Women's Role In The Feminist Movement

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“Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own”
John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Through the years, Women have always been treated, as well as depicted in quite a different way from men. The woman is designed to flatter the men, who are assumed to be the ‘ideal spectators’. Not only is the relation between men and women poor, but also is the relation of women with themselves. The woman turns herself into an object, the surveyor in her becomes male. Tired of being interpreted as subjects by both genders, women artists revolted during the feminist movement with a kind of art which reflects women’s lives and experiences, with a goal ,as declared by Artist Suzanne Lacy, ‘to influence cultural attitudes, and transform stereotypes.’ …show more content…

Later on, she started using photography, performance, sculpture and video to challenge the prevailing notions of sexism,feminism and sexuality. Wilke’s most famous early work, S.O.S Starification Object Series indicates a kind of emergency, related to feminine identity- henceforth playing an important role in the Feminist Art Movement. She merged her minimalist sculptures and her own body, creating small vulva-like sculptures out of chewing gum and sticking them to herself. She then posed half naked, adopting exaggerated postures of celebrities and the fashion industry,subjecting her own image to objectivity. The work was originally created as a game, which Wilke made into an installation- where she had audience members chew the gum for her. She then sculpted them and placed them on papers that she hung on the …show more content…

It also refers to the vaginal sculptures that decorate her body, recalling the practice of scarification employed by certain cultures where designs are branded onto the skin of women without any anaesthesia, as a permanent body modification. S.O.S. being the international Morse code distress signal, indicates a kind of emergency situation that one needs to be pulled out of. In this context, the ‘emergency situation’ being objectification of women, and their sexuality as subjects purposed for projection of male sexual

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