Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies

Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies
Author: Catherine McCormack
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2021-11-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0393542092

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.

Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis

Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis
Author: Rosemary M Balsam
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2012-07-26
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1135137013

Why has the female body been marginalised in psychoanalysis, with a focus on female problems and pains only? How can we begin to think about body pleasure, power, competition and aggression as normal in females? In Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis, Rosemary Balsam argues that re-tracing theoretical steps back to the biological body's attributes is fruitful in searching for the clues of our mental development. She shows that the female biological body, across female gender variants and sexual preferences, including the 'vanished pregnant body', has been largely overlooked in previous studies. It is how we weave these images of the body into our everyday lives that informs our gendered patterning. These details about being female free up gender studies in the postmodern era to think about the body's contribution to gender – rather than continuing the familiar postmodern trend to repudiate biology and perpetuate the divide between the physical and the mental. There are four main areas explored: • clinical contributions on female development • assessments of past and present psychoanalytic theories in relation to the body • inner portraits of gender building blocks • a conscious and unconscious focus on the potentially procreative female body. Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis will be of particular interest to psychodynamic, psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic practitioners, teachers, students, feminist academicians, college undergraduates, graduates and faculty in women's studies and gender studies. Rosemary Balsam is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine; Staff Psychiatrist, Yale University Student Mental Health and Counselling Services; Training and Supervising Analyst, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom

Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom
Author: Christiane Northrup
Publisher: Bantam Dell Publishing Group
Total Pages: 753
Release: 1995
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 9780553374667

Based on the connection between physical and spiritual health, a popular holistic guide to alternative medicine for women contains an alphabetical list of women's ailments and conditions, including fibroids, menstruation, vaginitis, and menopause. Reprint.

Bodies of Knowledge

Bodies of Knowledge
Author: Wendy Kline
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2010-10-15
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0226443086

Throughout the 1970s & 1980s, women argued that unless they gained information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. Wendy Kline considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the centre of women's liberation.

Dancing Women

Dancing Women
Author: Sally Banes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1134833180

Dancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage is a spectacular and timely contribution to dance history, recasting canonical dance since the early nineteenth century in terms of a feminist perspective. Setting the creation of specific dances in socio-political and cultural contexts, Sally Banes shows that choreographers have created representations of women that are shaped by - and that in part shape - society's continuing debates about sexuality and female identity. Broad in its scope and compelling in its argument Dancing Women: * provides a series of re-readings of the canon, from Romantic and Russian Imperial ballet to contemporary ballet and modern dance * investigates the gaps between plot and performance that create sexual and gendered meanings * examines how women's agency is created in dance through aspects of choreographic structure and style * analyzes a range of women's images - including brides, mistresses, mothers, sisters, witches, wraiths, enchanted princesses, peasants, revolutionaries, cowgirls, scientists, and athletes - as well as the creation of various women's communities on the dance stage * suggests approaches to issues of gender in postmodern dance Using an interpretive strategy different from that of other feminist dance historians, who have stressed either victimization or celebration of women, Banes finds a much more complex range of cultural representations of gender identities.

Common Bodies

Common Bodies
Author: Laura Gowing
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300142889

This pioneering book explores for the first time how ordinary women of the early modern period in England understood and experienced their bodies. Using letters, popular literature, and detailed legal records from courts that were obsessively concerned with regulating morals, the book recaptures seventeenth-century popular understandings of sex and reproduction. This history of the female body is at once intimate and wide-ranging, with sometimes startling insights about the extent to which early modern women maintained, or forfeited, control over their own bodies. Laura Gowing explores the ways social and economic pressures of daily life shaped the lived experiences of bodies: the cost of having a child, the vulnerability of being a servant, the difficulty of prosecuting rape, the social ambiguities of widowhood. She explains how the female body was governed most of all by other women—wives and midwives. Gowing casts new light on beliefs and practices of the time concerning women’s bodies and provides an original perspective on the history of women and gender.

Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives

Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives
Author: Wenda Trevathan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2010-05-27
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0195388887

In Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives, anthropologist Wenda Trevathan explores a range of women's health issues, with a specific focus on reproduction, that may be viewed through an evolutionary lens. Trevathan illustrates the power and potential of examining the human life cycle from an evolutionary perspective, and how such an approach could help improve both our understanding of women's health and our ability to respond to health challenges in creative and effective ways.

Female Stories, Female Bodies

Female Stories, Female Bodies
Author: Lidia Curti
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 1998-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0814715737

On women authors and women in literature