My dissertation asserts that the (f

My dissertation asserts that the (female) naked body, a site often associated with
scrutiny, violence, and objectification, is able to make politically and socially useful its own
vulnerability through various feminist art practices. I turn, in particular, to a photographic exhibit
titled The Century Project (TCP) by Frank Cordelle, which chronicles girls and women from
age 0 to 94; each photo is accompanied by a written statement authored by the subject,
sometimes anecdotal, sometimes tragic, sometimes sharp with wit, and often striking. Taken in
the context of related work – from Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party to The Vagina Monologues
– TCP alludes to a rich history of political artwork focused on both empowerment and
embodiment by way of a celebration of women’s bodies and achievements. While there are,
indubitably, powerful philosophical discussions on offer in the critical discourse concerning
embodiment, I will address how the artistic and critical output speaks to the material conditions
of the women they purport to portray – ‘women’ here not referring to a falsely homogenous
category, but actual women with names and life histories. Integral to my project, then, are the
words of the women pictured, as well as the production and reception of the exhibit itself (to
which I can speak personally having both posed and volunteered for TCP).
My project will take as its starting point Rita Felski’s insistence that there does not exist
a feminist aesthetic per se, but rather an opportunity to understand feminist literature and art in
the context of their social, political and historical context, and in terms of what they enable by
way of a culturally urgent critique. To situate TCP in these various contexts, I will consider that
the exhibit alludes to both a history of nude portraiture and filmic representation that takes the
naked female body as its object of study and, as Lynda Need argues in her historical survey of
the female nude in Western art, “seeks to render the female body knowable and possessable.”
How might TCP replicate and/or challenge these oppressive viewing practices, which, in trying
to ‘capture’ the active female subject, relegate her to passive object? I will also explore the
picturing of trauma specifically (reified in starved, scarred, and pained bodies throughout the
exhibit), which raises its own set of queries; TCP hearkens back to Jean-Martin Charcot’s
photographs of hysterical women—male photographers assuming authority on, and attempting
to ‘document’ specifically feminine maladies, whereby the subject is contained by both the
frame and diagnostic modes of address—while simultaneously bringing to the fore
contemporary debates around the representation of suffering more generally (Susan Sontag).
I am sensitive to the danger in framing my discussion (and the female subject) solely in
terms of victimology (a concern shared with Elizabeth Grosz); as clear as I can map TCP’s
place in a long trajectory of practices that have aesthetically rendered the female body subject
to the power and control of the male artist, I have also witnessed and will argue for its
transformative, salutary, and markedly feminist possibilities. In line with Mark Reinhardt’s
assertion in Beautiful Suffering that it is necessary to consider that there are multiple viewing
contexts, some of which exacerbate the injury of those pictured, others of which make that
pain politically resonant, I will assert that the photographs of TCP, while not unproblematic,
make socially and politically relevant the experiences of the women that comprise the project –
as well as those who look and read with recognition at the various instances of struggle and
joy. My project will be critical of the debilitating association between women and victimhood,
and in favour of recognizing the strength inherent in being vulnerable, in willfully exposing
one’s self, in standing naked, unabashed and unapologetic in the face of impossible body
types, which have become not only the ideal, but a self-regulating, disciplinary force. Following
Judith Butler’s question, what, politically, might be made of grief (Precarious Life), I will argue
that loss provides a supplement to rights-based discourses by emphasizing our dependency
on and vulnerability to one another; in other words, TCP, by way of multiple bodies and
subjectivities, encourages inclusion and recognition (and therefore a claim to legitimacy) of
both specific instances of pain, violence and grief but also of our mutual vulnerability.