A Justice Site
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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: April 15, 2004
Latest Update: April 17, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, April 2004.
"Fair use" encouraged.
This week's painting is taken from an acrylic on canvas that I haven't finished because I have to keep coming back to the site and teaching. So this is retirement! Well, at least it's fun. I began notes on trying to understand my unfinished painting before I got around to painting it digitally. They are at Feminist Theoretical Paths.
After struggling to explain the unfinished painting to Pat yesterday, and to conceptually link it Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, I sat down to digitalize the subject with some trepidation today. Why the iconology of the Virgin Mary? Surely it cannot be just because I grew up in my tender years living in a convent school. Certainly that had an impact, but the iconology of the Virgin is repetitive in my work. And why, oh why, did the naked lady of the mud flaps appear in her arms instead of the child Jesus?
As an artist I don't have to know the answers. As a teacher, I need to understand what my mind is telling me. Finally, I think I found at least one coherent explanation in Chapter 6, Style and Power, by Josephine Donovan, and Chapter 7, Radical Writing, by Peter Hitchcock. Please do not take this to be "the" explanation of my painting. There is no "the" explanation. This is just a recorded dialog between the "me" that paints and the "me" that teaches feminism and social justice.
Both the iconology of the Virgin and that of the Naked Lady come to us chiefly through male ideology of what woman should be. Just as the colonial woman has difficulty finding a way to speak who she is, women everywhere have trouble to see themselves except through the icons of male ideology. I have trouble to see myself except through male images. That doesn't usually trouble me because I'm not alone by any means. The image of the Virgin was a safe ideal to cling to, at least until the 21st Century. And the image of the naked lady could be adopted and thrown angrily or ironically back at the male ideologue.
Now, it helps that males we live with no more match the ideal than do we:
But that doesn't help me to see me. What does help me is that I can recognize that there are thousands, millions?, of images of woman within me, and that the problem with the traditinal male perspective is that it is linear and hierarchical. so it sees me as having all these images, yes, but the male perspective ranks them as hierarchical, changing the hierarchy according to the male interest in the particular female. This is how we can get so confused that we try to look like the naked lady when it looks to me like she could do with some orthopedic and/or chiropractic help. When the males in our life are reflecting their momentatry interest in the naked lady, we lose in the hierarchy of rankings with our own image. But when he's hungry the male isn't looking for the naked lady sunning herself. Then he's got another female image in mind. I don't mind so much that he has all these different icons in his head. I have them, too. It's called culture. But I do mind when he tries to define me by his icons and within his hierarchical vision. That's where feminism comes in.
Feminist theory recognizes pluralities, recognizes that temporal patterns alter images, short-term temporal patterns that determine whether we're hungry or not, and long-term temporal patterns that determine whether the fashion idol of the times wears corsets or not. If the naked lady isn't wearing one, she's malformed. But then, so is Barbie, and guys seem to like that.
In the painting, as much of it as I can verbally express at this point, the Virgin is the more socially acceptable of the two icons. She's the "good" girl. And the naked lady is the Mary Magdalene of all time, the "bad" girl. But the Virgin and the naked lady are both woman. And the Virgin holds the naked lady with no display of antagonism. That's a feminist style of a paratactic figure, one that sees many perspectives as equally valid, equally important, if temporally dependent. And women connect such figures with "AND." Meaning that I saw the Virgin AND the naked lady. The "and" connection allows each different perspective to be just that, a different perspective, a different icon, a different ideal, a different enactment of all of those. That style is one of using "polysyndeton, a paratactic figure that connects ideas through a series of 'and' phrases.
I didn't know I was doing that. I never even saw these words before that theory book. But theory here, once again, helps me understand better what I am trying to say in relation to the dominant discourse, so that when I need to answer, I will be able to do so much more effectively. When I yelped last semester about the naked lady icon, I didn't know precisely why I was yelping. So I didn't know how to make Wayne understand that there was indeed something wrong. Something that had to be talked about and acted upon. Now, almost a whole semester later I see that it was the dominant discourse style of hierarchy of icons and imagery that was part of the problem. And now I can illustrate that for you and for me. Wayne may still not agree with me, but I can answer him with greater confidence than I had when I just stood there and barked. If we are going to be effective in creating social change, we're going to need to use theory to help us organize what we feel so that we can organize our catalysts for change more effectively.
More references, more summaries, more theory later. jeanne Early Friday evening.
References:
Feminism:
- Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic. Edited by Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinistry. Suny. 1991. ISBN:0-7914-0770-5 (pbk).
Imagery and Icons
Ideology
- Frida Kahlo: Identity/duality
- Religious Rituals, Body Symbols, and Female Gender Identity: A Comparative Study of the Catholic Devotion to the Sacred Heart in 20th C. Italy and the United States. Harvard Divinity School. Text not available on site. jeanne
- Art and Identity:Budddhism
Notes to myself - April 15 - on Painting of the Week - done in acrylics on canvas - trasferred to digital tomorrow - jeanne
Virgin and child
Virgin and naked ladythereoetical background: transparency: places the infant female in the form that has come to be identified with female. Defines female as subordinate and yet powerful
The muslim veil: provides transparency so that male can substitute his imagery
woman of woman born - body image and identity - what effect does it have that the virgin image is still acceptable, but the child is no longer acceptable - child of woman, like woman, in woman's unique function - rejected.sometimes the Virgin holds miniature King Jesus, not child - what I'm saying is that all perspectives are one, when hidden by the veil - the lamb - challenging that man is allowed to make his portrayal of the "bad" only, and yet still cover it with the veil - what we need is paratactic style - style that is non-hierarchical, using polysyndeton, lots of "ands" where each new addition is equal - there should be a virgin and a naked lady
veil covers over and makes acceptable what is under it - like the black box in physics -
feminist theory needs to remove the veil in order to permit the paratactic style to function, and yet, if we cover the female, then we cover what could still be hierarchy
One of the things I was trying to do was to bring to awareness the extent to which man's self-appointed right to idealize woman as the naked lady insults all men, all women, and so I meant for the Virging who finds herself holding the naked lady to be insulted by all men, and to remind women of the complicity inherent in silence in the face of such insults. Gee, that took a long time to get into words. I painted this weeks ago and have been trying to verbalize these thoughts ever since. Bauer and McKinstry's Feminisim, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, at p. 89. helped. jeanne . And it's insulting because it excludes the paratactical figure of polydyndeton - it doesn't allow for the naked woman AND the Virgin; it forms a hierarchy of preference, though granted the preference would be different within different systems. Woman is all these things; but she is not one of these things at the expense of the other. jeanne Thursday night. April 15.
