El arte de escribir en el cuerpo
Based on Regina Galindo’s 2005 performance piece Perra in which she writes the word perra (bitch) on her left leg with a knife in an act of protest against the women killed in Guatemala that year, literal and symbolic writing on the body will be debated in the quest for a language that transcends meaning. At the same time, channels of communication between writing and action will be sought, because this performance is accompanied by texts that reinforce its approach.Violence will be the focus of reflection by undertaking a survey of the various pieces that the artist has developed on the subject. Finally, the question will be raised of the political or nonpolitical intention of Perra, as well as the conception of art as a political act.
The representation of the female body in the multimedia works of Regina José Galindo.
The female body is central to the performance art, poetry and blog site interventions of Guatemalan Regina José Galindo. While Galindo is best known for her performance work, this article compares the hereto overlooked, distinctive and often shocking representations of the female body across her multimedia outputs. We first consider the ways in which, in all three media, Galindo presents an ‘excessive’, carnivalised, grotesque and abject female body. Second, we analyse representations of the female body that has been subjected to violence at a private and public level. In so doing, we show how Galindo not only contests hegemonic visions of gender and (national) identity but also challenges the viewer/reader to engage with, rather than look away from, the violence to which women are subjected in patriarchal society.
All those nasty womanly things
Abstract In the context of international women's studies, contemporary women's art theory and practice remain somewhat on the margins. Yet the issues raised in the work of women practitioners are of crucial importance to current debates surrounding gender, the body, and technology. This article seeks to address the complex interface between feminism, bodies, and technologies, and explores how this might relate to Barbara Creed's notion of the monstrous-feminine. For example, what happens when the slick technology becomes “contaminated” by monsters and “all those nasty womanly things”? Using processes such as digital imaging, interactive CD-ROM, and cosmetic surgery, women artists Orlan (France), Alexa Wright (UK), and Linda Dement (Australia) utilise the tools of modern technology to probe the limits of corporeality and question Western standards of female beauty. To read their work in the light of the monstrous-feminine opens up potentially liberating modes of knowing and experiencing the materiality of the female body.