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Cindy Sherman[edit]

Feminisms[edit]

Many scholars emphasize the relationship Cindy Sherman's work has with the concept of the gaze. In particular, scholars like Laura Mulvey have analyzed Sherman's Untitled series in relation to the male gaze. In a 1991 essay on Sherman, Mulvey states that ″the accouterments of the feminine struggle to conform to a facade of desirability haunt Sherman's iconography,″ which functions as a parody of different voyeurisms captured by the camera.[1]

Others question whether this confrontation with the male gaze and a feminine struggle was an intentional consideration of Sherman's[2][3], and whether this intentionality is important in considering the feminist standpoint of Sherman's photography.

Sherman herself has identified an uncertainty toward the Untitled series' relationship with the male gaze. In a 1991 interview with David Brittain in Creative Camera, Sherman said that "I didn't really analyze it at the time as far as knowing that I was commenting upon some feminist issue. The theories weren't there at all... But now I can look back on some of them, and I think some of them are a little blatantly obvious, too much like the original pin-up pictures of those times, so I have mixed feelings about them now as a whole series."[4]

In addition to questions of the gaze, Sherman's work is also given feminist analysis in the context of Abjection. Scholars like Hal Foster[5] and Laura Mulvey interpret Sherman's use of the abject via the grotesque in 1980s projects like Vomit Pictures as de-fetishizing the female body[1].

Scholar Michele Meager interprets Sherman as having been "crowned a resistant celebrity" to feminist theory[6].

  1. ^ a b Mulvey, Laura (1991). "A phantasmagoria of the female body: The work of Cindy Sherman". New Left Review. 188: 136 – via ProQuest.
  2. ^ Sprague-Jones, Sprague, Jessica, Joy (29 September 2011). "The Standpoint of Art/Criticism: Cindy Sherman as Feminist Artist?". Sociological Inquiry. 81: 404–420 – via Wiley Online Library.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. ^ Liu, Jui-Ch'i (February 2010). "Female Spectatorship and the Masquerade: Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills". History of Photography. 34: 79–89 – via Taylor & Francis Online.
  4. ^ Brittain, David (1999). Creative Camera: Thirty Years of Writing. Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719058059.
  5. ^ Foster, Hal (Autumn 1996). "Obscene, Abject, Traumatic". October. 78: 106–124 – via JSTOR.
  6. ^ Meager, Michelle (November 2010). "Would the Real Cindy Sherman Please Stand Up? Encounters between Cindy Sherman and Feminist Art Theory". Women: A Cultural Review. 13: 18–36 – via Taylor & Francis Online.