women commonly took on the roles of muse, alter
ego, and victim for male artists. Many of these ar-
tists have been condemned as misogynistic, though,
because the images they created of women were
often pictorially mutilated—headless torsos being
especially common—or powerless—props for ela-
borate costumes or for various experimental ef-
fects. Man Ray’s shadowplays across the female
torso combine both tendencies.
Despite these realities, because Surrealism posi-
tioned itself as critical (or contemptuous) of main-
stream thought, this movement did provide a
forum for female expression heretofore not avail-
able to women artists. Whitney Chadwick suggests
that as artists, women were able to assert their
uniqueness by way of irony, humor, and confron-
tation (Chadwick, 10). Painters Dorothea Tanning
and Frida Kahlo, and photographer Claude Cahun,
for example, were able to problematize their posi-
tions in relation to Surrealism and beyond into the
larger artworld and society in general. Chadwick
suggests that the relationship between the artist’s
‘‘self’’ and the depicted ‘‘other’’ became especially
complex when these women made self-portraits
because ‘‘no matter how relentlessly pursued in the
images reflected back to it, [the female self] can
neither be fully captured by its representations nor
escape them’’ (Chadwick, 12).
In 1929, Joan Riviere described the malleability
of identity and range of possibilities available to
woman in ‘‘Womanliness as a Masquerade.’’ Exam-
ples of disguise and masquerade were prevalent for
all Surrealist artists as the binaries of reality/fan-
tasy, male/female, and self/other were collapsed.
Such questioning of the establishment resurfaced
in the late 1960s, both socially and artistically. Yet
it remains that the most famous Surrealist repre-
sentation of gender is Man Ray’s portrait of avant-
garde artist Marcel Duchamp as his female alter
ego Rrose Se ́lavy, not Claude Cahun’s (born Lucy
Schwob) androgynous self-portraits.
Various manifestations of the feminist movement
throughout the century have sought to open up
ideas beyond male Eurocentric viewpoint. The
first wave was concerned with securing the right
to vote, beginning with the first women’s rights
convention in 1848 and concluding with the rati-
fication of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Con-
stitution in 1920. During World War II, Rosie the
Riveter symbolized women stepping in to fill vacan-
cies in the workforce. After the war, ‘‘traditional’’
roles were assumed: women were the homemakers,
men the breadwinners. Several seminal feminist
texts were published around this time, Simone de
Beauvoir’sSecond Sex(1952) and Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique(1963), leading to a revived
interest in equal opportunities for both women and
minorities in education and employment as well as
equal treatment in the workplace and in the eyes of
the law. Legal victories were achieved in 1964 with
the Civil Rights Act prohibiting segregation and
discrimination, and in 1972 with the U.S. Supreme
Court decision supporting safe and legal abortions.
With the introduction of such alternatives came
the artistic probing of ‘‘normal’’ or conventional ap-
proaches and lifestyles. Discussions of gender in the
1970s were centered on the feminist critique against
modernist art practices of ‘‘male-dominated values
of beauty and humanism’’ (Rosenblum, 263) as well
asamovingawayfromexclusionaryandhierarchi-
cal ‘‘high art’’ approaches. Feminism had the effect
of opening up forms of expression not only for
women, but also for multicultural social and cultural
viewpoints that had also been underrepresented.
Attention to gender as informative to the con-
struction and reception of artworks has been going
on for the past 30 years. Linda Nochlin’s seminal
article, ‘‘Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?’’ (1971) examined the gendered notion of
artistic genius, a ‘‘golden nugget’’ exclusive to men.
She pointed out that adequate training was not pro-
vided to women: barring them from life drawing also
censured them from serious commissions. Histori-
cally women who had become successful artists,
such as painters Artemisia Gentilleschi, Rosa Bon-
heur, and Berthe Morisot had prominent male artists
in their families. Though Nochlin’s study did not
consider photography, Laura Mulvey examined gen-
dered dynamics of viewing with regards to film in her
important essay, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema’’ (1975). She discusses the conditions that
created and fostered conventional models of gen-
dered viewing and being viewed that had previously
been overlooked. These essays served as an important
foundation for feminist scholarship, which has con-
tinued to investigate the objectification of women’s
bodies and the marginalization of women artists, and
has expanded to include broader issues of gender.
Women began to be more active and successful in
the field of photography in the 1930s, particularly in
the United States, through the Farm Security
Administration (FSA) and the emerging fields of
photojournalism. Naomi Rosenblum explains thatWomen have been actively involved with photography
ever since the medium was first introduced in 1839....
The barriers to their participation in photography were
lower, and recognition often came faster than in the
other arts.(Rosenblum, 7)REPRESENTATION AND GENDER