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Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies
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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
"However, McCormack's analysis snags on pop culture ..."
"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' ..."
"McCormack's chapter on mothers as artists and as subjects of artists is perhaps the strongest and most coherently argued ..."
"McCormack isn't wrong."
"A timely, succinct, aesthetic inquiry into debates about sexuality, objectification, and representation."
"The subject could fill an encyclopedia; in Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies, historian Catherine McCormack narrows it down to women in art history and visual culture ..."
"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 ..."
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