Abstract:
This mini-dissertation serves as a framework for my own creative practice. In this
research paper my intention is to explore, within a feminist reading, representations of
the female corpse in fashion photography and art. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall's
theories on the concept of representation are utilised to critically analyse and
interogate selected images from fashion magazines, which depicts the female corpse
in an idealised way. Such idealisation manifests in Western culture, in fashion
magazines, as expressed in depictions of the attractive/ seductive/fine-looking female
corpse. Fashion photographs that fit this description are critically contrasted and
challenged to selected artworks by Penny Siopis and Marlene Dumas, alongside my
own work, to explore how the female corpse can be represented, as strategy to
undermine the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body. Here the
study also explores the selected artists' utilisation of the abject and the grotesque in
relation to their use of artistic mediums and modes of production as an attempt to
create ambiguous and conflicting combinations of attraction and repulsion (the
sublime aesthetic of delightful horror), thereby confronting the viewer with the notion
of the objectification of the decease[d] feminine body as object to-be-looked-at. This
necessitated the inclusion of seminal theories developed by the French theorist, Julia
Kristeva (1982) on the abject and the Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) on the
grotesque.
