An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body
Rosemary Betterton
In Chapter One of “An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body”, Betterton examines Suzanne Valadon’s “Self Portrait”, in which the artist, 66 years old, presents herself naked and without commiseration. Betterton points out that Valadon’s painting is” intimate”, and at the same time she upholds her body as “an object of representation”(p.7). According to Betterton, when an artist such as Valadon, looks at her representation, she completes that space between “self and others” (p.7). Betterton examines two extremes in the representation of the body - looking at the body, and the embodiment itself. She explains her interest in the analysis of the symbolism of distance and touch in women’s art and how the center of interest in Western art and science is looking. By looking, we establish a distance between the subject and the object. In contrast to Western art theory, feminist theory presents an alternative view of the way we think, see and talk about the body.
These alternatives include examining the “borderline between the biological and the social, the natural and the cultural”(p. 9). The author states that the way the body has been represented in culture and in language is at the core of feminist theory. She mentions the importance that feminist theory has made of the poststructuralist and psychoanalytic work of Foucault and Lacan to question the “notion of a coherent female subject.” (p. 9) Betterton points out that women artists have started to recreate the cultural meaning of the female body as a specifically female experience. Women artists were, in effect, reclaiming the cultural meaning of the female body. In the 1970’s, pornography was a catalyst for the discussion about the representation of the female body that contested the male view of the female body as only genitalia.
The author points out that the analysis of aesthetics was a point of debate in feminist theory in the 70’s. The deconstruction of the traditional representation of women’s body became a central point for women artists. Rejecting traditional art forms like painting, feminist artists turned to methods and genres that allowed them to deconstruct the image of the female such as text, performance, and photo. The author explains that deconstruction represents an important tool to analyze “cultural forms and women’s oppression”(p11), and points out that if women artists want to represent their bodies, that it should be out of the “male gaze frame”.
To define the relationship between looking and embodiment, Betterton uses a comparison between Roland Barthes who stated that the only possibility to see our body is through existing cultural codes, and Luce Irigaray who rejected the idea of the image of women as re-duplicating male gaze, and states that the relationship to the body and its representation has been the center of debate in feminist visual theory.
Back to Roland Barthes - the author shows other interpretations about the body in representation, in his essay, “The Grain of the Voice”. He suggests another way to see the body, as a relationship “based on looking and one based on other senses” (p.13). For Luce Irigaray, the look has been privileged over other senses.
In the section ”Social Bodies”, the author points out the tendency of Western culture to establish dichotomies. Women have been categorized as inferior and aligned with nature, different from the category of the white, male, middle class. Males have been defined as rational (the mind) and women as just the body. The body has been defined as a “binary term of difference”. The author states the difference between identity as a result of social discourse, and embodiment. According to her, modern feminism has responded to this position about the body in two ways: taking the liberal theory of equal rights, but leaving out specific status of women, and adopting sexual differences, and affirming the idea of nature as something positive, but not questioning “male rationality”(p.14).
In the last part of Chapter One, Betterton describes how feminist theory has defined the body as the point of “social and political inscription rather than giving a biological veracity”(p.15). In contrast, the author presents the feminist literature of science in a progressive level in the deconstructive analysis of the sexual difference, by presenting the interaction of cultural, and biological parts in the female body.
