This article was published last year in 'Essays in Philosophy', Humboldt State University, California.
In the article I consider instances in visual culture in which artists and filmmakers aestheticize women with damaged, missing or anomalous limbs. I focus upon Joel Peter Witkin’s photomontage Las Meninas (1987), Peter Greenaway’s film A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), Alison Lapper Pregnant a statue by Marc Quinn, Mathew Barney’s film Cremaster (2002), David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), Luis Buñuel’s Tristana (1970) and David Lynch’s short film The Amputee (1973). Although I do cite other films as well. I argue that although the artists and filmmakers reveal, rather than disguise the damaged, anomalous or missing limb(s) of the women, thus valorising their particular embodiment, these women are paradoxically still portrayed as deviant and monstrous.
I've posted this entry today because last night I attended a lecture delivered by Barbara Creed, in which she contextualised sexual displays and rituals by various bird species (footage gleaned from David Attenborough) alongside similar displays by women in Hollywood films of the 30s and 40s. Barbara argued that not only were women portrayed as beautiful, fecund and essential for propagating the human species (showing the influence of Darwinian thought on cinema), but were purposefully dressed or displayed (often in flower shapes, holding or wearing fruit, or as part of a interwoven pattern) so as to be perceived as part of the complexity of nature. I was interested in how in a number of instances women were augmented in such a way that they became icons of excess that bordered on the grotesque.
Barbara Creed's new book is entitled: Darwin's Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema (MUP Academic Monographs, 2009).
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