What's Wrong with the (White) Female Nude
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"What's Wrong with the (White) Female Nude? (2016) is an essay by Zoey Lavallee which criticizes Anne W. Eaton for her "single-axis framework of analysis" in "What's Wrong with the Female Nude?". She wants to involve race intersectionally:
- "I want to focus not only on how nudes are represented in the Western canon, but also on the nudes that are omitted, and moreover why the representation of the omitted nudes would raise some different questions than the nudes that come into Eaton’s critique."
Lavallee cites Charles W. Mills and “Reinventing Herself: The Black Female Nude” by Lisa E. Farrington, Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant.
She shows
- Reneé Cox, Yo Mama’s Pieta, 1994 (photography)
- Reneé Cox, David, 1994 (photography)
- Sugar Baby by Kara Walker
The essay uses the word nonwhite 48 times.
She cites Lynda Nead's The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality by way of conclusion:
- "The patriarchal tradition of the female nude subsumes the complex set of issues and experiences surrounding the representation of the female body within a single and supposedly unproblematic aesthetic category. If one challenges the boundaries of this category, it is at least possible to propose not a single aesthetic register but a range of possibilities and differences – distinctions of race, size, health, age and physical ability which create a variety of female identities and standpoints. In its articulation of differences, an engaged feminist practice necessarily breaks the boundaries of the high-art aesthetic symbolized by the female nude."
She ends by calling the work of Eaton insidious.
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See also
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