Reclaiming the Gaze

 

Ana Mandieta

My selfie

John Berger 

 "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves."(Page 47)   

"The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight."(Page 51)

Mickalene Thomas -Photographed, Collaged and Painted Muses

"It’s clad in maximalist patterns —animal print rugs, Marimekko-esque upholstery, wood-paneled walls, crocheted tapestries — that echo the New Jersey home in which Thomas grew up."

"Thomas’s jazzy photomontages of women’s limbs and facial features can be construed as commentary on how female bodies are brutally picked apart in contemporary visual culture."  

 Bell Hooks 

"Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence."

"At church they had learned that God created man to rule the world and everything in it and that it was the work of women to help men perform these tasks, to obey, and to always assume a subordinate role in relation to a powerful man."

Ana Mandieta's self-portrait with blood brings awarness of violence of women. She had several different photos and angles of blood running down her face. The voilence women are a part of comes from society dominating men. She recreated this portrait to an older portrait called "Sweating Blood". I was inspired about this becuase violence against women has alwasy been a political issue and it still an issue today. Sometimes women forget that things can happen until it does.