Gender Critique of The Scientific and Medical Construction of the Female Body in Women’s Artworks
Gender Critique of The Scientific and Medical Construction of the Female Body in Women’s Artworks

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I will develop a gender critique of scientific and medical idealizations of the human body and its health, which was performed out of gender and feminist studies,pointing also to women’s art. In the discourses of medicine, healthy and beautiful human – andespecially the female human – body is revealed as an ideological construction, an affectiveagent and a biopolitical ideal that controls and regulates gender differences. My intention is todemonstrate that the discourses of medicine, feminism, and art are in a dialogue historicallyin relation to these topics. Following Tasha N. Dubriwny’s discussion of medical discourseand practice, I will map three phases in the development of Western medical discourses andpoint to the fact that they are in dialogue with feminist discourses and with the way how arttreats and represents beautiful bodies, and/or sick bodies, with particular focus on femalebodies. Discussion of the first phase of medical development points to the fact that visual artand photography were used to performatively help doctors to construct the female body assick and deviant, as Didi Huberman showed. The second phase was the medicalization era, inwhich human bodies are expected to adhere to a standardized norm. In this period, within theframework of second wave feminism, feminist health activists appeared, forming the women’smovement for health. Special attention will be directed to the third phase, the biomedicalizationera or inclusion-and-difference paradigm, in which postfeminist discourses appeared andin relation to which I will discuss artworks by Hannah Wilke, Katarzyna Kozyra, and Orlan.

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