The Female Body in the Looking-Glass ─ Contemporary Art, Aesthetics and Genderland

The 'mirror stage' in Lacanian psychoanalytical theory constructs the female body as lacking. However, what happens if you follow Baudrillard's advice to 'swallow the mirror'? Basia Sliwinska's Genderland, like Alice's Wonderland, is an invitation through the looking-glass. It explores the reflections and realities that we see in the cultural mirror, offering radical new insights into gender identity and the politics of vision in contemporary women's art.

This book maps representations of the social and cultural 'other' associated with visual tropes of femininity, such as Alice in Wonderland, Venus or Lolita, in seminal practices of women artists. When discussed through the metaphor of the mirror, these practices go beyond gender binaries and embrace otherness and difference. The text offers a close reading of post-1989 artistic projects that construct new relationships between art and activism and intervene in gender inequalities, producing new forms of political aesthetics, and re-assessing patriarchal regimes. The mirror reflects becoming subjects, ideologies and identities which are discussed in terms of their close connections to the gaze, body, patriarchy and gender. Such themes have become prominent in postcolonial feminist and gender discourses critiquing gender asymmetries, but can they be traced in contemporary art cartography? Can they direct representational strategies of the female body beyond the hegemony of the Western heterosexual male gaze?

Everyday images of femininity reinforce unequal representations of gender and the obsessive positioning of the female body as 'lacking' that arise from the Lacanian concept of the 'mirror stage'. By examining lesser-known, gender-related practices of women artists from both sides of the former Iron Curtain, including Joanna Rajkowska, Lora Hristova, Jess Dobkin, Natalia LL, Sedzia Glowny and SZ-ZS, Basia Sliwinska investigates provocative works which challenge Lacan's 'mirror stage', providing scenarios and visual concepts that offer alternative readings of 'female' representations to those already in play.

Basia Sliwinska is an art historian and art theorist. She holds a full-time post at Loughborough University, UK, and teaches Critical and Historical Studies and is a Visiting Lecturer at Sotheby's Institute of Art in London. She is also an Associate Editor at the academic journal, Third Text and the Chair of Freelance and Independents Group, Association of Art Historians.