This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body. Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, fine arts, women’s studies, gender studies, feminism and cultural studies.

Focusing on art practices that advocate, raise consciousness and educate about the human right to reproductive health, this book analyses and compares forms of feminist artivism to interrogate bodily rights while closely examining the lived experiences of women and their right of free choice. The transnational framing engages with resurgent imperialist and colonial ambitions across global politics and with the attempts at disrupting these positionings by prioritising feminist care as instrumental for democracy and social justice. Key foci of this book include the ways in which arts activism operates, and its strategies and methods related to, for example, the types of artistic practice employed, approaches to dissemination and reach, and engaging the public. The analysis of these topics interrogates the potential of arts activism to work while other forms of activism may stumble, leading social change in thinking, practice and, finally, legislation. Countries covered include Finland, Poland, Portugal, Latvia, the United Kingdom, Chile, Brazil, USA and Australia. The book will be of interest to students and scholars studying art history, art theory and practice, gender studies, and women's studies.

In his theory of the 'mirror stage', the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan argued that the female body is defined by its lack of male attributes. Within this framework, he described female sexuality primarily as an absence, and assumed female subordination to the male gaze. However, what happens if one follows Jean Baudrillard's advice to 'swallow the mirror' and go through the 'looking-glass' to explore the reflections and realities that we encounter in the cultural mirror, which reflects the culture in question: its norms, ideals and values? What if the beautiful is inverted and becomes ugly; and the ugly is considered beautiful or shape-shifts into something conventionally thought of as beautiful? These are the fundamental questions that Basia Sliwinska poses in this important new enquiry into gender identity and the politics of vision in contemporary women's art.Through an innovative discussion of the mirror as a metaphor, Sliwinska reveals how the post-1989 practices of woman artists from both sides of the former Iron Curtain - such as Joanna Rajkowska, Marina Abramovic, Boryana Rossa, Natalia LL and Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova - go beyond gender binaries and instead embrace otherness and difference by playing with visual tropes of femininity. Their provocative works offer alternative representations of the female body to those seen in the cultural mirror. Their art challenges and deconstructs patriarchal representations of the social and cultural 'other', associated with visual tropes of femininity such as Alice in Wonderland, Venus and Medusa. The Female Body in the Looking-Glass makes a refreshing, radical intervention into art theory and cultural studies by offering new theoretical concepts such as 'the mirror' and 'genderland' (inspired by Alice's adventures in Wonderland) as critical tools with which we can analyse and explain recent developments in women's art.

2020 Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) Book Prize In post-1968 Mexico a group of artists and feminist activists began to question how feminine bodies were visually constructed and politicized across media. Participation of women was increasing in the public sphere, and the exclusive emphasis on written culture was giving way to audio-visual communications. Motivated by a desire for self-representation both visually and in politics, female artists and activists transformed existing regimes of media and visuality. Women Made Visible by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda uses a transnational and interdisciplinary lens to analyze the fundamental and overlooked role played by artists and feminist activists in changing the ways female bodies were viewed and appropriated. Through their concern for self-representation (both visually and in formal politics), these women played a crucial role in transforming existing regimes of media and visuality—increasingly important intellectual spheres of action. Foregrounding the work of female artists and their performative and visual, rather than written, interventions in urban space in Mexico City, Aceves Sepúlveda demonstrates that these women feminized Mexico’s mediascapes and shaped the debates over the female body, gender difference, and sexual violence during the last decades of the twentieth century. Weaving together the practices of activists, filmmakers, visual artists, videographers, and photographers, Women Made Visible questions the disciplinary boundaries that have historically undermined the practices of female artists and activists and locates the development of Mexican second-wave feminism as a meaningful actor in the contested political spaces of the era, both in Mexico City and internationally.

The quintessential examination of women, gynecology is not simply the study of women's bodies, but also serves to define and constitute them. From J. Marion Sims's surgical experiments on unanesthetized slave women in the mid-19th century to the use of cadavers and prostitutes to teach medical students gynecological techniques, Kapsalis focuses on the ways in which women and their bodies have been treated by the medical establishment. 34 photos.

"This book discusses how some works of art produced in Latin America in the sixties, seventies, and eighties forged a different understanding of the female body, understood as space for the expression of a dissident subjectivity in relation to socially normalized places. Representations of art and of feminist activism interrogated the disciplining of the female body that entails as well the disciplining of the male body. Before a history of highly regulated artistic representations-regardless of the occasional exceptions a historian might point out-images erupted that questioned the social and institutional naturalization of the feminine and the masculine"--

Women's bodies and their portrayals in the media remain at the center of every debate on women's rights worldwide. This study examines the domains of public and private space--and the interstices between them--with a focus on how women advance in the public arena, drawing on the domestic politics of the private realm in their drive for social justice and equality. The author examines the visual culture of first-wave feminists in Edwardian England and feminist developments in France. Late 20th century and 21st century women's movements are discussed in the context of how they continue to honor first-wave suffrage history.