User:Annalystad/essay

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Beauty

The human body has been used in art since the very beginning, especially the female form which represented fertility. Women has been looked at as a more natural, biological being than men. In my research I have discovered that in today's society the word feminism has become a bad word - a word that has become about man hating instead of equality. In Regena Thomashauer’s ‘Pussy’ she is talking about taking back the word and what it stands for. How the word Pussy has a negative reaction, its one of the most insulting words that can bring negative experiences for women. She start with describing different types of women and how they live their lives. She is talking about how women are living their lives to pleasure men, just our female ‘obligation’ from how society has formed itself. In this self help book she is claiming that the word pussy is a good definition of a woman. That it is a word to be defined as powerful, messy, mysterious and unknown. That getting familiar with the word, and appreciating it for what it is, to tap into our pleasure center and how pleasuring yourself in a sexual or non sexual way is our promise of happiness. In Amelia Jones - Feminism - Incorporated ‘Reading post-feminism in an anti-feminist age’ she points out that in the last 10 years we have experienced a feminist backlash and is exploring the death of feminism so-called post-feminism and how it has been promoted through photography and written texts. She is claiming that photography has been a part of this execution of feminism. That photography is a ‘truthful’ medium and is widely spread through magazines and advertisements. These ads and magazines are setting the standard view of male/female truth when it comes to limits of gender, race, sexual and class differences.

Further, I will explore my way of using the photograph to represent the human body in a way that is not defined by gender, sexual preference, class or race. I will explores the subject of how the media and society have this notion of a meat market, that we objectify our own bodies and confine to the rules of society. It will be portrayed as something visually beautiful yet dark and disturbing.‘Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.’(Stendhal). To me, beauty is not just something you see, it is something you feel. Something that inspires you, makes you addicted, something you can never have enough of. In my art, i explore the human body, its shape, texture and context within the world. This obsession has been a form or therapy, and exploration and acceptance of my own body. Exploiting the raw truth within others selfishly helped me. The idea that beauty is a fetish, in a way that we depend on it, we are forced to see it in certain things, objects or places of feelings like a symmetrical object or face. I don't think i have ever heard anyone say ‘that was a ugly sunset’. If this feeling is a subjective one or an objective one I can not answer you. Although there are many arguments for both sides depending on what it is. Is beauty a feeling we have romanticized?

Have you ever dated someone, and the more you get to know them they become more or less beautiful? The more we obsess with our bodies, they become more or less beautiful. Either beauty is a feeling which blinds us of seeing the truth or it helps the truth. Why is it that what we live with all the time, like our hair, we get sick of and want to change it, that the things that are ‘normal’ in our lives become boring, less beautiful. Once you change it, you start missing what you once had, or the feeling of having it. You romanticized how you felt before and think if you get it all back you will also have that feeling back. In my work, i will try to package and distort what i find beautiful, my obsession, the human form and texture. We can sometimes can feel like a meat market,, because of today's society it is a meat market , it's a survival mechanism. We have chose this ourselves in the sense that we treat it like a piece of meat - something we can cut in to, burn fat, and alter the texture. This fascination with beauty and how it makes us feel is an ongoing project for many, getting more fit, slimmer, better health and feeling better has an underlying tone of wanting to feel beautiful. This obsession can be just from our own visuals of our body, social pressure, or health issues. No matter what the reason might be, it is this fetishism with beauty, this addiction to feel good, about ourselves or in society - to be a part of this meat market. ‘By regimes of dieting, makeup, exercise, dress, and cosmetic surgery, women, and increasingly men, try to sculpt their bodies into shapes which reflect the dominant societal norms. Such disciplinary practices attach not only to the production of appropriately gendered bodies, but to other aspects of bodily identity subject to social normalization. Hair straightening, blue tinted contact lenses, surgical reconstruction of noses and lips, are practices in which the material shapes of our bodies are disciplined to correspond to a social ideal, reflecting the privileged position which certain kinds of, usually, white, always able, bodies occupy.’http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-body/#LivFemBod. These are some of the lengths both men and women go through to achieve beauty. I am exploiting this idea within my art by photographing the human body for what it is, its natural beauty, and comparing that with different kinds of meat that have various texture, color, look and shape. This metaphor is meant to both find beauty and the scary truth of what our bodies are treated like. With this process I am learning how to see beauty in my body, my flaws, and how i should accept me for me - to find my promise of happiness.

Something I want to include:

Feminists in general have concluded that, despite the seemingly neutral and inclusive theoretical language of philosophy, virtually all areas of the discipline bear the mark of gender in their basic conceptual frameworks. Those who work in aesthetics inquire into the ways that gender influences the formation of ideas about art, artists, and aesthetic value. Feminist perspectives in aesthetics are also attuned to the cultural influences that exert power over subjectivity: the way that art both reflects and perpetuates the social formation of gender, sexuality, and identity, and the way that all of those features are framed by factors such as race, national origin, social position, and historical situation. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-aesthetics/#BodArt

The work of artists across the globe utilizes bodies in different cultural and political contexts, dramatizing the recognition prevalent in contemporary feminist theory that there is no such thing as the female body, only bodies marked by the differences of their historical situation, their geographical location, their social position, their race, as well as sexual morphology--transgendered, female, male, intersexed--and their abilities or disabilities (Silvers 2000; Millett-Gallant 2010).