Women Artists Research Articles

Quilting in West Africa: Liberian Women Stitching Political, Economic, and Social Networks in the Nineteenth Century

Quilts occupy a liminal position in the histories of art and material culture. Centering analyses around specific artworks like Martha Ricks’ 1892 Coffee Tree quilt, as well as investigating women’s writing about their material production, illuminates ignored narratives about the ways black women participated in international social, political, and economic networks around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Quilters who emigrated from the United States to Liberia in the nineteenth century incorporated an aesthetic heritage from the American South with new visual vocabularies developing alongside the newly independent nation. Artists relied on networks with abolitionists in the United States and local textile knowledge to source materials for their work. Finished quilts circulated in local and international contexts, furthering social, political, and economic objectives. Like Harriet Powers’ bible quilts, Ricks’ quilts gained fame through exhibition and a whimsical artist’s biography. Quilts’ fragility as natural-fiber textiles in a tropical climate makes a finding a body of works difficult to examine as there are no extant Liberian quilts from the nineteenth century. However, it is possible to patch together a network of women artists, their patrons, and audiences from West Africa to North America and Europe through creative investigation of diverse historical records, including diary entries, letters, newspaper articles, and photographs. I argue that by examining Martha Ricks’ artworks, self-presentation through portraiture, and published writing, it is possible to envision a new narrative of black women’s participation in visualizing the newly-minted Republic of Liberia for Atlantic audiences.

Contemporary Italian Women Artists of African Descent: A Transnational and Intersectional Approach to their Lives and Works

ABSTRACT This article considers the life and work of Afrodescendant Italian artists Iris Peynado, Nadia Kibout and Nadia Ali. Through my interviews with them and a critical analysis of their films, I underline the cultural value of their achievements and emphasize the discriminations that black women face in contemporary society and in the cinema industry. Racial, class and gender biases often are subjects of their filmmaking, and offer a critical site to reflect on the need for further social and political change. Their collective experience is seen in light of a transnational spatial and temporal continuity between black Italians and the diasporic communities around the world. A variety of nuanced cultural expressions makes it inaccurate to consider Italian Afrodescendant artists as a monolithic group of women having a single identity. In spite of societal biases, they are powerfully emerging as filmmakers, actresses, and activists. They contribute to our understanding that a true postcolonial approach requires a more fluid and flexible consideration of Italian identity as a transnational and multi-faceted expression of a fertile intersection of people of diverse genders, races, and religions.

5 Questions for Idra Novey

5 Questions for Idra Novey Michelle Johnson (bio) and Idra Novey (bio) IN TAKE WHAT YOU NEED, Idra Novey's third novel, a woman who fled her childhood in the Allegheny Mountains endures an uneasy return when her stepmother, Jean, dies. There in her Rust Belt hometown, Leah is astonished to find Jean's metal sculptures, what Jean called her Manglements. In this novel of ideas with a propulsive plot, characters take what's discarded—from a desolate landscape and damaged relationships—and make something meaningful. Click for larger view View full resolution Q Take What You Need is set in the southern Allegheny Mountains, in a town painted in desolation with its boarded-up storefronts and empty, condemned houses, "the hulking emptiness of the mills." The airport is long-gone, the hospital closed, but political polarization is present. I read the novel as, among other things, a Rust Belt novel. Why did you decide to write a novel set in the Rust Belt? A One in four people in this country is estranged from a close relative. During the previous administration, I had an intense disagreement with one of my siblings that led to a prolonged, painful estrangement. I couldn't find any novels that addressed the psychic cost of cutting off communication with a sibling or parent over a political divide. As I have in all my novels, I decided to write the scenes I longed to read. This novel takes place in the Rust Belt region of western Pennsylvania where parts of my family have lived for over a century, and still live. I've come to see the upsides of that rural reality with new eyes, returning now with my children, playing with them in the same creek where I played as a kid. Yet some of the statements on billboards around town, on the signs in people's yards, are terrifying. This novel became a way to think more deeply about that dissonance, how the [End Page 19] ongoing experience of political polarization is impacting me and my children in ways we may not realize for years to come. Click for larger view View full resolution Q What other Rust Belt literature would you recommend? A Hanif Abdurraqib is a superb writer from Columbus, Ohio. I loved the poems in his collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much. One of my favorite novels set in the Rust Belt, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, by Joan Chase, came out in the 1980s. It's a quietly radical novel about women's stifled lives in rural Ohio, the covert ways they seek pleasures denied to them. Q Louise Bourgeois and Agnes Martin appear throughout the novel, with Jean quoting them, relying on their wisdom for guidance. How did these two artists come to feature so prominently in the novel? A Louise Bourgeois entered the novel after finding a beat-up book of her writing at a flea market. Bourgeois's insights on sexuality and power, on her father, aligned potently with Jean's artistic drive. Bourgeois recognized the libidinal forces fueling her sense of defiance. Agnes Martin's writing aligned with Jean's process in other aspects. Martin chose to retreat and work in complete solitude in her later years. While writing Jean's chapters, I also immersed myself in the writing of Anne Truitt, Celia Paul, Hilma af Klint, and many other women artists. They were all repeatedly dismissed and written off, and yet somehow still found the conviction to keep taking their art seriously. Writing about Jean's nerve to keep getting on her ladder, stacking her Manglements as high as her room allowed, was a deeply joyful and rewarding process. Q In specific moments with both Jean and Leah, we see reflections that could apply broadly to a polarized society. For example, Jean reflects on how isolation takes away the pressure to explain things, to make sense to other people or yourself, and when she and Leah are hurtling down the mountain, arguing about the local men they met on the cliff, Leah imagines them crashing while "arguing over them with such intensity that we lost all sense of our own...

Art on Film at Finch College: Reproductive Labor in the Enrichment Economy

Abstract Finch College was a small women's liberal arts college located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan open from 1900 to 1975. The Contemporary Wing of the Finch College Museum of Art held a number of important exhibitions for conceptual art, experimental media, and film organized by the museum's curator, Elayne Varian, from 1966 to 1975. This article addresses how ideas of process, reproduction, and documentation were being reconfigured at Finch, especially in film and media art of the 1960s. Robert Morris's film installation, Finch College Project (US, 1969), is emblematic of this larger turn toward process in the visual arts; however, Varian's Projected Art exhibitions complicate our understanding of how and why artistic process became a subject of interest. In light of what Boltanski and Esquerre have recently identified as an “enrichment economy” and what feminist thinkers of the time theorized as reproductive labor, works in the Projected Art series shift attention to the reproductive labor of caring for, curating, collecting, and consuming visual art and film. I argue that Varian's exhibitions as a whole complicate our understanding of process-oriented work during the postwar period, especially film and media that moved into gallery exhibition spaces. These works attacked the existing modes of production by turning toward process, complicating the status of photographic reproduction, and contributing their own surplus value through reproductive labor.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

시각 예술에서 응시와 여성의 주체

This study focuses on the status and role of women through the art works of two female artists, Cindy Sherman(1954~) and Caroline Walker(1982~). The works of both Sherman, a representative second-generation feminist artist who has received critical attention since the end of the 1970s, and Walker, who grew up under the influence of post-feminism, portray women who reveal various social, cultural, and economic differences in modern society. Both artists focus on the traditional female image and gaze that still exists behind the status of women and female artists as well as the subjectivity of women. Walker goes on to explain how the characters in her works, particularly the reality of women performing invisible jobs and female immigrants, are related to women's labour and subjects.

Perfilman Nasional Tahun 1970-an Hingga 1980-an

This research aims to look at the development of Indonesian film from the 1970s - 1980s based on the increase in film genres and the increase in film production in Indonesia, so that the technology that began to become sophisticated in Indonesian filmmaking was a form of the glorious decade of film. The results of this study are the number of films produced during the years 1970-1980 as many as 618 titles. With a classification of 370 drama genres, 72 action genres, 23 horrors, 26 fantasy, and 127 comedy titles. The 1970-1980s also gave birth to phenomenal artists and films such as Remadja Bride (1971), Sidoel anak Betawi (1973), First Love (1973), My Love on the Blue Campus (1976), Hurricane Pasti Berlalu (1977), Sexy Waitress Inem (1977), and Gita Cinta dari SMA (1979) also gave birth to the nickname Sex Bomb for female artists who dared to appear open to the adult scene in the film, Suzana, Yati Oktavia, is an artist who gets the nickname Sex Bomb.

Religiosity and Spirituality in Linda Mary Montano’s Anorexia Nervosa

Abstract This paper presents a close-up reading of American artist and ex-member of the Maryknoll Sisters, Linda Mary Montano. Her performance in the video work, Anorexia Nervosa (1981) is analyzed in view of contemporary performance and video art by women artists in the second wave feminism. By positioning the experience of self-starving in the Catholic tradition of holy fasting and asceticism of self-starvation, this paper regards Montano’s video work as a continuation of Catholic women utilizing social agencies. Montano’s own performance in Anorexia Nervosa can be seen as one of many forms of keeping the faith while exercising contemporary art with a mission of disrupting social boundaries and norms. Montano’s understanding of the body as a vehicle of performance art is still resonant with her religiosity of elevating self-starving to a miraculous intervention. Her mundane narrative of the extraordinary supports her view that her life is art; art is life.

Keeping the Faith

Abstract In many cultures, women are the “keepers of the faith,” despite the fact that masculine pronouns are often used to identify deity or deities in most of the world’s major religions. In addition, many foundational leaders of these faiths were male—Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammed, and Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha). This double issue of Religion and the Arts seeks to explore the ways in which contemporary artists who identify as women or are non-binary or third gender engage with spirituality, both in the context of different faith traditions and as unaffiliated spiritual seekers. The essays include: Scholarly explorations of contemporary artists’ engagement with religion and/or spirituality in the context of cultural roots; faith, religion and/or spirituality as a source of inspiration in art making for women artists, inclusive of trans and gender non-conforming people; relationships between religious traditions and gender fluidity as explored by contemporary artists; consideration of how women and gender non-conforming artists around the world are grappling with religiosity in their cultures and personal artistic practices; and the role of contemporary art made by women and/or gender-fluid artists in encouraging dialogue around religious belief.

Art-Kut! The Counter-Cultural and Feminist Spirituality of Shamanism in Postwar South Korean Art

Abstract On 17 January 1981, during a cold Winter Day at the height of an authoritarian military regime, a group of South Korean artists named “Baggat Misul [Outdoor Art]” gathered around a riverbank outside Seoul to interact with nature and called it “jayeon misul [nature art].” A young woman artist Yong-sin Suh performed an act the group called “a lark,” during which Suh alternated with two male artists in reading aloud sections of newspaper articles. These unhinged, free-spirited acts were inspired by the Korean folk theater tradition of pansori (traditional Korean musical opera), and kut (traditional Korean shamanistic exorcism). Korean shamanism by way of the mudang kut rituals has historically been a Korean indigenous belief intertwined with Buddhism and Taoism and stood as a counterforce to the mainstream nationalist neo-Confucian and imperial Christian conservative legacy that oppressed women and the nonconforming gender-neutral community in South Korea. The paper analyzes the Korean shamanistic elements that were utilized in performative, conceptual, and nature art practices by South Korean artists in the post-WWII period to the present, within the framework of the intersection of Korean feminism, art activism, and shamanistic spirituality.

Made in Africa: Tapestry and the Topography of Swedish Philanthropy in Southern Africa

ABSTRACT During the 1960s, tapestries from Swedish art and craft centres in southern Africa were acclaimed in the Nordic country as an outcome of its own expertise and largesse. Yet when these works by marginalised women artists in Africa were exhibited at the National Museum in Stockholm in 1970, they were dismissed as the fruits of Swedish cultural imperialism and naive artistic minds. Despite the ensuing public debate, the exhibition and its discourses, like the works themselves, are little known in southern Africa and now largely forgotten in Sweden. In considering the visual vocabularies of some of these tapestries, many of which were woven at the renowned centre at Rorke’s Drift in KwaZulu-Natal, this article addresses the implications of these Swedish ‘culture-rescue’ projects, showing how women’s artistic ‘voices’ on the subcontinent were silenced, not merely by apartheid suppression but also in Swedish representations. By interrogating the attitudes that the audiences of the exhibitions held towards black women artists, the article reveals how the tapestries’ woven iconographies were a complex response to circumstance, covertly interrogating white hegemony while invested with self-definition.

A probe into the Visual elements in female illustrations from the Perspective of Feminism

With the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s, the concept of feminism gradually entered the public's field of vision. Its theory revolves around with the development of society, the wave of feminism continues to deepen and affect all aspects of human life. The improvement of productivity and the change of production relations urge women to re-recognize themselves, and the improvement of productivity and the change of production relations urge women to re-recognize themselves, and women's self-worth and social status are more and more affirmed. The female image, as one of the common subjects in the history of eastern and western illustration, has rich forms of expression, thus reflecting multiple connotations, and analyzing the visual elements in female illustrations from the perspective of feminism. it provides a new perspective for illustration analysis, and can deeply understand the author's creative ideas through the selection and performance of picture elements. The author starts with feminist painting art, through the analysis of representative paintings including female images in Chinese and western art history. The author starts with feminist painting art, through the analysis of representative paintings including female images in Chinese and western art history, combined with feminist thoughts to analyze the implication behind image expression, and then from feminist painting to feminist illustration research As feminism goes deep into the public's As feminism goes deep into the public's field of vision, feminist illustration expression is endowed with more forms and meaning of the times, and it is always intended to show the viewer a At the same time, illustration, as a widely used form of artistic expression, can provide an effective perspective for feminist expression as a woman. At the same time, illustration, as a widely used form of artistic expression, can provide an effective perspective for feminist expression as a suitable medium, so as to provide a window for the public to understand feminism. The research and thinking of this paper is devoted to excavating the unique and diverse female beauty in different female paintings and illustrations. and hopes to appeal to the viewer to have more tolerance and appreciation of the current feminist art, in the present when many female artists are open up the artistic road in the future with practice.

Introduction. Women’s Stories of Crisis: Portals to Relationality, Vulnerability and Resistance?

This special issue aims to provide a deeper insight into cultural responses to various contemporary crises, such as migratory movements in recent history and, at the very present moment, pandemics, climate change and such other unsettling societal processes as political and economic ruptures, armed conflicts or environmental disasters. In particular, our aim is to draw attention to the way these changes have affected women’s lives and the way female writers and artists represent these processes and their consequences in diverse cultural narratives, such as fiction, poetry, experimental and autobiographical works. We explore issues related to diaspora, feminism, environmentalism, new materialism, memory and identity from a transnational and intersectional perspective, attempting to find connections among those cultural texts by women voicing some of the most relevant crises that have configured and are still re-configuring our global and local identities.

Towards a Weak Avant-Garde, Re-Shaping the Canon

Feminist discussions in art history usually focus on the exclusion of women artists and the reification of women’s bodies. A growing constellation of queer and feminist theorists today, however, analyse failure and cuteness as aspects of contemporary feminist avant-garde practices, suggesting that alternative currents in art practice and theory are emerging that challenge traditional notions and modes of art production. In my article, I discuss these debates in relation to “weak universalism” and weak messianism in order to reshape our understanding of avant-garde theory and practice from a feminist perspective. I argue that feminist analysis transforms what was previously thematized as conditions of exclusion into an important part of artistic legacy in works made by previously excluded groups. I propose that the concept of a weak avant-garde might help to theorize these shifts.

The Unclean, ‘touching and training’ in puppetry from Japanese otome bunraku

‘Training in touching’ aims to refine the knowledge and experience of ‘touching’ in its specific application to puppet-things in motion by those who move them. It opens up unusual concepts such as virtual touch in the spectator, therefore contributing to a practical and theoretical understanding of the lived experience of the ‘puppetry ensemble’, puppeteer-puppet-spectator. An acutely perceptive haptic sensibility distinguishes puppetry from all other forms of performance. Contrary to the idea that puppeteers only use their hands to animate, ‘touch’ is a whole-body sense exemplified in the strange, paradoxical, dance-like phenomenon of the beautiful and rare Japanese otome bunraku or ‘maiden’s puppet-theatre’. Any marginalisation of female artist antecedents of otome bunraku tainted by their three centuries in the pleasure districts of Edo, was superseded in 1925 by technical and theoretical inventiveness enabling one young girl to perform one heavy, fully articulated puppet: head, legs, arms, neck and back. It was similar in appearance to the famous and more familiar Japanese bunraku operated by not one but three men in, possibly, unhealthily close proximity to each other. Currently, dangers in health implicit in the touch and breath of COVID 19 might be averted by adopting a one puppet to one puppeteer style of performance.

Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West by Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos

Reviewed by: Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West by Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos Randolph K. Tibbits Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West. By Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2022. Pp. 341. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index.) From the late 1950s onward, Abstract Expressionism (Ab-Ex), which reigned supreme in the New York art world at mid-century but had begun to fade there, found renewed life and a new home in a seemingly unlikely location: the Texas Panhandle and surrounding areas. This development occurred thanks to a symbiotic partnership between a "closeted gay man" (2) and a number of New York City-based Ab-Ex artists, mostly women, who were underappreciated in the big city. That is one of the bold propositions advanced by the authors of this interesting and beautiful new book. [End Page 599] The Three Women Artists of the title, painter Elaine de Kooning, mosaic artist Jeanne Reynal, and sculptor Louise Nevelson, were not unknown in their lifetimes, but they have become the subjects of increased interest and regard in recent years as scholars and the viewing public have taken a closer look at the art and careers of women artists throughout history. Amarillo gallerist, teacher, and art promoter Dord Fitz, the closeted gay man, is little known, even to those who have an active interest in the art history of Texas. One of the valuable contributions of the book is its deft presentation of a rich and provocative story of "decentered" modernism, as the authors call it (2), in which important contemporary American art was as vital on the High Plains of Texas as in the sometimes myopic New York art world, with both places giving as well as taking as far the art itself was concerned. Fitz, an Oklahoman who had to reinvent himself after being fired from a plum academic job at the University of Kentucky following a 1951 arrest on morals charges, returned with his wife and children to Bannister Ranch in the western part of the state. He applied his experience in art and education to teaching art classes in northwest Oklahoma and surrounding areas of Kansas and Texas, fostering a patron base on which he could build when he opened his art gallery in Amarillo, and began showing and promoting avant-garde New York art. Through annual trips to New York, he established relationships with the artists he wished to show. He found De Kooning, Reynal, and Nevelson particularly responsive because he offered them the prospect of an appreciative public, and additional income from art sales and teaching, on a more gender-level playing field than they faced in New York, where male artists received significantly more attention. The authors assert that Fitz and the women artists who became his gallery stars meshed in part because of their shared experiences navigating gender and sexuality hurdles as they operated in male- and hetero-dominated environments. This is another of the refreshingly exciting threads of the story the book tells, one only recently being addressed in either Texas history or art history. Clearly Fitz thrived based on his connections to the New Yorkers, but the artists, and their art, profited too. All three spent time in Amarillo, where Fitz made sure they had the Texas experience. But in addition to entertaining visits, all three, especially De Kooning, who is quoted as saying, "I love Texas" (21), sold art, found new influences for their work, and developed mutually beneficial relationships with local patrons and students. This in a place that stereotypes often cast as indifferent, even hostile, to such things as abstract art. Von Lintel has already done a masterful job of showing how the Texas experience helped shape the art of the preeminent American Modernist, Georgia O'Keeffe. With this new volume, she and co-author Roos have made an equally important contribution to broadening our understanding [End Page 600] of Texas as both receptive home and active contributor to American art of this later era. Randolph K. Tibbits Houston Earlier Texas Art Group Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

A Marble Woman: Is the omen good or ill? Louisa May Alcott’s exposé of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s repressed individualism in her domestic horror fiction

This article reassesses the place of Louisa May Alcott’s pseudonymous domestic horror fiction in the wider canon of her work. Traditionally, Alcott’s domestic horror writing has been viewed as an expression of her repressed authorial individualism and desire for incorporation into a male literary tradition. Through examining Alcott’s allusions to Nathaniel Hawthorne, I argue that her domestic horror writing exposes the traumatic repercussions of male individualism for women in the work of her contemporaries. Her pseudonymous horror novella, A Marble Woman (1865), appropriates Hawthorne’s allusions to the Pygmalion myth in his earlier novel, The Marble Faun (1860), to demonstrate that the male artist’s preoccupation with a lifeless muse is contingent upon acts of psychological abuse. Alcott interrogates Hawthorne’s elevation of the female copyist to demonstrate that Hawthorne only endorses women’s art when it supports male traditions of creativity, thereby placing women in a subordinate role that stunts their creative power. In place of copyism, Alcott promotes an equal relationship between male and female artists that enables women to critique the work of men. Her domestic horror writing should therefore be read as satirical commentary on the elevation of male artists in the work of her contemporaries in the Concord circle.

‘I do, I undo, I redo’: Louise Bourgeois and Samuel Beckett

Louise Bourgeois and Samuel Beckett were both from comfortably bourgeois families; both had a strained relationship with one parent and undertook psychoanalytic treatment while grieving the deaths of their fathers; both were academically successful and placed great emphasis on studying; both were marked by the First and Second World Wars; both experienced the disorientations and liberations of exile and working between languages; and finally, after a period of relative neglect, both achieved celebrity and critical acclaim later in life. Drawing on Bourgeois’s notebooks and diaries in her New York archive, in which Beckett makes fleeting appearances, this article presents a comparative reading of Bourgeois and Beckett, and identifies a significant number of affinities in their creative preoccupations and strategies, points of confluence that call into question assumptions by their respective critics that their creative practice is exceptional. A comparative reading with a female artist has the additional benefit of situating Beckett outside the masculinist heritage in which he has been inscribed, and brings into focus the gender bias that has been evident in both sets of scholarship. At once modernist and contemporary due to their longevity and the variety of their prolific output (over seventy years for Bourgeois and sixty for Beckett), Bourgeois and Beckett have both been successfully canonised: vital points of reference for artists and writers today, exhibitions and productions of their work also draw huge crowds. Their respective critics have hailed the work of Bourgeois and Beckett as remarkable and distinctive, setting them apart from their fellow artists and writers. They share a creative strategy, however: both dedicated themselves to a narrow range of themes and pursued these through the adoption of a diverse range of media, play with scale, and an unceasing experimentation with form.

“She Whistles Freely Shunning Companions”: The Embedded and Transcendent Selves of Poet-Painter Wang Liang in the Eighteenth Century

This article examines the unusual life of the poet and painter Wang Liang (ca. 1720–1790). Granddaughter of a prominent Jiaxing bibliophile and collector, she lost her father in infancy and married into a respected Huzhou family of officials only to witness their demise amidst a very public sex and corruption scandal in 1740, which also implicated her own wealthy merchant family. In the wake of this disaster, she and her husband severed their family ties and lived out their years in genteel poverty, childless. Surviving her husband by over twenty-five years, she fashioned an independent life and a self-image, echoed by observers, of Daoist detachment from the proverbial dust of the world while cultivating relationships with prominent male mentors and female artists across Jiangnan. As poet, painter, and player of the zither and the game of Go, Wang Liang at times articulated a vision of explicitly ungendered artistic perfection resembling aspects of the androgynous ideal associated with the culture of the Ming-Qing transition. Yet she was also poignantly aware that she was still embedded in relationships that pulled her back into family obligation, gendered hierarchy, and social exchange. I delve into her extant poetry and commentary about her to present her life and art as a contrapuntal play between embedded and transcendent modes of identity and expression.

The eroticization of Tibetan monks in shōnen-ai and yaoi manga

Men have historically dominated the artistic production of cultural exotifications. This article flips the script by analysing how two prominent female Japanese manga artists – Kuranishi and Shinsan Nameko – erotically illustrate Tibetan men, specifically Tibetan Buddhist monks. Through textual analysis and fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2021, we show how their manga depictions of Tibetan young men, in particular monks, tend towards eroticization and sexual innuendo. This discursive and aesthetic trend in manga parallels ethnographic data on how Japanese women – facing unprecedented social precarity, seeking spiritual healing and self-transformation and desiring alternate masculinities – look elsewhere, outside of Japan and the perceived inadequacies of Japanese masculinities. We explore how liberative erotics, especially homoeroticism and love between boys, fuses with Buddhist and alternative spiritualities in yaoi and shōnen-ai genres and gestures towards a changing landscape of female desire.