Off of Amp’s collection for the Big Fat Carnival, and Arwen’s post on Pandagon about porn and women’s bodies, I thought I’d link to Rachel Weeks, whose art has been very much concerned with the female nude:
My recent project, entitled Autoerotica, looks back at the history of lens voyeurism. In this series I photograph myself in the style of vintage erotica, in part to attempt to resolve my conflicting feelings about erotica and pornography. Although the poses and the conventions are often borrowed from the traditional “male gaze” on a woman, my intent is to make clear that these are self-portraits and that as a form of empowerment I am choosing to portray myself as an object of sexual desire. This allows me to explore the conflict between my own desire to be seen and my shyness and insecurity.
This is the part of her statement that I find most interesting:
If we accept the argument that pornography objectifies the socially unequal woman for a man’s gratification, the fact that I chose to photograph myself for my own personal pleasure and gratification nullifies the argument that the objectified woman is being exploited or degraded. Even though they are the same poses and vantage points, by reenacting the scene with myself as the voyeur and the viewed, I am claiming the privileged position. The inclination to see women as victims and as the object of the male gaze ignores the small gains that were achieved by manipulating this inequality and the kinds of agency that is possible in a situation of social inequality.
So then what happens when that work of art–a woman photographing herself in an attempt to interrogate the male gaze–leaves her purview and becomes an image out in the world?
the fact that I chose to photograph myself for my own personal pleasure and gratification nullifies the argument that the objectified woman is being exploited or degraded.
Just want to add a technical point about the young girl who photographed herself nude and was charged with producing child pornography and sexual abuse of a child. She of course shared her photos, so in that way the case differs from your example
.
There’s objectification and then there’s objectification. Let’s just be clear about that.
i’d be more convinced that objectification wasn’t anti-feminist if she were objectifying a dude for her personal pleasure.
oh sweet action, we hardly knew ye.
Would it be any different if I beat myself up as a form of empowerment since I am the one deciding to bash my head against the wall?
Not quite. Objectification need not be intentional. The fact that she chooses to do this herself doesn’t change the fact that it’s objectifying. She admits to making herself “an object of sexual desire”. That’s objectifying.
While I share the artist’s ambivalence about pornography, and her concern with “agency… in a situation of social inequality”, I thik she’s somewhat misunderstood the concept of the “male gaze” here. The male gaze isn’t something men have or practice, it’s something society imposes on men and women. Here’s John Berger discussing the concept in Ways of Seeing:
I can think of no better illustration of the gaze as described above than a woman who photographs herself as an erotic object…
I think they’re beautiful and extremely risky. It’s hard enough for fat women to look at themselves just in the mirror–imagine how much more difficult to submit to the camera, and then publish those images.
All art is subject to gaze. To boldly seek that gaze takes a courage I certainly don’t have. As a fat woman I’m often busy trying to be invisible to others, to not inhabit my space at all. I appreciate a woman who fills her space completely and without apology.
In a situation where there is no possible communication beyond your looks, there’s really no way you can practically be anything other than an object to another person. You see an underwear ad that pictures someone who embodies the physicality of what you desire in a sexual partner. You don’t know anything else about this person, but the presence of a physical attraction without a romantic or personal one isn’t a defecit on your part – how much more can you know about Underwear Model X other than that they look good in tighty-whities? When you are actually interacting with someone, however, and you only consider them to be a sexual object instead of a whole person, that’s when objectification is a problem. When all you know of your girlfriend is her status as a sexual object, you’re objectifying her. Ignoring all other aspects of her personhood makes her into a sexual object and only a sexual object. When you can consider her status as the object of your sexual desire as simply a part of her personhood, an aspect of her that is just as real as her sense of humor or good taste in wine, then you’re having a sexual relationship with a human being.
regarding what sara says:
“there’s really no way you can practically be anything other than an object to another person”
sara, you are what you PROJECT. yes, there are always people who have books because they look cool and never read the content, people who objectify other people and never go beyond the surface definition of the object. So… you, or any man or woman, have a choice to either embrace that type of person to surround yourself with or not..
Darwin’s survival of the fittest would say that if a person who lives life only on the object layer, and interaction with real people over time that person will find him (her) self alone and sad and wondering why. When they ask why and start to try to learn how to interact with people with integrity.. then there you go. Growth.
Do not surround yourself with people you do not vibe with. And yet, of course systematically everyone initially operates on generalities and attractions and if that means the initial interaction is only on the object level that is fine, as long as it goes somewhere that is pleaseing to both parties.
bottom line, you are what you project, if you choose to be more then a sexual object, project that and reject them who do not see you for who you are. keep in mind reciprocity for the times you are (if you do) look for your sexual partner to be only an object of the night or short term or fling. most of have done that once or twice and then.. at some point we feel alone and start looking for the content between the covers and the person inside.
freedom of choice is a choice, be who and what YOU choose.
AND regarding:
“If we accept the argument that pornography objectifies the socially unequal woman for a man’s gratification” … to accept that line of thought means that women do not enjoy porn, to nullify the dominatrix, it is to state that porn is only a place of one sex. Porn has nothing to do with just men with issues unaddressed in jungian therapy. Porn has to do with power. Porn has to do with at times bi-unequality of power (it goes both ways) and at times with the re-enactment of a visual manifestation of a Karma Sutra like dance with deep sacred meaning for both parties being viewed or re-enacting or learning from the viewed.
to look at life simplisitically is to be shallow. what is it to be a feminist? is it to replicate the male power structure in reverse? or is it to point at things for society to think about and go ‘ah hah’ maybe this should change or point at things for society to go ‘ah hah’ look at how wonderful those two people interact… I want to be that happy.
project what you want to become.
that is all i have to say if i have to say only a one liner.
I agree, the photographs are lovely and risky, and some of them are challenging. I don’t necessarily believe her when she says that she photographs herself for her own personal pleasure and graitification; some of the photographs seem to challenge the perfect world (and the perfect woman) created for “the male gaze” in classic erotic photography, and to begin to change the trope itself. She’s an artist, right; it’s not just some kind of exercise without comment on the form itself.
I also don’t believe her when she says that photographing herself for her own personal gratification “nullifies” the argument that the woman in an eroptic photograph is objectified or degraded. I agree that there are types of agency possible in situations of inequality; no agency occurs outside of the complex networks of power that we live in. But images are images, they are complex, and their meaning can’t ultimately be controlled by those who make them or those who appear in them. These social forces are at work in the every viewer, in every interpretation; they can’t really be argued away based on the maker and the subject alone.
Well as it is art I have to point out somethings that are very relevent – first off she doesn’t conform to the arbitrary level of physical thinness of the time, on that level at least she’s subverting the paradigm, the other thing I notice about the pictures is that her facial expression isn’t particularly “Porn”, there’s about a half dozen facial expressions used by porn actresses, especially late 19th/early 20th century ones, here’s a few examples google coughed up, and weeks has gone for this sort of “who pissed in my cornflakes?” look for most of the pictures, and occasionally wipping out a really forced looking smile that lacks any real attempt at conveying any emotion, sort of “first someone pissed in my cornflakes and now someone is asking me to smile”.
And what that all amounts to is that the Weeks photos aren’t really porn, they lack the artificial appearance of “sexiness” designed to elicit sexual feelings in the viewer, but instead is simply some pictures of herself naked.
The sad thing is, that the whole concept of the artistic nude not being pornographic does not work if you consign all pictures of the naked female into the category of “porn”, and that for the creator of these pictures to conflate the two shows that she on some level sees the female form as an object that can not be viewed in any other way other than as a source of sexual gratification for the male gaze.
If she wasn’t fat the series would be totally and unequivicably patriarchy and rape culture affirming as well as being Othering to women in general.
R Mildred, I think you’re totally off-base here. Art can be pornographic and pornography can be artistic. The fact that this woman is using her form in such a way to arouse or gratify doesn’t mean she sees herself as only a sexual object. You’re fasely positing that if you appreciate the sensuality of the female form, you can’t see it as anything else. I hear this woman taking possession of her power to arouse, on her own terms. She is photographing herself because she likes the idea of arousing someone else with her body. There is nothing necessarily disempowering about allowing someone else to take pleasure in your form.
And Justin, to say that I am what I project is absolutely ridiculous. I can’t be held responsible for the impression others have of me. I can dress a certain way or hang out in a certain place, but these things can be misconstrued by any observer. My empowerment needs to come from who I am and what I do, not whether someone else is sensitive enough to see me as who I am.
To tie this together, my point is that this woman can’t be held responsible for the way people react to her photos. She can do her best to communicate her sexual empowerment, but the fact that others might not “get it” doesn’t mean anything about her. The impressions of others do not diminish the gratification she got from taking the photos.
“If she wasn’t fat the series would be totally and unequivicably patriarchy and rape culture affirming as well as being Othering to women in general.”
I don’t buy that — there’s plenty of BBW (Big Beautiful Woman) porn, for one thing. Weeks is taking control of her own representation, and there’s something empowering in that. She’s also expressing a vision of what turns her on, and there’s something empowering in that, too. I don’t buy the argument that this kind of personal empowerment somehow magically takes her images out of the realm of objectification, exploitation, or degradation — which isn’t to say that I therefore am arguing that her images are objectifying, exploitative, or degrading, just that her control over the image-making process isn’t in and of itself enough.
I happen to think the images are very successful in foregrounding a lot of tensions within pornography, and between porn and art. For example, she emulates the style of late Victorian pornography — even “distressing” the images so that they look old and well-used. While this removes theimages from the realm of modern “hardcore” imagery, it also situates her as a subject in a context in which women were far more beholden to men. Today’s porn reduces women to images; Victorian women were quite literally property in many ways — and needless to say, didn’t have the means to control their representation the way Weeks controls hers. More: Weeks explicitly aligns these images with pornography, defined as images intended to arouse “prurient interest”, writing that her intention is “to create sexually charged images of myself for my own personal pleasure”. At the same time, she removes the pornographic impulse for anyone other than herself and those who share her view of what makes an image erotic; only for those who share her desires are these images “self-portraits” in the broadest sense. But for those who do not share Weeks’ notion of the erotic, the images fail to become pornographic.
Anyway, enough amateur art analysis. The point is that inasmuch as the work aims to confuse and confront objectification, it’s fairly successful; inasmuch as it aims to sidestep objectification altogether, it fails. (Albeit in interesting ways…)
R.Mildred, I really don’t understand this statement. Could you clarify a bit please?
I just commented on the Pandagon post, and much of what I said I think has relevence here, so I’m going to be lazy and repeat it:
For me the chief annoyance is that beauty and nudity are so associated with sex in this culture, so as to define women as sex objects when either are present. As a nonmodest person who lives in a place with rather hot summers, this means that I cannot go around shirtless when it’s ninety-five degrees out, even though men can (both due to laws and to the fact that people would automatically assume that I’m doing it to get as much sexual attention as I can). As an artist I have it limiting what I can in good conscience create. Nudity = sex = objectification, and I hate that. I hate that it makes what should be simply a wardrobe choice into an issue of oppression.
My own definition of pornography (I imply objectionable in that word) is “sex not person,” i.e. the image has somehow failed to be that of a human person, despite the fact that that is what formed the content of the picture.
Or, to put it another way, for an image to be not pornagraphic, three things have to occur. First, the creation of the image must not demean—that is, the person in the image, the model, if one exists, has to be unexploited, uncoerced, and should feel somehow pleased or empowered by how she is being portrayed. Secondly, the medium, whether it be photograph, film, a painting or drawing, or anything else, must convey her humanity, her personhood. Good art is not just a representation of something; it has presence. It is a picture of a person, not a picture of a body. Thirdly, and this is the hardest thing, this all has to be percieved by the people who look at the image. If these three things happened universally, I’d imagine it would be the end of most of the feminist criticism of pornography. It would also be the end of pornography, the way we define it, which is objectionable for the most part because it objectifies, because it cannot be empowering for a representation of one’s self to be regarded with all the acknowledgement one devotes to a wallpaper pattern; to reduce any picture portraying a person, nude or not, to an arousing image, is the equivalent of thinking of one’s secretary as a sort of computer with hands, or of a nurse as a bedpan dispenser, or a waitress as a soda machine.
The whole purpose of an image is to represent the person the image is of, and to refuse to perceive that person in the image is to make the image a failure, and a much worse substitute for the real thing than it should be. The failure of a picture to represent and convey humanity is what makes that picture pornography instead of art. The refusal of a viewer to perceive that humanity, that personhood, amplifies the problem, and aditionally can turn art into porn (think Beavis and Butt-head wondering if Mona Lisa can deep-throat). Conversely, a decent viewer could turn porn into art, if they see the person rather than the object; however this is not a sufficient fix for earlier problems (a person looking at the Abu Ghraib pictures and seeing suffering people and being appalled by them does not make up for the conditions in which the pictures were made).
If I draw or paint a person, or a mythological creature designed to have consciousness, I want that to come through in the painting. Regardless of the amount of clothing that the subject is wearing. I want everyone who sees that painting to see the person, not just the body; I want them to see strength and courage and grace and joy and purpose and whatever the hell else I mean the character to possess. Problem is, we as a society tend to let a clear view of certain body parts so outshine everything else that it’s like trying to stargaze at noon. For this reason, while I have drawn a few nudes (male and female), and managed to give most of them that presence that, for me, defines a successful job, I have yet to show any of them to anyone other than my sisters. I wish I could legitimately expect people to see the presence I’ve worked so hard to convey, but in many cases I know they won’t.
Damn patriarchy.
Kyra:
And everyone misses your viewpoint and your expression because you are afraid of how others may interpret it. That is a shame and I’d like to think you’d revisit that issue and possibly change your stance and share what you have with others.
I used to write alot and oftentimes I would get disappointed by the reactions from persons who might read my short stories, they seemed to project on them their own self images and expectations and often miss the point entirely. I was young and impressionable then. I am not so much now (although I haven’t the time to write like I used to now).
To me art, good art, is alive all the time, it springs up from the within the artist, is shaped and if the artist desires, is shown. But reception of that art, how it is perceived and interpreted by others cannot be controlled by the artist. It would seem to me that true art, if contrived for approval of an audience, ceases to become art and then becomes merely entertainment. Art can and often does entertain the viewer, listener or reader, but if its existance is purely reliant on affirmation outside the artist, then again, to me it ceases to be art.
In this vein, I must say that I would agree that Rachel’s pictures constitute art. She felt a need to produce them and she used the medium to express her desire to have ownership over how her body is defined within herself. As she says, she struggles with the desire
So she uses the medium she is most comfortable with to try to weed out a pesonal conflict she feels with her own body and sense of self.
Whether or not the medium allows her to steal away the objectification of herself by the patriarchy because she takes control of the lens, I don’t know. I would tend to say that she is functionging largely within the same paradigm to prove the paradigm false, which to me serves only to reinforce the paradigm itself and in that sense her work serves to satirizes it.
R.Mildred, I really don’t understand this statement. Could you clarify a bit please?
ugh, I hope that wasn’t offensive to fat people, if it was I apologise.
anyway, the only thing to my mind that is subversive about the peice is that she doesn’t conform readily to the patriarchal weight standard, kyra explains what I was trying to get at well – the Weeks series lacks that depth of personality that would make the pictures actually empowering. Her poses and body language are borrowed from those dictated by a male photographer 80 or more years ago and her facial expressions are not really expressive of anything about her.
By sticking to those poses, and by limiting her facial expressions like she has, the original photographer(s) is still involved in the images and is still directing the picture and controlling her and how here body is presented, and by doing so she robs herself of actual power over the images themselves, instead giving what power she could of had over hte actual presentation of herself over to a standard of body language and positioning that was created by and for the pre-war era patriarchy.
It focuses too much on the production of the “porn” without paying attention to the subject, and so the fails to actually challenge patriarchal Othering of the actual women who are the subjects of porn.
So, on one hand, if one isn’t allowed to display whatever parts of their body they like, they’re oppressed.
On the other hand, if they display their body and people look at it, they’re being sexually objectified.
I guess I don’t get it. Is going back-and-forth on this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t issue really more important than, say, reproductive freedom or workplace equality? Trying to be as polite as possible, let me say that there’s a perception of a dichotomy in feminism: practical, issues-oriented feminism, and then the academic social-analysis feminism that seems absolutely useless, pointless, and self-negating. These sorts of discussions largely feed this perception.
Great. An artist feels free to make whatever art she pleases. I took a look and I didn’t find it particularly interesting or meaningful; but to the extent that the artist is satisifed, I applaud her. Wondering if she’s an oppressed sexual object or an empowered woman of freedom seems to miss the fucking point entirely; it’s a question of sophistry. There is no “empowering” act that can’t simply be construed as kowtowing to some societal pressure and is therefore oppression. The discussion, ultimately, is meaningless.
well, the landscape portfolio was in the same distressed, oldschool style. Evidently, she likes retro. However, that element of the medium is kinda distracting from the concepts she’s trying to get across, and makes them seem archaic and irrelevent in the context of modern porn.
//Also: personal hobbyhorse: dude, don’t bring up darwin or natural selection. I spend all my time with his bastard children (genetics and ecology) which he himself never heard of. Let’s not get the old geezer involved in social darwinism, much less (oh crap, trainwreck) psychological darwinism.
Well one of the things I liked about the series (beside the fact that she was simple a normal-looking, normal-bodied woman) was that she wasn’t making any attempt to engage with the camera or the viewer. She might have just been going about her business, the same way I would look if somebody had filmed me getting out of the tub, drying off, doing a thousand daily activities that she happened to be doing without clothing on. I never felt any invitation to gaze at her as a sexual being, and I suspect that if she’d been a stereotypical 18 year-old sexpot her matter-of-factness still would have affected me the same way.
Chet:
Is going back-and-forth on this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t issue really more important than, say, reproductive freedom or workplace equality?
Perhaps you aren’t aware that bloggers post about many different things. That’s one of the great things about the Internet: You can discuss both “practical, issues-oriented feminism” and “academic social-analysis feminism,” sometimes on the exact same day! You can even throw in photos of your pets!
Your assertation that the discussion of art and sociology is meaningless strikes me as, well, wrong.
Kate—
I never stop revisiting it. This issue is a sort of razor’s edge for me, between expressing beauty and avoiding the charge that I am somehow perpetuating the objectification of women. It’s a legitimate pain in the ass.
Although it bears mentioning that part of my reluctance is due to the fact that I have no good means of doing so. An online thing like a blog or DeviantArt account would require a scanner or a digital camera, and I really have never considered how to go about doing it offline. In any case, an offline exhibit would come to the attention of my mother, who is . . . well, to illustrate, I recently bought a painting by my favorite artist of an ancient Egyptian priestess wearing a loincloth and a necklace which covered most of her breasts. Nothing pornagraphic was showing, and yet my mother’s first response to it was to tell me I should draw a dress on over her. Cover her up, give her some modesty. (“When the space-time continuum collapses, Mother.”)
So I really don’t know what I’m going to do about it.
Chet had it right
although I’d say that the academic social-analysis feminism is an important means for deciding what practical feminism should look to accomplish (more so if we ever get past defending our already-won rights against their attackers enough to focus our efforts on the power structure itself). Injustice exists not only in laws and customs but in culture and in how people are taught to think, and achieving true equality for everyone will require a few of these to be rewritten. Therefore they should be understood. “If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
i think it’s important for individuals (male or female) to explore their body image and self image. there are most certainly fuzzy lines being crossed when it is publicized, but one can hardly criticize ones own personal need or wont for that exploration.
that said.
i would ask: what is being explored in the sexual realm, if one is attributing physical objectification to seduction and sexual identity?
it is unfortunate (as far as i am concerned) that self and body image as well as sexual identity is being defined within this scope from the onset – by the nature of this woman’s exploration. as opposed to questioning these parameters and definitions.
sexuality does not start and end with body parts or poses. my wish would be that this woman’s exploration will evolve to engender or include the complexities of sensuality as experienced by the observer / voyeur… the reality of exchanges (whether obvious or understated) between people isn’t represented in this sort of exhibition.
perhaps one will enevitably lead to another, for this woman… in her investigation.. but it is sure this is merely scratching the already too predominate surface.
Kactus:
This is rather off the point of this thread, but I disagree with this assessment. The second part, about not interacting with the viewer, may be true, but she’s definitely engaged with the camera — many of the shots include the cable release cord with which she triggers the shot. One could say that the main object of the series is not her body but her control of the representation of her body, hence the visible apparatus of the act of taking the photo.
Indeed I am aware of that, but a casual examination of the offerings of several universities suggests that they’re far more likely to offer classes about the subject of this post than on the subject of reproductive freedoms or workplace equality.
In other words, while this idle conversation is certainly suited to the internet, the internet is not the limit of where it occurs. This subject matter, while it hardly interferes with other opportunities for discussion and action on the internet, does so interfere in academia and in the public sphere, and it was that interference that I was criticizing.
This subject matter, while it hardly interferes with other opportunities for discussion and action on the internet, does so interfere in academia and in the public sphere, and it was that interference that I was criticizing.
Now I really don’t understand. If this is your complaint, that universities offer too many courses on things that you don’t consider important, then you should be criticizing the universities, not bloggers, who have nothing to do with it. If your complaint is that blogs have a great deal of influence on academic culture (oh, if only) and therefore they should limit discussions to certain pre-approved topics…um, no. Not even if you weren’t the only person defining “important.”
It’s an especially weird complaint in light of the fact that Feministe’s bloggers write a lot of posts on reproductive rights and workplace equality.
Kyra: Good heavens, you’ve come up with yet another reason for Mona Lisa’s smile: the taste lingering in her mouth after….
Kactus: She was engaged with the camera in that she set up each shot exactly the way she wanted it, caused the camera to produce the images she wanted.
Zuzu, I’m late to the party on this, but I wanted to express my view.
I think there are good arguments against porn, both from the standpoint of concern for sex workers and from the standpoint of how the material operates in the world. In the case of self-created material where the subject is auteur, especially where there is no money to be made, I think the former set of concerns is laid to rest. We have a pretty good idea that these photos are this woman’s consenting, genuine expression. That leave only your last question, which is, what happens to these images when they are viewed ina patriarchal culture.
That’s not a question that is easily waived away. In a patriarchal culture, the context of how women are treated tends to reduce them to commodities for the satisfaction of male desire. Some folks think that the visual depiction of women, period, just makes the depicted woman available for the male gaze. I think that argument proves too much.
If the mere fact that men who have been raised in patriarchy look at women reinforces patriarchy, then porn is the least of our problems, and we have to adopt a Wahabbi-style prohibition of the sight of women altogether. I’m not being flippant: Twisty once wrote on her blog that women on stage reference fucking just because women on stage always reference fucking. That’s true as far as it goes. A woman walking down a street is going to be seen as an object of desire, and an object for use, by some men. If that in and of itself were sufficiently powerful to reinforce patriarchy, than only stopping men from looking at women they don’t know would have any effect.
Now, erotic work is somewhat different because people masturbate to it, but that’s not such a distinction. I don’t see lots of folks masturbating to the stuff you linked; there’s lots of erotic art that people look at and even become aroused by, and don’t masturbate to. If “gets aroused by” is the standard, then we’re back to strangers on the street.
Also, if the reaction of the patriarchal potential audience is an overriding concern, it forcloses the possibility of any sexual minority or subculture making material to speak to themselves. Should “On Our Backs” not exist because straight men might masturbate to it? Should photographers stop chronicling the BDSM scene because some patriarchal guys might see the photos and fantasize that what they are looking at is nonconsensual? That just leads us back to a prohibition on the depiction of women. Which, since it’s impossible to achieve, would only mean that feminists withdraw from the discourse of how women are depicted, leaving the field to the misogynists.
When a woman takes up a camera and creates an image of her body that she wants to share with the world as her own expression, telling her not to do it because of how someone may misinterpret that image seems to me an awful and unjustifiable constraint.
I think you mean Jill.
Zuzu, in fact I meant Piny. Given what you’ve said about your body type, the references to Amp’s Big Fat Carnival and Weeks’ physique had me thinking that this was your post, even though Piny’s name is right there at the top for any fool to see. The confusion’s all mine. My apologies.
David in #3, EXACTLY.