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Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies
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Volume of Reviews
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About This Book
Art historian Catherine McCormack challenges how culture teaches us to see and value women, their bodies, and their lives. Venus, maiden, wife, mother, monster―women have been bound so long by these restrictive roles, codified by patriarchal culture, that we scarcely see them. Catherine McCormack illuminates the assumptions behind these stereotypes whether writ large or subtly hidden. She ranges through Western art―think Titian, Botticelli, and Millais―and the image-saturated world of fashion photographs, advertisements, and social media, and boldly counters these depictions by turning to the work of women artists like Morisot, Ringgold, Lacy, and Walker, who offer alternative images for exploring women's identity, sexuality, race, and power in more complex ways. 20 illustrations
Reviews
"In the end, my frustration with these oversights won out, not least because I would have enjoyed seeing where McCormack, an astute critic, would go if her book hadn't topped out at 223 pages."
"McCormack isn't wrong."
"Her intended audience is a general rather than a scholarly readership, but obscure references, meandering text, and a British slant may pose a challenge for the American layperson—still, anyone going to an art museum after reading this volume will likely find much to discuss ..."
"Mixing feminist polemic, a few blinding flashes of the obvious and the cri de coeur of a working mother, McCormack grounds her analysis in feminist art history and theory, the insights of racial and sexual justice movements, and her own story as an emerging professional from a working-class background who moves in elite zones of the art world ..."
"She anchors her insightful study around four female stereotypes—Venus, Mothers, Maidens and Dead Damsels, and Monstrous Women—and lucidly explains the ways in which women's bodies have become symbols of male desire, sex, and violence, their subjugation culturally treated as 'the unquestionable natural order of things' ..."
"A timely, succinct, aesthetic inquiry into debates about sexuality, objectification, and representation."
"A stellar section called 'Monstrous Women' asks if 'Medusa was originally a Black African deity from Libya' ..."
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