The Metaphors of Spatial Merging: The Female Body as House in the Work of Mary Caponegro, Louise Bourgeois, and Francesca Woodman

Year 2007, Issue: 25, 17 - 30, 01.04.2007

Ceylan Ertung

Abstract

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar once asked, if a pen is a metaphorical penis entitling men to have authority over the creative process, whence should women derive their creative powers; or in other words, with what organ can women generate texts? By saying “women have sexual organs more or less everywhere” 252 Luce Irigaray gave the answer by suggesting that woman’s creative organ is their body. Ecriture Feminine which translates roughly as feminine writing or writing in the feminine mode, implies writing from or by the female body. According to Helene Cixous, feminine writing would constitute a counter language which has a subversive potential to explode the oppressive structures of conventional thought and language; giving woman the ownership and the authorship of their own bodies that have been denied to them. She says, “By writing herself, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display—the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions” Cixous 116 .

Keywords

Metaphors, Spatial, Merging

References

• Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie, Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stansbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
• Buchloch, Benjamin. “Francesca Woodman: Performing the Photograph, Staging the Subject.” Francesca Woodman: Photographs 1975-1980. New York: Marion Goodman Gallery, 2004.
• Caponegro, Mary. The Complexities of Intimacy. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2001. Chicago, Judy and Miriam Shapiro. “Female Imagery.” The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Amelia Jones. London: Routledge, 2006.
• Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Feminism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Mary Evans. London: Routledge, 2001.
• Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Penguin, 1965.
• Gatens, Moira. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London: Routledge, 1996.
• Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984.
• Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.
• ---. Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1995.
• Irigaray, Luce. “This Sex Which Is Not One.” In Feminism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Mary Evans. London: Routledge, 2001.
• Komar, Kathleen L. “Feminist Curves in Contemporary Literary Space” Reconfigured Spheres: Feminist Explorations of Literary Space. Ed. Margaret R. Higonnet. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994.
• Kirby, Kathleen M. Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjectivity. New York: Guilford, 1996.
• McLaughlin, Robert L. “Mary Caponegro.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction. 21.3 (Fall 2001): 111-150.
• Nixon, Mignon. Fantastic Reality: Louise Burgeois and a Story of Modern Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
• Rus, Eva. “Surrealism and Self-Representation in the Photography of Francesca Woodman,” May 2004, 27 December 2007 Spain, Daphne. Gendered Spaces. Chappel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992.
• Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994.
• Walters, Margaret. The Nude Male: A New Perspective. New York: Penguin, 1978. Wye, Deborah. Louise Bourgeois. Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1978.