women’s hair—despised and hidden by religious fundamentalists and vilified by church fathers for its eroticism, shaved by soldiers as punishment and revenge, and condemned to be a nest of snakes by mythology—a way of demonstrating the power of that untamable hair, one of the attributes of women most representative of their rebellion, turning it into a means of expression, just like their bodies.
DOI: 10.21134/t7bg8a48
Author: Sylvia Lenaers Cases
Language: English
Topic: Art, Politics, and Modernism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4415188392
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