Sarah Baartman - Cultural Studies

Nichols uses humour as the main deconstructive strategy to be an efficient tool for subverting the myths that have oppressed black women. The woman’s body acquires relevance, as the poems focus on a black immigrant woman within a context of white supremacy. Nichols creates persona who she uses to represent the black female body and she constitutes a challenge to black women’s objectification in the Western (British) society, in which she is exiled. The writer occasionally speaks in the first person, has no name, so the third-person poetic voice refers to her as ‘the fat black woman’. The fat black woman refuses to be a victim and, therefore, rejects all the traps laid by racist and sexist society by means of stereotypes that aim at constricting her into limiting roles. It is her that

In Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” John acts as the mirror through which women are viewed negatively in the society, a society in which women are not considered citizens. They are not supposed to be anywhere near the political or public environment. Instead, they should remain in their homes. This view has led to women creating women movements to fight for their place in the society.

1985 (Figure 2) first appeared in 1985 plastered on billboards around New York City. The piece is illustrated in monochrome colours so to not distract viewers from the meaning of the poster. The harsh contrast in colours between the black writing and white background make the piece stand out and draw the attention of bypassers. Written on the artwork is a list of well-known museums in New York City and beside them is a score of how many women artists have had one-person exhibits there in the past year. The results showed that the Guggenheim, Metropolitan and Whitney museums each had zero, whilst the Modern museum had one. These results are supposed to shock the audience and make gallery curators feel a sense of guilt, that it’s clear the art world don’t appreciate women artists like they do men. Whist they are confronting the public with that truth they are also providing another critical message with this piece. The Guerrilla Girls identified these museums by first name, not out of convenience, but to make a statement, that the only museums to allow women artist some form of respect like male artist do was the ‘modern’ museum. Emphasising the fact that gender discrimination and bias nature in the art world should be in the past, and the only museum that realises and recognises this is the modern one. The poster’s main message challenges the patriarchal world of art and confronts art galleries

Did you know that discrimination can take many forms from race, gender, religion and sexuality and that “40% of Canadian workers experience bullying on a weekly basis” (Canadian Bullying Statistics)? One of the biggest example of discrimination is female oppression. Even today, women are perceived and shaped generally as fragile and caring. During the 1900’s, and many years before, women were oppressed; some were even hospitalized for wanting to expand their knowledge. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman, and the author herself, are great examples regarding the oppression of women by a patriarchal power structure during the 1900’s. Throughout the story, Gilman exemplifies the social struggle against male domination that woman faced through her personal experience, the characters in her story and the wallpaper as a symbol of the male authority.

Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Artists Rights Society (ARS). (2017). Collection. Retrieved from MOMA Museum of Modern Art, US: Museum of Modern Art [US]/https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78699

By employing themes such as psychosexual fantasies, race, gender, and violence, artist Kara Walker reconstructs and explores the history and effects of American slavery on American culture. Although being called names like notorious, revolting, anti-progressive, and shameless, she continues to be a pioneer of bringing the unspeakable aspects of American slavery that are not commonly discussed and are left out of the history books to the foreground of public discussion.

Throughout our history, there have been many incidents that have helped shaped American culture. Many of these incidents have substantially affected women. To counter these phenomena, women work as shapeshifters. That is to say, they shift and morph their ethics and endeavors in order to adapt to their external, social environment. From the glamorization of woman’s confinement in Cotton Mather’s “The Captivity of Hannah Dustan” to overcoming political and social exclusion in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments” and, finally, to the emersion of female sexual liberty in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, we can observe how women become different iconic symbols of America through using religion and moral persuasion as methods to fight the tyrannies that oppress them.

A single photo can tell thousands of stories about people that have been silenced in the past or those who are still silenced today. This is the case for the photograph titled “Oppression” by Luke Moore. In such a simple picture, the author is giving voice to the women who have been mistreated, killed, raped and oppressed. This treatment against women is not new and has been implemented all over the world. Moore uses line, character, and color to appropriately demonstrate the fight women have against oppression and the responsibility society has on this oppressive system.

“Will women ever break the bronze ceiling?” by Maya Rhodan is an article in the September 4, 2017 edition of Time magazine. It is about how the U.S. is trying to change the fact that there is a very small amount of statues of real, historical women in the United States. The article later talks about the protest for the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, va and how many places in the U.S. took down Confederate memorials. It says in response to this protest “Now a parallel movement is growing to boost representations of people who have been left out (Rhodan 28).” Later in the article, it describes the change in the U.S. regarding the issue that women aren’t generally depicted in statues. It later shows the change happening

Despite living in a confined room, the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” finds a way to break free, become an entirely new person, and explore the evils and unfairness holding her back in society. This demonstrates that those who are oppressed can overcome their oppressors but cannot belong in the same structure after realizing the negative impact on not only themselves, but also on society as a whole. The narrator is forced to suppress her true feelings until she violently overcomes her unjust treatment and cannot return to the compromised structure. Her treatment is directly affiliated with her femininity and she chooses to abandon all aspects of her gender, gender roles, and expectations to lose her past self and reject the patriarchal influences on society.

Jacobs autobiography which is known by the name of ‘Incidents in a Life of a Slave Girl’ gave a true account of the treatment that black women faced during that time and also throwing some light on a perception which has been kept in shadows from the society. While writing the story of her life, Jacobs though focused on her defeat due to obstacles like race and gender, gave voice to something which was hidden from society regardless of the presence of patriarchal society of the nineteenth century.

I fell in love with methodologies of art history. I felt empowered in that, through my own interpretations, I could attach words and meaning to objects. My study of art history reached a turning point when, in 2012, I took a class entitled Identity in a Post-Identity Art World: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Trans/Nationality, 1990 to the Present. The course endowed me with another lens with which to examine works and, more importantly, shed light on representations of marginalized identities. As a result, I was introduced to the writings of Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir, both seminal theorists who inspired my own analyses. I enjoyed every minute of conducting research and forming arguments to support my claims. Ultimately I was interested in developing my understanding of issues in contemporary art further and sought to accomplish this by engaging with a larger

Having established an abolitionist position through other works and reviews (Ferguson 84), Wollstonecraft proceeded to complicate her prior references to mothers and daughters as slaves by folding abolitionist rhetoric into her arguments for women’s rights (Ferguson 83). By comparing the dehumanisation of women to the brutalisation of “the poor African slaves” (Wollstonecraft 96), Vindication draws a distinctive parallel between the experience of colonised slaves and the relatively privileged classes of white European women. This strategy creates “new political possibilities” through a suggestion of “collective opposition” (Ferguson 92). However, it also co-opts black women as “sexual victims” to underline her arguments about male sexual power and implicate white women in the “resistance” black female slaves (93). This is a problematic engagement with female experience because it reduces one group of women to “shadowy figures” that are only “ushered in” to support the argument for the emancipation of women occupying positions of privilege over colonised slaves (93). This creates a rhetoric which uses the racial, colonial, and gendered injustice suffered by enslaved black women living as a metaphor for free white women’s subordination without interrogating the privileges held by white women over people of other races, especially those living in

Jacobs autobiography which is known by the name of ‘Incidents in a Life of a Slave Girl’ gave a true account of the treatment that black women faced during that time and also throwing some light on a perception which has been kept in shadows from the society. While writing the story of her life, Jacobs though focused on her defeat due to obstacles like race and gender, gave voice to something which was hidden from society regardless of the presence of patriarchal society of the nineteenth century.

The artwork chosen was created by Kara Walker(1969-). The prodigious sculpture measures at seventy-five feet long by thirty-five feet tall with the width is unknown sculpture is titled as “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby”(Figure 1). This sculpture was created at a closed down Domino Sugar factory. In addition to the usage of space, Walker also used a sugary paste donated by Domino Sugar to create the exterior layer of the sculpture. This sculpture was created similar to a replica of The Sphinx. While the shape and form of the “Marvelous Sugar Baby” is similar to The Sphinx, resting on its appendages, the sculptures are quite different. Unlike the Sphinx, Walker’s sculpture was created with the features of an African woman wearing a headband with the over dramatized and example of an over sexualized African woman’s body. She had chosen to create this sculpture at this location because the building was less than standard. The structure was falling apart, and molasses was running down the walls. It was a horrid, yet an ideal place for the project in her eyes. The way the entire Domino structure, made of the beams holding up the building, was built to provide a cage encasing the sculpture. Walker’s intention with this sculpture was to speak out against the difficulties people nowadays have discussing African slavery in the sugar field, and the several hardships that were brought upon these women: slave trading for high quality items and constant over sexualization of