Art in Gender Studies

So, sorry if these paintings are not the highest quality, I have not painted since middle school. However, when we started going into art history in this course it inspired me to want and try to paint. Art is a universal language in a way, and can be interpreted in so many different ways. So here are 3 different works of art that I made inspired by this course and what they mean to me.

I decided to make this painting to challenge traditional beauty standards. The subject of the painting is androgynous, therefore cannot be entirely masculine or feminine. Society’s idea of the perfect body changes over time, so there is no such thing as a “perfect body.” During the Renaissance, the ideal body was on the heavier side because it showed that the person was well fed and had wealth. This evolved to the days where “twiggy” was the ideal body type in the 1960s, which is being extremely skinny, to now where fat is only acceptable on certain parts of the body (for instance, butts, breasts, and thighs). Having stomach fat is not acceptable in today’s society because it seems to show laziness. Blemishes were never acceptable because it showed that a person was dirty. So I depicted my subject with traits that are not socially accepted, including a large stomach, small breasts (which can be a man or a woman), stretch marks, and dark spots. I put a well-known quote on the top of the painting that says “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I used watercolor paint because it is loose paint and imperfect but still makes a beautiful work of art, just like the body I painted.

Feminism has historically been something dominated by white upper-class/middle-class women. So I decided to paint an image that depicted third wave feminism. Third wave feminism encompasses concepts such as queer theory, black feminism, and intersectionality. This movement focuses on the issues of all people in relation to gender and sexuality. In my painting, I depicted four completely different individuals that share one commonality, calling themselves a feminist. I was trying to show that a women who dresses conservatively can be a feminist, a women who dress in a more stereotypical “girly” way can be a feminist, a woman of color can be a feminist, and a man can be a feminist. The feminist community used to be a closed community, but now it is more open to the different experiences people face and feminism now looks to end injustices overall.

Throughout history, artists always used women and sexuality as subjects for their work. So in a lot of pieces, you will see naked men with their genitals out and bare breasts and naked women. However, the women’s vaginal region would usually be covered. This made me wonder why the rest of the naked women were seen as beautiful but the genital region was censored? Men rarely had their bare bodies censored so why have women? So, I decided to paint an aroused vagina to try and challenge two things: 1) the lack of female genitalia in art 2) the lack of female sexual pleasure depicted in art. I used very dull colors but I shades of blue and pink to render the vagina and shade the labia majora and labia minora. I drew the vagina during an orgasm so that is the reason that the hole is more wideset. Something taboo that I have wanted to address is the fact that vagina does release liquid when aroused, so I also depicted that. Sexuality is very male-centered in America, a fact that is very prominent in art and in the media. Society has no problem sexualizing women and making them into sexual objects, but is against women as active sexual beings themselves.