Now displayed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Frederic Leighton’s 1895 oil painting Flaming June orbits an unconscious female subject. Against the painting’s calculated — almost architectural — composure, this image of female repose becomes a charged site where sex and sexual desire are insistently inscribed. Leighton choreographs the woman’s body into a carefully… Continue reading The trouble with Sleeping Beauty — desire, desirability and the unconscious female body
The alluring title of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique serves as a successful façade for the book’s rather morose themes. 15 years following her graduation from the all-female Smith College, Friedan constructed a questionnaire for her classmates — now all wives and mothers, but once equally academics. Despite the domestic reverie that had been portrayed… Continue reading What would Betty Friedan make of the 21st-century tradwife?
In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux, in a somewhat self-indulgent practice, recounts her girlhood: all its desire, shame and vulnerability that encircles the years of female adolescence. Ernaux’s creative ability to place herself into the body of her 18-year-old self means reliving sexual and emotional trauma. She divulges into the summer of 1958 when she worked as… Continue reading Journey to the self: detangling adolescent desire and conditioned female shame in A Girl’s Story
