I'm slowly coming up with the basic outline for the book I want to write over the next couple years (I say years because I'm still in full time school). After the positive reception to my article on beauty (officially entitled: Beauty and the Expansion of Women's Identity), I've been encouraged to start seriously fleshing out a full book.

I seem to be continually drawn back to the women/feminist artists of the 1970s for guidance on this path. The work done by these pioneering women for both the feminist movement and the art world at large was truly amazing, and has been largely forgotten (see: Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneemann for two examples). Basically, these women were cultivating the emergence of a truly kinesthetic-based feminist aesthetic, one that made both female beauty and the female body central to their agendas of transformation; two categories that were completely ignored by the wider feminist movement. 

Beauty and the Body. There couldn't be two more taboo and controversial topics within feminist theory. Beauty was basically exiled all together as the "myth of the patriarchy", and the female body itself became the most contested site of female oppression. Because the body had become so problematic for women, in the post modern era, many feminists tried to eradicate the female body all together. Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, argued that biology itself was oppressive to women; that the way nature had made us (subject to pregnancy, menstruation etc.) made us inherently dependent on men. Her solution was thus: Eradicate biology as much as possible through all means of technology. Here is where we see the arguments for test tube babies (mothering is patriarchal). From this standpoint, the female body itself becomes seen as inherently patriarchal, including everything that goes along with that body (i.e., beauty). And we wonder why us women are so dissociated from our bodies!!!

Another radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon, is famous for saying that all sex is rape. In simplified terms, because all sex takes place within a fully pervasive patriarchal order, women can never truly consent to sex. Women are always being programed, brainwashed, etc. So now we are not only not allowed to have bodies, we are also mindless, brainless sheep!!    

Obviously, these are the extreme ends of the spectrum, but the notions behind them pervade all feminist discourse, and they deeply effect the way women relate to their own bodies, their own beauty, and other women's bodies and beauty. We need a new language for beauty, and the feminist body. That is why I am going back to these couragous feminist artists of the 70s who used their beauty and bodies as a powerful social and political statement. These women saw the aesthetic as an essential part of any wider revolution for women, an aesthetic cry that went unheard (and continues to go unheard) by their feminist contemporaries.

In later posts I hope to bring in some photos of these artists work as I work on the project. It would be neat to hear others reactions, observations, repulsions, excitements, etc, to being confronted with these, at times, very provocative depections of the female body. My working title for the book title is: "Feminist bodies and the Beauty Taboo".   

"Women sometimes feel a separation and a confusion about who they are. This is experienced as a core wound of existence. It's a primal feeling that something is off, that something is missing. It creates a torque in your being, and women will try to find relief in many different ways--through relationships, for example, or self-help processes. But this core wound is one of the factors that also drives women to seek spiritual relief or awakening--to discover on a very fundamental level who they are as consciousness. And as women wake up and claim their presence here with the liberation of consciousness as their foundations, they will actually shift the dynamics of the world."
                                                                             -Linda Groves-Bonder

"Many years ago, I found myself asking Spirit what it would take to save the world. And the answer came clearly and immediately: a lot of enlightened women."
                                                                             -Lesley Temple-Thurston