Gender Equality In Feminist Art

You enter an art gallery and you come upon Cindy Sherman’s #10 untitled film still (fig. A.1.). In this photograph you see women squatting down on the floor; her skirt is pulled up. You are taken aback by the girl in this sexual position, and frankly, you are a bit uncomfortable. You then see the spilled groceries on the ground and place her in the place of a housewife, running around to cook dinner for her husband. The way that we view this photograph can be attributed back to the theory, of “male gaze.” Cindy Sherman was the first photographer to incorporate this strategy into photography which was, up to this point, only used in movies. Mary Devereaux defines the male gaze both literally and figuratively. Literally speaking, the male gaze …show more content…
Peg Brand, in her peer reviewed essay, Feminist Art Epistemologies: Understanding Feminist Art, discusses the importance of female artists creating feminist artwork. This is because all through time, artwork has been created by men. When going about looking at this problem she referred to the reactions of popular feminist artists and their artwork and the criticism they received, such as Judy Chicago and her piece, “Dinner Party.” She received much negative attention from male critics about her art being poronographic whereas female critics reacted more positively, looking past the “porographic” qualites of it and instead focusing on the feminist message Chicago had for viewers of her work. She backed up her thoughts on female artist oppression by looking at statistics of the price of similar artwork of men and women and the difference in prices, and even activists like the guerrilla girls and the protest posters they put out. From this she concluded that when men create artwork of women, they can’t capture an accurate embodiment of them. When women create artwork about women it is more genuine because “feminist art created by women is a unique expression of personal experience and firsthand knowledge that seeks to bring to attention to women’s positive attributes.” In a world where art has been mostly created by men who seek to make themselves better than their female counterparts, this is an important message. Women, like Chicago, seem to be punished for creating artwork that is feminist because men don’t understand it. Men have no experience being a woman and therefore cannot create artwork that successfully embodies them. Brand stresses the importance of creating feminist art because of the need for female artists to be on the same level as male artists to fight the injustice and inequality of the two sexes in the world