Anxiety and Agency in Fashion, Beauty, and the Erotic Female Grotesque

Abstract

This thesis considers anxieties and concepts of agency related to femininity as represented through the beautiful and the grotesque, and the tensions that manifest when these two states coalesce. Reviewing dominant anti-fashion/beauty rhetoric that rose to prominence with second-wave feminism establishes a framework for understanding the persistence of Western culture’s fraught relationship with women’s cultivation of image and sexual appeal. Conversely, examining third and fourth-wave feminism’s more holistic embrace of fashion presents an alternate viewpoint that justifies the agential power of knowing engagement with contemporary systems of dress and beautification. This is supported by theories of performativity of gender. Similarly, highlighting Western culture’s historic belief that women’s bodies exist as innately abject provides insight into enduring anxieties towards the corporeal female form constituted as grotesque. In contrast, referencing scholarly theories that frame the carnivalesque female grotesque, including the active display of erotic will, as a mode of liberating female bodily expression, helps support arguments for the grotesque’s self-affirming potential. Consideration of philosophical arguments that demonstrate the value of the erotic and its connection with the abject assists in reasoning the link between personal sovereignty, erotic pleasure and transgression. Examination of select artistic examples helps draw even greater attention to the tensions that reside in dominant attitudes towards representations of femininity today. The studio practice consists of two short films buttressed by a selection of photographic works. These artworks use the subject of the self to explore concerns of fantastical, performative self-transformation to reflect on the polymorphic nature of femininity. Like the work critiqued in the thesis, the studio research similarly evokes aesthetics of the sumptuous, alluring and repellent relating to style, location, materiality and the female body. Together, the written thesis and creative studio outcomes aid appreciation of the semiotic value of this ambiguous yet powerful mode of representation.