Weekly Selfie 3 - MB

Monique Boss, Silhouette, 2024

Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series Iowa, 1977

The male gaze is the hyper sexualization and objectification of women's bodies. Where the female gaze is  
more inward. The female gaze is less about looks and about empowerment, self-discovery, creativity, and pushing boundaries sometimes by breaking the norm. 

My selfie is an interpretation of Ana's silhouette series.

Art That Looks at What Women See

"Of the 294 portraits Berthe Morisot painted, for example, only about 10 depict men. The rest are women and children. This was partly because women were restricted from using live models until the mid-19th century, and partly because, she said, "Decidedly I am too nervous to make anyone else sit for me." Her models were her mother and sisters, so in a sense she was creating an image of the world in which she lived." 

Overlooked No More: Ana Mendieta, a Cuban Artist Who Pushed Boundaries

"...Mendieta upended her apartment, covered herself with blood and tied herself to a table to recreate the aftermath of brutal sexual assault. She invited an audience to the made-up crime scene, where she  remained bent over the table with blood dripping down her legs and pooling at her feet as they discussed the incident."

Response: I really enjoyed reading about how Ana pushed boundaries as a minority artist. She put a lot of passion into her work. I love that it was fueled by her emotions and beliefs. It is shown that she really dedicated herself to her work enough to recreate something as traumatic as rape using her own body. This shows how far she was willing to go to bring awareness/translate a message. What's also crazy is that I never knew this artist's name but I have seen her work plenty growing up, as a pre-teen/teen on Tumblr. Specifically, the piece where she is lying in stone covered in white flowers.

Ways of Seeing 

"To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two."

"One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight."

Response: I enjoyed that the reading in Chapter 3, discusses the story of Adam and Eve and how it relates to the perception and treatment of women. The story of Adam and Eve portrays the woman being blamed and made subordinate to the man, and I believe this story is a refection of the way women are viewed and treated in our current society. A woman's presence is seen as an "expression of her own attitude" towards herself, in contrast to a man's presence which is seen as a "projection of his power". Women have had to constantly feel the need to change themselves and appearances in order to be treated a certain way by men, leading to a shift in self-identity.