Analysis Of Barbara Kruger 's ' The Body Is A Battleground '

More often than not, analyses of John Rollin Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta interpret the novel as a demonstration of male bravery, and regard the female characters as counterparts that exist to remind the violent men of their humanity. However, an analysis that only considers women for their roles as sentimental beings is one that fails to detect their true significance in the work. Instead, it is essential to recognize that the female characters of the novel diverge from traditional, confining expectations of womanhood, and embody traits of masculinity as a response to their social situations.

Similar to postmodern art, Faith Ringgold's work appropriates unmistakable imagery and other artistic practices to offer basic social editorial. She provokes us to consider expectations for gender and race, and in addition customary desires and estimations of what art may be. Through picture and content, Ringgold changes history to make a place for women like herself in its historical advancement.

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is a photograph that documents a moment of distress within American history. The image works as a visual representation of suffering for those who were lucky enough not to live within the Dust Bowl region. To many it is uncertain if Lange’s image became an American Icon because of the struggle it presented or because of the eye capturing composition of it. However, with this image came forth the issue of a photos validity after photo manipulation, as Lange edited the image by removing the thumb of the mother who was a large subject. Despite the slight manipulation in Migrant Mother, the photograph still presents the situation truthfully, making the photograph function as both a work of art and a historical document.

Also in her work “Their Eyes Were Watching God the author portrays several examples of feminism and gender roles that are similar to “Sweat”. Woman are additionally considered the “weaker sex”. Woman can only gain

Every girl growing up always use to play dress up in clothes as a childhood past time for fun. Cindy Sherman used that passed time as a way to create art with photography and is known for her talent of this act and taking self-portraits of it. Her ideas come stereotypes of women throughout past and present society. These self-portraits are known to “confront and explore the representations of women in society.” (Jankauskas).

In Chapter 3 of his book, “Ways of Seeing”, John Berger argues that in western nude art and present day media, that women are largely shown and treated as objects upon whom power is asserted by men either as figures in the canvas or as spectators. Berger’s purpose is to make readers aware of how the perception of women in the art so that they will recognize the evolution of western cultured art.

Before starting this project, I knew very little about photography, photographers, or exactly how much impact photographical images have had on our society. I have never taken a photography class, or researched too in depth about specific pictures or photographers. This project has allowed me to delve deeper into the world of photography in order to understand just how much influence pictures can have over society’s beliefs, emotions, and understandings’. I have have chosen two highly influential photographers, Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange, who I have found to both resonate with me and perfectly capture human emotions in way that moves others.

With the photographs she takes of herself, she impersonates various characters and shows us the numerous roles women play in our world. In her pictures she depicts women as housewife, sex symbol, lover, victim, monster and more, and causes us to reflect upon how we perceive women.

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

American Literature has always been about men and for men. In this essay, we are going to analyze the women’s role in the book, as inferior and weaker gender.

Andersen examines representation of gender because both men and women need to be looked upon as equals with one another. For example, there are many times when a women needs help and most men think that she is a “damsel in distress”, because a woman that needs saving looks fragile and needs a “man” to save her. This also shows that usually the women are the ones being saved, so that the men can be the ones doing

Junot Diaz, the author of “A Cheaters Guide to Love” writes his short story with many different references to anti-feminism. He writes about women in different ways to show them as powerless, and un-superior to the main character in the short story. From this short story, Diaz conveys the main characters ways when he shows the him talking about, the girl he calls to have sex with, the women at the yoga class, and the files read at the end of the story that show the fifty girls he cheated on his fiancé with. Diaz creates his main character and puts him in the second person to relate to the reader, but show his anti-feministic signs.

For her article in the 1976 publication of the Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Helen Cixous writes, “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put herself into text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement” (Cixous 875). Kathy Acker does just this in her novel, Blood and Guts in High School. Unlike her male contemporaries, Acker took the risk of writing her own body into her text. As a woman who wrote from inside her skin and mind, she maintained an acute awareness that the metaphor of the body politic begins as a gendered experience.

behavior and a cry for the recognition of women's rights ( ). Instead its theme

There is some disparity between the way critics and philosophers like Judith Butler view Cindy Sherman's work and the way that Cindy Sherman speaks of her photographs. It may be the disparity that exists between many modern artists, who often operate on an intuitive level, and the philosopher critics who comment upon them from a theoretical perspective or a pre-established framework. On one level, Cindy Sherman may only be playing "dress-up" (as she herself admits) in her famous History Portraits (1989-90) (Berne, 2003). On another level, however, her "dressing-up" may be indicative of a deeper problem in modern gender identity theory which is the problem of "becoming" woman (Butler, 1994) or, as Judith Butler sees it, the problem of performativity. In the History Portraits, Sherman may certainly be said to be "performing" and perhaps even attempting to "become" the male and female characters she represents in her work. Indeed, it is upon such a premise that philosopher critics and gender theorists find her work so engaging. This paper will examine Cindy Sherman and her History Portraits in relation to Judith Butler's gender theory, the portrayal of the self, and how gender identity has changed throughout the course of modern history. It will examine representations of womanhood from Romantic Idealism to Post-Modernism and will also