Berger And Berreby Analysis

In today’s society we have created this sense of identity that we can either reveal and or hide behind that can include either a computer screen, our skin, or even who we want people to think we are. In John Berger’s essay Ways of Seeing, he breaks down the misogynistic view we have on woman by comparing what it is to be naked versus being simply nude. In Neal Gabler’s essay Our Celebrities, Ourselves, the idealized celebrity is brought down to human level and formed into a never ending narrative that categorizes them into the people they are seen as versus the people they actually are. Berger criticizes the disguise a woman must wear as being surveyed by men in the form of art yet Gabblers idea of a disguise is more like a role a celebrity

These differences aren’t biological as some researchers lead us to believe, claiming that men are more sexually stimulated by images, making it natural for women to be gazed at. Bordo argues that our culture determines what if acceptable for “women learn to anticipate, even play to the sexualizing gaze…in the process we learn how sexy being gazed at can feel-perhaps precisely because it walks the fine edge of shame” (135). Yet, with the use of erotic male images and her clearly sexually reaction to them, Bordo pushes readers to question why there are differences in how men and women are viewed and view each other. Who decides what is acceptable?

The central message of this work is that society is obsessed with appearances. The point the author is trying to make is beauty should not be the most important trait of a person. In today’s society everything is based on looks, people are more concerned about a person’s outward appearance. People strive to

Berger’s first claim which sets up the premise behind Chapter 3 is that socially, a woman’s existence is different from that of a man’s. A man’s presecence is tied to how much or how little power he possesses and how he executes this onto the world at large. He is the doer, the achiever, the generator. In contrast, a woman’s existence is manifested by how she communicates that existence to herself, which then becomes interpreted to the rest of the world. She adjusts herself (voice, gestures, etc.) so as to adapt to a viewer. She lacks autonomy and therefore becomes an object, or rather a sight.

There are many companies in the world today that put an idea of this perfect female body into the heads of women. These images lead to a faulty standard men hold of women and their bodies and that women strive to become. Margaret Atwood addresses the issue of the way men view the female body by writing her essay in the viewpoints of a male so the reader can better understand how the expectation men have of the female body is unrealistic. First, she uses an allusive comparison to show the male expectation of the female body and how it is objectified as if it were a doll that comes with accessories. Next, she uses an anecdote with defamiliarization to show how the way the father views a Barbie doll and the way it portrays the female body to young girls is hypocritical. Lastly, Margaret Atwood uses insidious diction to talk about how men not only view the female body as a product but how they also use the female body as a product which can be sold amongst businessmen. In The Female Body, Margaret Atwood uses many rhetorical devices to convey how the female body is viewed through the eyes of men.

Judy Chicago (artist, author, feminist and educator) has a career that now spans five decades. In the late 1960s, her inquiry into the history of women began a result of her desire to expose the truth of women’s experiences, both past and present. She still continues on a crusade to change the perception of women from our history, “Women’s history and women’s art need to become part of our cultural and intellectual heritage.” (Chicago, 2011) Through our history women - their struggles, accomplishments and contribution to history, have been overlooked, downplayed and even completely written out of a male dominated society and culture. In anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s 1974 essay “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” she supports this view, writing “…woman is being identified with—or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of—something that every culture devalues,” (Ortner, 1974) Where Mendieta's work primarily came from a striving to belong and an understanding of where she came from, I feel that Chicago's aim was to find a place for all women, past and present in this world, starting with herself in the art world. Chicago did explore her peronal heritage in later works entitled 'Birth Project' and 'Holocaust Project'.

I acknowledge that the male gaze is present in our modern society and it is what influences our fashion industry to produce imagery that contains visually desirable female bodies. However, what I wish to put forth is that the female body portrayed in my work is used as a beautiful vessel that contains psychological human depth and emotions revealing a multi-faceted human being. By distorting my work I challenged the critiques and conversations during my senior year which encouraged me to break through from beauty and fashion aesthetic in order to get closer to a more conceptual, psychological realm. By breaking through, I put forth what I am most interested in, the psychology of the visceral. Beauty is just a tool to draw the viewer into my

In the essay, “Rereading Edward Weston: Feminism, Photography, and Psychoanalysis”, Roberta McGrath introducing Edward Weston as a photographer who is “strange and his artworks have been dominated by his own writing”. Edward Weston provides his photographic work with the perception through his writing and journals, “The Day Books”, that consists of his life through photography, his children, his desire for women and the health foods, and his hallucinations. McGrath discusses the issue of the feminism in the art world and suggests that men were forbids to viewing art without the sensual connotations, while she didn’t explain how women view men. McGrath discusses how Weston’s oeuvre is in the connection of the feminism and Psychoanalysis. In

My guttural reaction to reading the Fay and Moon paper was mild annoyance, particularly at the suggestion “if the humanists fail to provide an account of social theories, we fare little better at the hands of the naturalists.” (219) Intentionality, according to Fay and Moon, is the pinch point as far as the naturalist is concerned. There is an underlying assumption for both that intentionality is not something which can be accounted for within an naturalist perspective, “the social sciences are needed to explain phenomenon which are different from those in the natural world--the are intentional[.]” (219) Due to intricacies of implied meanings of humans, they suggest that human interactions are too complex to be understood solely in terms of their natural properties.

The Nude in Art History, which covers “sexual objectification, double standard of sexual behavior, and the Madonna-Whore Complex” talks about how women were and are portrayed in art. Many times women are seen as sexual objects (sexual objectification). This double standard on how women should be treated compared to men is a real issue, and art from the past really displays that issue. “Seeing comes before words” (Berger pg.7), a very powerful quote, Berger goes into saying that the way we see things is different than the way we speak of things. Sometimes when you see something words can do no justice. I think taking that idea away from Berger and putting it in relation to this unit’s topic, the way women are portrayed in art, lets the viewer

When I think about the differences between men and women, there are many different ways to go about listing their individual distinctions. Although we are both human beings, men and women are in fact totally opposite. Supplementary to the obvious difference, sex type, there are numbers of other subjects left waiting to be analyzed.

in terms of object but as a projection of who we would like to be. She

Then photographing their bodies using the most peculiar of materials, they created fascinating and simultaneously repugnant images of Globules of Foam engulfing the body, asymmetric spines, bulged oversized muscled forms. What becomes more apparent within the photographs, the disturbing blank expressions, the non-existent emotional state of the subject, just starring back at you. It is not horrified or excited about the change of their form, they are merely present and allow themselves to be shown to you. It’s a purely visceral and visually arresting experience, that sort of lucid acceptance, clearly not hiding the kind of imperfections and oddities that society mostly trains us to be ashamed of. They are unnervingly confident about themselves. Lucy and Bart’s photographs, no matter how unnerving they might be, present us with a strong character, something to possibly compare with the likes of Picasso and Da Vinci’s painted subjects. The rest is up to the viewer.

The objectification of woman in art and the systemic sexism displayed in the works Berger discusses are indicative of a larger societal problem. However, we have undoubtedly progressed in the years since the publication of Ways of Seeing; this is demonstrated in the incredibly different approach to the female nude by contemporary artists such as Freud and Erin as discussed above. In fact, it is a strong argument that Bergers definition of nude is no longer relevant and instead the naked nude may be more appropriate.

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate - in practice and conceptually - the function of the mirror in visual art, with particular reference to the portrayal of women.
By drawing from the field of art and literature featuring the mirror and reflection, I will be looking at how the work of contemporary women artists and photographers challenged traditional attitudes and practices. This dissertation will be about women who use visual arts to stage interventions into the representation of the ‘female self’.
The female body and mirror have repeatedly featured in visual art over the centuries. It is the purpose of my dissertation to discover the reasons behind the use of the mirror in both western and contemporary art, giving a historical overview of women artists’ differing strategies towards self-portraiture throughout the twentieth century and analysing why this area has proved so fruitful and inspiring for women.