In the twentieth century, queer individuals faced a diverse array of social, legal, and cultural challenges. Homosexuality remained criminalized well into the century—in the UK until 1967—and queer representation in public discourse was often met with censorship or moral panic. The 1970s and ’80s saw the emergence of radical LGBTQ+ activism, such as the Gay Liberation Front and ACT UP, pushing for visibility, rights, and systemic change. These movements were catalysed by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, which disproportionately affected gay men and laid bare the neglect, stigma, and structural violence faced by queer communities.
Against this backdrop, queer artists used visual culture to contest marginalization and to articulate identity and belonging. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues in Epistemology of the Closet, queer subjectivity is shaped through mechanisms of concealment, silence, and resistance. Many queer artists navigated these tensions by embedding coded meanings, psychological depth, and activist intentions into their work. This paper explores how Francis Bacon, David Wojnarowicz, and Catherine Opie used their practices to reflect the evolving concerns of queer life—from repression and grief to affirmation and community.
Wojnarowicz, an American multimedia artist and outspoken activist, exemplified the use of art as political resistance. Informed by personal experience and a broader context of systemic neglect during the AIDS crisis, Wojnarowicz’s work often blurred autobiography with activism. His piece Untitled (One Day This Kid…) (1990) positions a childhood image of the artist surrounded by declarative text detailing the persecution and trauma queer youth face. The text operates as what Judith Butler might describe as a counter-discourse—reclaiming the power to name and grieve lives otherwise considered “ungrievable.” The piece highlights the socio-political forces that shape queer life from an early age and critiques the silence of institutions during the AIDS epidemic. Wojnarowicz’s work foregrounds what Sedgwick identifies as the need to make queer suffering visible, not as spectacle, but as a demand for justice and dignity. His art functions as both memorial and protest, reclaiming queer presence in a public sphere that often erased it.
Francis Bacon’s work communicates queer identity through a visual language of distortion, isolation, and psychological intensity. Working in mid-century Britain, where homosexuality was criminalized until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, Bacon developed a uniquely visceral style that captured the existential toll of repression. In Two Figures (1953), Bacon paints two male bodies in a contorted embrace, their forms blurring the line between intimacy and struggle. The figures are framed within cage-like enclosures, echoing what queer theorists describe as the spatial and psychic constraints of the “closet.” While Bacon rarely addressed his sexuality publicly, his work, as Sedgwick might note, “says” queer without “naming” it—embodying what she calls the performative ambiguity of queer existence. His paintings expose the instability of desire, shame, and identity, reflecting how queerness, in the mid-century context, was often internalized rather than externalized.
Catherine Opie brought lesbian identity to the forefront through her photography challenging both heteronormative conventions and internal community stereotypes. In Self-Portrait/Cutting (1994), Opie presents her back with an image of a lesbian family carved into the skin—a raw metaphor for the pain and longing for inclusion in traditional family narratives. The work visually articulates the violence of exclusion while asserting a vision of queer domesticity. Opie’s series Being and Having (1991), features lesbians styled in hypermasculine drag, deliberately subverts gender binaries, echoing Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Opie’s photographic practice offers an archive of lesbianism presence—centred not on trauma, but on community, visibility, and care. Her work resists the notion of a “single story” of queerness by showcasing its multiplicity.
Through their distinctive approaches—Wojnarowicz’s confrontational activism, Bacon’s psychological introspection, and Opie’s intimate visibility—these artists critically reflect the shifting issues central to queer lives in the twentieth century. Their work engages with themes explored in queer theory: the performative nature of gender, the constraints of the closet, and the politics of mourning and recognition. Collectively, they underscore how queer art became not just a mode of self-expression, but a potent strategy for resistance, redefinition, and survival in a world that often sought to erase them.
In Pig Tales (Truismes),[1] Marie Darrieussecq crafts a deeply provocative and unsettling allegory challenging the hegemonic narratives constructing gender, sexuality, and the boundaries of the human. The novel traces an unknown, unnamed woman through her surreal transformation into a ‘sow’, a female pig. [2] Her metamorphosis starkly reveals the mechanisms of patriarchal culture that reduce women to objects of consumption and control. Lying demurely at the intersection of speculative fiction and political allegory, Pig Tales becomes a rich site for interdisciplinary analysis, particularly through the combined lenses of feminist and animal theories. For at the centre of both ‘anthropocentrism’[3] and the ‘phallogocentric’[4] patriarchy lies a man. These metaphorical ideas of “human vs animal”, “man vs woman” are shaped through the powerful and provocative combination of sexuality, appearance and capitalism, and the warping of time evoking a sense of uprootedness mirroring the disorientating metamorphosis. Darrieussecq’s understanding, and representation of these symbolic oppositional ideas are informed by the pervasive pressure of the patriarchy and speciesism on the geographical and social world. As 21st Century readers or viewers, Pig Tales can be consumed critically based on intersectional feminist deconstructivism and anthrozoology. Darrieussecq produces a moving and disturbingly all-to-familiar insight into the impacts of the trials and tribulations of existing in the patriarchal human world as a female.
The protagonist’s social value under the system of the patriarchy is interconnected to her compliance to the different facets of gender norms. Feminist thinking roots itself in the dissemination and understanding of the social workings of the ‘conceptual oppositions of man vs woman’.[5] Throughout the novel we see the ‘dominance of the man and the subordination of the woman’[6] and the characters’ active engagement in these hegemonic roles. To begin, the protagonist’s value is placed on her visual conformity, spatially embodied in the narrative by the ‘perfumes and cosmetics chain’ profiting from this enforced conformity.[7] Sandra Bartky, states that ‘a woman’s body must be confined and shaped into a ‘more feminine’ form’ to meet these ideals, thus ‘the disciplinary practices of femininity produce a body on which an inferior status has been inscribed’.[8] The ‘tight fitting’ ‘employee uniforms’, looking ‘lovely and well-groomed at all times’ set a list of binary rules based on superficiality.[9] The motivations of getting the job are to solely help her further align herself to these ideals: ‘how good [she] was going to smell, about the glowing complexion’ in a futile plight of achieving male validation initially from her boyfriend and subsequently the boss and clients.[10]
This visual objectification is in a symbiotic relationship with her sexual availability, another layer of the patriarchal means of conformism. With the ‘right breast in one hand, the job contract in the other’ the boss’s sexual violation catalyses an unconscious set of behavioural patterns, the protagonist knows to ‘get down on [her] knees’ and go to ‘work’.[11] This conditioning of sexual compliance and internalisation of pride in the abuse as some form of highest compliment is active throughout the novel, illustrating how patriarchal logic infiltrates the female psyche. Moreover, her acts of disengagement with the sexual acts of the clients, ‘I didn’t want to service him anymore’, is met with instantaneous disposal, ‘dumped on the outskirts of the city’ and ‘losing a good customer’.[12] This begins the unwinnable paradox of the patriarchy regarding female sexuality. When engaged sexually she is ‘too forward, too coarse’, a ‘bitch in heat’.[13] Thus, beginning the verbal compliance, ‘I kept quiet of course and I submitted’.[14] Darrieussecq highlights how these attempts of compliance are futile as when the female body deviates from the capitalist patriarchal human desirability’s, age, whether you are a ‘frigid old hag’[15] or ‘dainty as a girl’[16], weight, or a pig-metamorphosis, any semblance of femineity is unrecognisable and monstrous. Susan Bordo affirms, ‘the rules for femininity have come to be the rules of a woman’s bodily existence’.[17] This conditioning is so internalised in the protagonist as she gains weight, she ‘began to disgust [her]self’, within her own subjectivity the patriarchy infringes.
In the protagonist’s ever-changing, pig-like state, her social and sexual value diminishes, even as the bestial impulses of her male counterparts intensify. This shift illustrates how animality and brutality are projected onto the female body through sexual violence—violence that is intrinsically connected to what Kelly Oliver terms the ‘implicit violence of our relationship with animals’.[18] Throughout the novel, animals are ‘figured negatively’, metaphorically positioned as the ‘other’ to the rational, human male.[19] Darrieussecq’s use of anthropomorphic imagery constructs a binary subjugating the female-animal, while the male-human assumes dominance through acts of violence and control. Akira Mizuta Lippit notes that animals in Western thought ‘occupy a state of disappearance,’ existing in a ‘perpetual state of vanishing.’[20] This speaks to the power dynamics of visibility: to be an animal or woman in a phallocentric society is to be present, but ultimately unseen. The protagonist reflects on this erasure: ‘they didn’t look at me to see how I was… they were preoccupied with themselves. It made them feel good to be able to feel me up.’[21] Here, she is reduced to tactile stimulus, not a subject with interiority. As Bennett and Royle argue, ‘wherever there is writing, sex and gender become equivocal, questionable and open to transformation.’[22] Darrieussecq literalises this transformation as both women and men devolve: the former into animalised objects subject to sexualisation and consumption, the latter into feral ‘savage’ aggressors with ‘wild eyes’.[23] Kelly Oliver contends that ‘the treatment of women as animals allows men to treat them with a kind of feral violence, without consequence.’[24] This is vividly embodied in Pig Tales through the semantic field of graphic sexual violence: ‘shoved something up my rear end,’[25] ‘slapped me,’[26] ‘hitting me,’[27] ‘covered with bruises,’[28] and ‘always down on all fours.’[29] The language dehumanises the protagonist, positioning her in an entirely submissive, animalistic posture. This violent domination reflects a broader patriarchal logic where bodies that fail to meet human- male- standards are rendered “un-human” and treated as expendable. The young girl from Eager’s “party” exemplifies this perfectly; while being the youthful ‘little girl’[30] idolized by the patriarchy this disposability is definite, ‘I saw him amuse himself with her for a bit and then put a bullet in her head’[31]Simone de Beauvoir reinforces this alignment when she states that ‘woman [is] always on the side of the other, of the animal, the body, the flesh’ in her groundbreaking feminist novel The Second Sex.[32] Within Darrieussecq’s narrative, femininity is placed outside of humanity and male reason. aligned instead with flesh, instinct, and abjection. To be placed ‘down on all fours’[33] is not only a literal position, but a metaphor for being located beneath the human subject in a phallogocentric order—an order that deems some bodies punishable without recognition or consequence.
As the protagonist loses her human form, she is cast into social exile—an allegory of abjection that echoes the figure of the Mad Woman in The Attic. In their landmark feminist text The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar [34] explore how patriarchal literature confines women to the margins, casting them as either ‘angels or monsters’, ‘virgin or a Madonna Whore’.[35] The “attic” refers both literally to the upper floor of Thornfield Hall that “contains” Bertha Mason[36] and metaphorically to the symbolic space of female isolation and otherness. In Pig Tales, the protagonist is similarly ‘repressed, confined and driven crazy by forces of the patriarchy.’[37] Darrieussecq stages the maddening claustrophobia of patriarchal spaces—whether it be the perfume shop, Honoré’s apartment, or the hall of Edgar’s “New Year’s orgy”—each environment functions as a site of sexual antagonism and objectification. The protagonist’s descent into madness— ‘I was slowly losing it’—[38] evokes Gilbert and Gubar’s assertion that female characters are often driven to insanity by a system that denies them autonomy.[39] The madwoman occupies ‘an unforgiving and overlooked corner’ of the narrative and society—a position of exile, cut off from patriarchal control at the cost of utter social isolation.[40] Once she becomes monstrous, the protagonist is no longer recognisably feminine: she is laughed at, ‘snickered’ at,[41] and ultimately retreats to the ‘sewers’[42] for refuge. This dynamic is echoed in Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa (1975),[43] where she writes, ‘they riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss.’[44] Like Bertha Mason, Frankenstein’s creature, and Medusa herself, Darrieussecq’s pig-woman becomes a site of horror, ridicule, and symbolic punishment for failing to conform to hegemonic femininity. These constructions of monstrosity and madness ultimately force us, as Rosi Braidotti argues, to ‘rethink the very idea of what counts as the human’—and who has the power to define it.[45]
In conclusion, Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales offers a visceral and provocative critique of the systems that discipline, devalue, and ultimately dehumanise the female body. Through the protagonist’s metamorphosis into a pig, Darrieussecq lays bare the violence inherent in the patriarchal regulation of gender and sexuality, exposing how femininity is not only socially constructed but also brutally enforced. Drawing on the frameworks of Gender Studies and Animal Studies, this reading has illustrated how the protagonist is rendered abject reduced to animality, subjected to sexual violence, and exiled from human recognition. The critical theories by Bartky, Bordo, Cixous, and Oliver reveal how visual conformity, sexual compliance, and bodily discipline are central to the maintenance of patriarchal and anthropocentric power. Ultimately, the novel disrupts conventional distinctions between human and animal, subject and object, sanity and madness—forcing us to confront the unsettling truth that women, like animals, are often positioned as the silent, suffering other within dominant systems. By merging feminist and animal theory, Pig Tales becomes not just a story of transformation, but a radical allegory of resistance identifying the political and personal stakes of losing our personhood. Darrieussecq urges us to question the very foundations of what it means to be human, female, and seen.
If men act like pigs, what can I do but turn into a sow and live in a sewer.
Bibliography:
Bennett, Andrew and Royle,An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Sixth Edition), Chapter 21: Animals and Chapter 26: Sexual Difference, 2023, Routledge.
Brontë, Charlotte (1975. Jane Eyre. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Darrieussecq, Marie, Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation, 1996, Faber and Faber.
[3] Bennett, Andrew and Royle,An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Sixth Edition), Chapter 21: Animals, 2023, Routledge, 217.
[4] Bennett, Andrew and Royle,An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Sixth Edition), Chapter 26: Sexual Difference, 2023, Routledge, 271.
[5] Bennett and Royle: Chapter 26: Sexual Difference, 268
[6] Bennett and Royle: Chapter 26: Sexual Difference, 269
The 1920s saw the emergence of the avant-garde Surrealist movement. The Surrealists, as outlined in the Manifesto of Surrealism written by Andre Breton in 1924, sought to explore the unconscious mind through dreamlike imagery. Women played a central yet complex role in the Surrealist art movement. The women featured were often reduced down to a form of iconography: muses, objects of desire, or symbols of the male subconscious. Women and the female form were a central image in the movement. The male Surrealists, conformed to the social sexualisation and dissection of the female form under patriarchal view of female agency, described by the theorist Laura Mulvey in The Male Gaze. Contrastingly, the female artists within the movement used Surrealist techniques to reclaim their own representation, asserting agency and autonomy. It is the differentiation in the gendered perspective view of the female form in surrealism that defines women’s representation in the movement. Surrealist imagery centralising women both reinforced and challenged traditional gender roles. Thus, revealing the underlying tensions between male fantasy and female empowerment within not only the surrealist movement but the art world at large.
The depiction of women in male Surrealist art often reinforced patriarchal fantasies, reducing women to passive objects of male desire. This is particularly evident in the works of Hans Bellmer and André Breton, who positioned women as either fragmented, fetishized objects or elusive, idealized muses. These representations draw heavily from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, particularly his views on femininity, hysteria, and the unconscious. Freud theorized that women were defined by lack, a concept rooted in his theory of “penis envy,” which suggests that female identity is constructed in relation to male desire rather than possessing autonomous meaning. This notion contributed to the Surrealist tendency to depict women as incomplete, fragmented, or unknowable, reinforcing their status as projections of male fantasy rather than independent beings.
Hans Bellmer, The Doll (La Poupée), 1936
Hans Bellmer’s The Doll (La Poupée) exemplifies this Freudian framework, as his reconfigured mannequins present the female form as a site of male manipulation. His grotesquely distorted female figures reflect Freud’s theory of the “uncanny” (Das Unheimliche), where something familiar—such as the human body—becomes unsettling when distorted or fragmented. Freud describes the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”. Bellmer’s dolls evoke both desire and horror, reinforcing the Surrealist fascination with the subconscious while also illustrating Freud’s argument that female sexuality is mysterious, threatening, and fundamentally Other. This aligns with André Breton’s assertion in The Surrealist Manifesto (1924) that “the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.” The Surrealists’ fascination with the marvelous often manifested in depictions of women as dreamlike, unattainable figures, reinforcing their role as muses rather than active participants in the creative process.
André Breton, Nadja, 1928
Similarly, in André Breton’s novel Nadja the titular female character is portrayed as an enigmatic muse, embodying Surrealist ideals of irrationality and spontaneity. Freud’s concept of hysteria is particularly relevant here, as Nadja’s mental instability is depicted as both alluring and troubling. In Freudian psychoanalysis, hysteria was historically associated with women and linked to unconscious repression, reinforcing the idea that female identity is intrinsically tied to emotional excess and irrationality. Breton’s depiction of Nadja as an almost supernatural figure who ultimately succumbs to madness aligns with this tradition. His abandonment of Nadja at the novel’s end reflects the patriarchal tendency to romanticize female instability while ultimately dismissing or discarding women who fail to conform to male expectations. Simone de Beauvoir’s later critiques that woman are ‘perpetually defined in relation to man’.⁶ As Mulvey argues in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, women in patriarchal narratives are often either fetishized or punished—either transformed into objects of desire or relegated to the margins when they cease to serve male fantasy.
Breton’s views on women are further illuminated in his essay What is Surrealism?, in which he describes the femme-enfant, a woman who embodies innocence, irrationality, and the marvelous. He states, “She alone guides my steps, her eyes alone are capable of maintaining mine in a light that is unique to her.” This idealization of women as mysterious, almost mystical beings aligns with Freud’s characterization of femininity as enigmatic and unknowable. Freud, in Femininity (1933), argues that “the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology,” reinforcing the notion that female identity is an obscure and inaccessible realm. The Surrealists, rather than challenging this patriarchal construction, often embraced and exaggerated it, further relegating women to the role of the unknowable Other.
Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), Le Retour à la raison, 1923
Man Ray’s Veiled Erotic similarly reflects this Surrealist fascination with the female body as both revealed and concealed, available yet inaccessible. His photography often centralises around the nude female form seemingly under sheer veils embodies the duality of exposure and mystery. This aligns with Freud’s idea of scopophilia—the pleasure in looking—where the female body becomes the passive object of the male gaze. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud discusses the role of fetishism in male desire, suggesting that the fetishized female body parts become substitutes for the feared “lack” of the phallus. Surrealist depictions of fragmented female forms, as seen in Bellmer’s work and Man Ray’s eroticized photography, can be interpreted through this Freudian lens as an attempt to displace male anxiety about castration onto the female body, further stripping women of agency.
While Surrealism aimed to liberate the unconscious from societal constraints, its male members frequently reinforced conventional gender hierarchies rather than subverting them. As Simone de Beauvoir critiques in The Second Sex (1949), “woman is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential.” The Surrealist tradition of depicting women as muses rather than autonomous agents exemplifies this notion, as female identity is often shaped solely through its relationship to male creativity.
Surrealist art has often been criticized for its objectification of women, yet many female Surrealists actively resisted this trend by reclaiming their bodies, identities, and narratives. Unlike male Surrealists, who frequently reduced women to muses or fetishized figures, female artists used Surrealist techniques to explore selfhood, gender, and psychological depth. This shift is evident in Que me veux-tu? by Claude Cahun, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren, Assia by Dora Maar, and Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (1932) by Frida Kahlo. These works challenge traditional representations of women by asserting female subjectivity, agency, and fluid identities. The Female Surrealist artists actively resisted objectification and instead used Surrealist techniques to explore selfhood, gender, and psychological depth challenging traditional representations of women by asserting female subjectivity, agency, and fluid identities.
The male Surrealists often imagined women as muses, symbols of madness, or eroticized objects, female Surrealist artists turned the tools of the movement inward, using Surrealism’s emphasis on dreams, the unconscious, and irrationality to explore identity, psychological trauma, and gender politics. These women did not merely participate in the movement—they transformed it, bringing a radical subjectivity to the representation of women.
Claude Cahun, Que me veux-tu? (“What do you want from me?”), 1928
Claude Cahun’s self-portrait Que me veux-tu? (“What do you want from me?”) embodies Surrealism’s fascination with the shifting nature of identity but subverts its traditional portrayal of women. Unlike male Surrealists, who fixated on women as objects of desire, Cahun deconstructs gender itself. With an androgynous appearance and direct gaze, the photograph challenges the idea of a fixed, knowable self. Their work predates and anticipates Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Butler argues in Gender Trouble (1990) that “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original,” and Cahun’s images—marked by fluidity, androgyny, and theatricality—embody this idea. Through costuming, roleplay, and direct confrontation with the viewer, Cahun refuses categorization. The repeated question of the title—“What do you want from me?”—turns the male gaze back on itself, implicating the viewer in their own projections and desires. This defiance deconstructs the idea of woman as muse, offering instead a self-aware subject who performs identity rather than inhabiting it passively.
Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943
Similarly, Maya Deren’s film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is a foundational feminist reworking of Surrealist tropes. Where male Surrealists use dream logic to explore male fantasy, Deren uses it to map the fragmented nature of female consciousness and subjectivity. Deren stars in her own film, repeating scenes of domestic entrapment and emotional breakdown, suggesting the cyclical nature of patriarchal repression. The use of doubling, mirrors, and the faceless cloaked figure reflects Freud’s notion of the uncanny (das Unheimliche), but here it is not used to eroticize or mystify the woman—it externalizes the female internal states of anxiety and alienation. Deren reclaims the dreamscape not as a place of male fantasy. Her film prefigures the kind of “counter-cinema” advocated by Laura Mulvey, which resists traditional narrative control and voyeuristic structures, creating space for a woman’s psychological truth.
Dora Maar, Assia, 1934
Dora Maar, both muse and maker, rejected the passive role often ascribed to her by male contemporaries like Picasso. Her photograph Assia is striking in its departure from the objectified nude. Through stark contrasts and careful framing, Maar renders the female body not as erotic display but as a monument of strength and dignity. Assia’s presence is neither fragmented like Bellmer’s dolls nor veiled like Oppenheim in Man Ray’s photos—she is whole, powerful, and in control. This visual assertion corresponds with Simone de Beauvoir’s argument in The Second Sex that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” a statement that underscores the performative and constructed nature of femininity. In taking the camera and reframing the female form on her own terms, Maar enacts the becoming of woman as a subject, not a spectacle.
Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, (1932)
Frida Kahlo represents perhaps the most explicit political reappropriation of Surrealist aesthetics. Though she famously remarked, “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality”. Her work shares the movement’s visual symbolism and dreamlike intensity. In Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (1932), Kahlo presents herself not as a muse but as a border-crosser—between nations, identities, and histories. The painting contrasts industrial America with lush, ancient Mexico, situating her female body at the center of cultural, historical, and gendered discourse. Her direct gaze, traditional Tehuana dress, and symbolic rendering of nature and industry signal her political and personal resistance. She asserts control over her representation and uses her body as a site of cultural critique and resilience, especially in the face of colonialism and patriarchy. This politicized self-portrait challenges both Western artistic traditions and the Surrealist tendency to universalize the unconscious without accounting for race, class, or colonization.
Unlike the male Surrealists who often cast women as objects of desire or muses of the unconscious, Cahun, Deren, Maar, and Kahlo actively deconstructed these roles. Cahun challenged gender norms, Deren explored female subjectivity and psychological depth, Maar framed the female body with strength rather than fetishism, and Kahlo reclaimed narrative control over her own body and cultural identity. These artists used Surrealist techniques—dream logic, symbolic imagery, and fragmentation—not to reinforce patriarchal fantasies but to explore personal, political, and gendered experiences. Their work highlights a key contradiction in Surrealism: while the movement sought to break free from rational constraints, its male members often reinforced conventional gender hierarchies. The female Surrealists, however, turned Surrealist methods inward, using them to dismantle oppressive representations and forge new, self-determined identities. By reclaiming representation, female Surrealists not only disrupted the male gaze but also expanded the possibilities of Surrealist expression.
You want to live like common people? Well, the 3 or 4 year period of university has become a gateway for the children of the upper class into the “average” British experience. Before settling into their pre-established nepo job at JP Morgan (or wherever in Canary Wharf they have easy access to through mummy and daddy), one of the Russell Group unis becomes a playground far away from the realities of private schools and trust funds. From Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Durham, and right up to Glasgow, these Northern Capitals have become the stage where the star studded cast of coddled children can pretend to be “normal”.
So shrug off that Schoffel and play dress up in Fred Perry, second hand sweaters, and alcoholism.
Fun, right?
The British Social System operates on a basis of class differentiation, monarchy at the top and working class people at the bottom: ‘an invisible prison’ of capitalism. We really haven’t changed from the Middle Ages. This system erects boundaries amongst communities based on income. It is a language in and of itself. If you went to your friend’s house after school and they had an ice machine on a double door fridge, middle class. New Clarks school shoes with the doll in the heel? Middle class asf.
Following the destructive years of Thatcherism in the UK, the barriers to education skyrocketed. The economic gap widened. The people – the Geordies, Scousers, monkey hangers, Glaswegians, and Mancunians – were left to suffer, grappling with unemployment, drugs, and poverty without government support. When September suddenly rolls around, it brings with it an influx of southern private school children, infecting these already suffering cities with a rampant culture of classism or ‘poverty fetishization’. If you are from London and the South-East you are already 57% more likely to go to university than if you are from the North, so why not just stay there?
Catalysed by Margaret Thatcher’s divisive (and destructive) tyranny, working class people have been increasingly disenfranchised both politically and economically. All the while, being caricatured as feckless, lazy, loutish, and amoral (think Little Britain‘s Vicky Pollard). The media have demonised the lower class in the social psyche throughout the reign of the Tory cabinet. In 1984 there was the picket of the Orgreave plant in South Yorkshire, dubbed the Battle of Orgreave after they were charged by police on horses. Thatcher, following her rightwing dogmatism, called the National Miners Union ‘the enemy within’. Following the “ideals” of Thatcherism, we saw the rampant rise of universal credit, food banks, homelessness, and council funding cuts. These ‘deep seated economic issues […] ’ ‘underpin the grievances of working class people’. My people.
The “aesthetic” of the working class – historically labelled as Chavs, Wags, Povos – has been culturally appropriated. The nova check print, Fred Perrys, Lonsdale, Sambas, and Juicy tracksuits have been staples in the wardrobes of the working class and traveller communities for eons. I remember seeing an abundance of women with rollers in, fluffy slides, and sparkly lipsy tracksuits walking down Stockton high street. These signifiers become part of the wider collective identity of the working class and have subsequently gained negative connotations. The word chav is an acronym for ‘council house and violent’, because obviously violence and poverty are interlinked… duh! But suddenly, Tilly from London wears her Umbro tracksuit from Urban Outfitters and the term “Blokecore” starts getting thrown about in TikTok comments – catch yourself on kid.
Social suffering is the string connecting these counties, no matter how many miles lie between.
Where I am from in the North East, a total 1,250 people are recorded as homeless, 360 of them are children. We have the highest number of alcohol-related deaths in England (25.7/100,000, compared to a national average of 15). The experience is forgotten, the aesthetic is stolen, and not even a twinkle of recognition remains for the people and their hardship. For the southern students coming and renting a space in these cities, this is a 3 year transient condition. But for the natives – it is our everyday.
Our capability to endure and ‘make do’ is reduced down and tokenised. Drinking, drugs, pubs, pool, and poverty are mere props on a stage – put back in the cupboard when it’s reading week or Christmas time.
University is meant to be a place where the playing field is levelled out. But for many, the uni experience consists of the ski trip, unemployment, and parents buying them a flat. In Glasgow, large numbers of Londoners flock across the Scottish border in their pre-established private school friendship groups, only to create cliques in Murano.
If I hear the word Hackney one more time I’m going to scream bloody murder.
In Durham, the home of the Miners Gala, only 7.8% of graduates actually come from the North-East. To sleep with someone from a working class background is to ‘roll in the muck’. To be working class, to them, is to be equivalent to shit on their fresh adidas sambas or hokas.
When the degree is done, 2:1 acquired, and the real world comes crashing down over the days of societies and smoking areas, we know where they are going. But where does this leave the rest of us? Simply scraping by waiting for SAAS or SFE to roll around to afford a loaf of bread for the week (definitely not from Waitrose)? Letting old men in pubs buy you pints with 5p to your name just to enjoy a friday night escaping your damp, moldy flat?
It is baffling to feel like a minority in your own hometown, overtaken by a cacophony of ‘rahs’, ‘baccy’, and ‘Arabellas’. The person sat next to you in your seminar is so close, yet so far away. But for at least 3 years we are their equal, or are we?
Tattoos have been a part of self-expression for centuries. Ranging from those emblazoned with tramp stamps, to the icon of Catherine The Great, and the infamous members of the Japanese mafia, the Yakuza. These thin lines of ink run between the layers of skin but also act as a link between cultures around the world for millennia our whole lifetime. They are whole languages and encyclopedias to niche communities, tattoos have served as pieces of self-expression, art, and also punishment. Tattoos know no gender, age or race. Yet there remains a transgressive history implicated by parental, patriarchal and colonial conditions of this decorative act on our skin.
Back in February I got my first tattoos. A willow branch running up my forearm and an A for Amy Winehouse, an og tatted icon who was my first exposure to tattoos. My tattoos were done by a remarkable tattoo artist, Amy Culver (a head to toe tattooed queen) who was a guest at Greetings tattoo right here in Glasgow.
In the waiting room, my mother anxiously sat as her ‘baby girl’ got inked, it was inevitable- I’m just a baddie like that.
While waiting, my mother, a known fanatic for a book, browsed their bookshelf selecting a book on Russian Prison Tattoos as her vice. However, the contents did nothing to ease her worries. In the correctional facilities across the soviet union back in the 1960s, inmates used tattoos as a form of code. Tattoos show a “service record” of achievements, failures, and storied prison sentences; suddenly roses, cowboys and snakes meant a whole lot more. A dagger through the neck suggests that an inmate murdered someone in prison for hire, i.e if you see the fella with the gun on his neck walking toward your cell at night, you should run the f— away ‘cause it might truly be goodnight! What mum saw though was darker than this, tattoos of women being assaulted graphically marked on men’s skin. Extreme violent acts of female sexual assault being permanently acted out on mens skin. The dark shading on the portrait of tattoos is hard to deny, from the horrific markings of the holocaust and during the transatlantic slave trade, the culture of tattooing carries stigma.
However, the history of tattoos does not entirely match the darkness of the ink it uses. Tattoos are extremely common in the Eastern Polynesian homeland of the Māori people. In Māori culture, most high-ranking persons received moko. Receiving moko constituted an important milestone between childhood and adulthood, and was accompanied by many rites and rituals. Signaling status and rank and to make a person more attractive to the opposite sex. Men generally received moko on their faces, buttocks (raperape) and thighs (puhoro). Women usually wore moko on their lips (kauwae) and chins. Now many native across the world have been getting their moko or respective cultural tattoos as a manner of reclamation from the erasure of indigenous culture, this ink isn’t going anywhere British Empire!
Tattooing became such a male dominated space as sailors brought the practice of tattooing to modern Europe. European sailors became fascinated by tattooing through their encounters with indigenous peoples throughout the Age of Exploration. The practice was handed from indigenous people directly to male sailors, and it became common on vessels. An older sailor would tattoo a symbol onto a young sailor’s arm; anchors or other seafaring emblems.
While the history of tattoos is one complicated and dark in patches, times are changing. There’s no place for sexism or racism or anti-semitism in the tattoo world, this isn’t a boys’ club anymore, many shops offer free coverups for any now taboo tattoo, tat-booboos.
Indeed, the relationship between humans and tattoos is a long one, one dating thousands of years back. In the vast expanse of the Altai Mountains, where Russia, Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan converge, there exists a world frozen in time. In 1993, Russian archaeologists discovered an intriguing find on the Ukok plateau near the Russia-China border. Digging at the grave site, they stumbled upon a giant block of ice. They found the mummified body of a 25-year-old princess known as the Siberian Ice Maiden or ‘Princess of Ukok’. The Ukoks were a nomadic tribe that roamed the steppes more than 2,500 years ago. But it wasn’t her burial rites or the artifacts she was interred with that drew gasps of wonder and intrigue; it was the intricate designs that adorned her skin.
The Ice Maiden had tattoos on her fingers and both arms. It seems no matter where you go in this mad, vast and strange world humans’ simple curiosity to put ink to skin is an inevitable and prosperous one. This act of artistry and self-expression is one that links us special members of the tattooed club!
Universities pride themselves on legacy. It is what leads us to the institution, its name. The buildings housing our education are built honouring the alumni of our great establishment. Dates, crests, latin and lists of old white men’s names litter the five hundred and seventy three year old walls, reminding us of the people behind the University of Glasgow. But what about the money behind these institutions, not just the people. The flowing river of cash converted into salaries, scholarships and study spaces. The investment of funds into armstrading and the weapons industry has been a hot topic on campus for the last decade. It seems obscene to think that the money from our humble scholastic sanctuary put a gun in the hand of an IDF soldier or helped build a fighter jet “mowing the lawn” of the Gaza strip.
Or is it?
Let’s go step by step:
1.You pay your fees to the University of Glasgow, around £9,250 for the average UK student
2. A fund manager from the Investment Advisory Committees invests in stock market categories, for example in the Arms Category, BAE systems. In 2024 the university bought 14,998 shares with a market value of £194,524.06.
3. BAE produces the rear fuselage, used in F-35 fighter jets. that are produced by Lockheed and Martin, whom in 2024 the university bought 855 shares with a market value of £360,731.52
4. The Israeli Government, buys 50 F-35 jets, receiving 32 by 2022. The UK Defence Minister admitted that ‘there were 14 transfers of F-35 components’ from the UK to Israel between 2023 – 2024.’
5. The stock price of BAE increases, BAE Systems prices have soared by almost 120% across the last 3 years following the war in: Ukraine, Palestine and Yemen.
6. The F-35’s are used on the air strikes of the Gaza strip, killing more than 46,000 Palestinians
7. BAE makes a profit from the IDF’s purchase, before interest and tax in 2023, BAE made a record sale of £25.3bn.
8. UOG sees a return on their investment by the continuation of endowments from BAE, in 2023 UOG had 17,075 shares at £159,045.86 continuing into 2024. BAE have £38,879,098 in research partnerships with UOG
9. I get my £1000 a year RUK Scholarship.
Unfortunately, the F-35 jet isn’t the odd exception.
From the companies UOG invested in both in 2023 and 2024, they produce parts or manufacture the: F-161 jet, BAE makes the HUD (Head up Displays), MK 38 Mod 2 machine gun by BAE , F-35A jet manufactured by Lockheed and Martin or the F-35B-C jet manufactured by Rolls Royce. Or even the software for the Heron Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance UAV drones by Thales.
Just to name a microscopic portion of the Israeli arsenal produced by companies in UOG’s investment list.
In 2009 to ensure the university was making ‘socially responsible investments’ it introduced its SRI policy. Ensuring all investments were aligned to the UOG’s “world changing views”, in the interest of ‘environmental and social governance’. This ‘ethical investment service’ was a facade, a smoke screen of political correctness to cover the millions of pounds that our university has fed into the arms trade.
Following a blockade of the Rankine Building by GUJPS and GAFF on the 12/3/2025, a liaison meeting with the Chief Operating Officer, David Duncan and Head of Security Gary Stephen was arranged:
One last question from myself-
DD Go on.
Do you acknowledge that the university makes money from killing people? From war. Do you acknowledge that fact?
DD No. No. It’s not true.
Are you sure David?
The University Fund managers are ‘required to divest from companies that seriously breach international treaties that the UK is a signatory of’.
In the 2024 investments, Caterpillar Inc (1,469 shares at £397,070.89) are alleged to be providing equipment used in the demolition of homes in conflict zones, leading to displacement. This violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ‘Article 12: protection against arbitrary interference with one’s home’ and ‘Article 17: right to property ownership’. Alstom SA (2,785 shares at £42,514.16) are alleged to be involved in Israeli settlement projects in Palestinian territories, actively displacing communities. This violates ‘Article 9: protection against arbitrary exile’ and ‘Article 17’. Both the Israeli banks, Bank Hapoalim (3,904 shares at £28,073.09) and Bank Leumi (4,737 shares at £32,003.99) were identified by the High Council for Human Rights, to be ‘involved in the activities’ aiding the ‘Israeli settlements’ on ‘occupied Palestinian Territory’.
This identifies some of the investments that have breached Human Rights, unrelated to the arms trade. The supplement of arms to states at risk is a clear breach of Human Rights, clearly not.
GUJPS/GAAF calculated that in 2023 the sum of arms investments by UOG was at £4,493,821. In addition to this, the University’s careers service platforms these companies, inviting them to careers fairs. There are 23 active research grants, totalling around £60,343,849, funded by arms companies in the Engineering (~£23,093,465), Physics (~£26,249,593), Astronomy, Chemistry, Computing Science and Math & Stats schools. These are funded by Thales (389 shares at £48,158.10), Leonardo (3.297 shares at £61,134.90), Honeywell (1,843 shares at £293,786.64), Lockheed and Martin, BAE, Airbus (1,585 shares at £186,888.85), Dassault, Jacobs, QinetiQ, Siemens and Teledyne.
All are known to have made contributions to the Israeli Defence Force.
A FOI request was sent to UOG to ensure the 2024 File of Investments held for Endowment would be made publically available. They were released for a few days when they were taken down and were only recently reinstated.
110 of the 1038 companies we define as ‘socially irresponsible’.
David Duncan defined a moral ‘distinction’ in ‘a defence sector’ and the sales of ‘arms to certain recipients’.
So what you are saying about, companies who’ve- there is a difference between having a defense sector and-
DD selling arms-
-dealing arms to certain people, certain countries-
DD Yep.
-in high risk states. So PAX, a peace charity, used data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute to look at the unethical deliverance of arms to states at risk by the 25 largest arms companies [Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (now RTX), Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, BAE Systems, AVIC, L3Harris, Airbus, Leonardo, Thales, Honeywell, Rolls-Royce, General Electric and Safran]. In the companies identified [by PAX] bar 1 [AVIC] we have investments in all of these companies in both 2023 and 2024 [totalling at an estimated £2,896,094.39 in 2024]. And then they also looked at the links between the 15 biggest European banks who continued loans and investments with these arms companies in light of their unethical arms trading who through sales “contributed to negative human rights impacts”. So what you’re saying people delivering arms to people who are actively, the unethical deliverance of arms in differentiation from a defence sector. Out of the banks, out of the top 15 banks who engaged in that, we have investments in 10 of them.
DD So your talking about banks rather than defence sector-
Banks who continued to support arms companies and the arms companies themselves who did exactly what you are saying is unethical, supplying them to certain states at risk, so we have done that.
DD Yeah.
With the The companies highlighted were done through the 10% rule, as long as the company makes less than 10% of its profits from arms trading, all is ok.
We haven’t. Murder is Murder. Whether in Yemen, Palestine or Sudan. Be it a bolt, a nut or a screw, complicity in the production of any part in the machine of war is unacceptable.
Overall, the sum of arms investments in 2024 is estimated around £4,520,625.29.
David Duncan said a ‘revised SRI policy’ would return to the University Court in April of 2025. Judging from the ignorance to genocide by the managerial team surrounding the issue of divestment, what does this mean for the student body as we sit and wait?
To be bigger, louder and stronger. To stand together with the UCU, SRC and the greater Glasgow community. As said by Chomsky and Pappé, ‘We are many. We will prevail’.
Success has been seen previously. Student action directly led to the divestment of university funds from the fossil fuel industry, however pathetically that has been pursued by the Investment Advisory Committee.
The prevalent presence of student activism on campus highlights the problematic funding that goes into building a university, book by book.
Our university is built on the back of colonial profits and we now see the game of apologetic amendments unfolding. In 2016, UOG acknowledged it ‘received some gifts’ ‘from persons who may have benefitted from the proceeds of slavery’. In 2018, UOG announced a set of initiatives acknowledging its colonial past. In 2019, they signed an agreement with the University of the West Indies in Jamaica pledging £20 million in funding activities relating to restorative justice and the issue of slavery.
Amendments can be made and divestments done without the bankruptcy of the university that is so greatly feared .
If David Duncan and the rest of the faceless, nameless, cowardly UOG management cannot open their eyes to the humanitarian crisis we are actively contributing to and not divest, should we?
If only it was that simple. To remove our fees, return our scholarship removing the fear of indifference to the economic contribution to war. As students, we now have to define our alignment with the university system in the 21st Century. The access to education builds the tools to challenge the colonial capitalist ideology plaguing not just the halls of the GUU but the foundations of the world.
Education is not the cost to be cut. It is the investment in the arms trade.
Simple, right David?
Management’s choice to not divest illustrates the hypocrisy at the core of the University of Glasgow, not by the student body but by its perverse pedagogues.
So, you joined us. We followed these funds down and you saw what we found. Now it falls to you. Engaging with the issue of Palestinian liberation or any war is to engage with divestment and that begins in this university we call home.
We can only show you the way, tell you the truth, you must help create the life we all deserve.
Chinese women in both the western and eastern cannon have been obscured, hidden, and forgotten. Feminine participation in art creation from the Xia dynasty (2100–1700 BCE)[1] to modern day, has been left out of the ‘annals of history’[2], resulting in them forcibly existing behind men artistically and academically; their works may feel limited and rare but are not non-existent. The collections of institutions like the National Palace Museum in Beijing show several ‘exceptional artworks by women themselves and the subject of ladies’. Chinese, and all women’s participation in art creation in its simplest form can be defined into two roles: ‘as artists and as [pictorial]… subjects’ as muses or patrons. In both roles, there is a plethora of Chinese women who contributed to art creation as creators and visual stimulus across the Chinese dynasties. In the 21st Century, there is a new generation of Chinese women continuing this legacy and reclaiming their time in the spotlight and redefining Chinese femininity in art as both maker and muse.
One of the most recognisable subgenres of Chinese painting is “meiren hua[5]” 美人畫 (paintings of beautiful women) highlighting the importance of women’s roles as pictorial subjects. The genre originated in the Song Dynasty, then was later popularised in the Qing Imperial court from 1644-1911AD.[6] It has historically been associated with ‘male painters using gendered perspectives to create idealised female figures’’, a unique version of Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male Gaze’ focusing on Chinese women. Jake McIvor suggests the ‘Qing Dynasty was the most oppressive towards women’ based ‘largely on Confucian ethics’ with ‘patriarchal oppression’, reflected in the Twelve Beauties. The mieren hua genre operates on the reduction of Women to core idealised patriarchal virtues: beautiful, domesticated, and sexualised.
Prince Yong’s (1678 –1735[7]) Shi’er meiren tu 十二美人圖 (Twelve Beauties)[8] from the Qing court are quintessential mieren hua works. Prince Yong, a Qing dynasty prince who became the Yongzhen 雍正 Emperor in 1722 (AD), commissioned 12 large paintings for the hall in the Yuanmingyuan 圓明園 garden[9]. The Twelve Beauties combine the yueling tu 月齡圖 (Calendar paintings) genre with mieren hua toillustrate ‘court ladies’, ‘anonymous generic beauties’ as symbols of ‘royal privilege and power’.[10] The mieren hua style was largely influenced by the ‘pictorial repertoire of the Han dynasty’[11] in 206 BCE-220 CE[12]. Many of the ‘conventional stylistic attributes’ from the Song (CE 960 – 1279) and Ming (1368-1644 CE) paintings of women are evident within the mieren hua portraits; femininity operates as the focal point of this genre of work produced during these periods, therefore the participation of female sitters cannot be understated.
The women in the mieren hua genre are shown in an ‘idealised’ style, arguably a consistent trend within the entirety of the artistic canon. The genre illustrates the traditional Far-East Asian-centric patriarchal beauty standards in China: ‘long oval faces’, ‘slender bodies and pale white skin. This genre of painting can also function as a type of documentation of feminine fashion trends in the imperial court. The ‘Twelve beauties’ highlight key trends from the Qing period for women: ‘colourful embroidered robes’, ‘ornamental hair ribbons’, ‘jinbu yao’—a hair ornament worn by ‘royal ladies during the Han period’ (206BCE–220CE) gaining popularity among elite women in the Tang (618–907CE) era. Not only are these women the inspiration of the work but the social trends of the era determine the content, most of the paintings are ‘interior spaces’- in Confucian philosophy ‘nei 内 (inner)’ is symbolically a ‘feminine spaces. However, the mieren hua women’s ‘opulent’ and “trendy” appearance is an emblematic one, “she” is firmly positioned as unattainable but remains imbued with just enough eroticism to remain desirable. The ‘Qing emperors were fascinated with the erotic culture of the Jiangnan area’ and continued that sense of eroticism. The mieren hua paintings illustrate a core feminist complex of the feminine archetypes regarding sexuality, one is not able to be sexual but must be open to being sexualised for the pleasure of your male superiors, ‘a prince or emperor’. The Qing imperial court transformed the meiren hua into a sophisticated patriarchal display of economically and socially precious imperial goods: technology, fabrics, architecture, and women.
The forced ‘male subjectivity onto women evident in the mieren hua genre is pervasive over women’s participation in art creation in not only Chinese art but arguably the entirety of humanities creative works. Many women feel ‘forced to conform’ to these ‘male authored’ and popularised modes of ‘male authored representations of women’ in their own creative production. Art Historian Tani. E. Barlow suggests that ‘collectively women [have been used as a] medium, not a subject’. Laura Blanchard has documented how Laura Mulvey’s essay increased the popularity of female subjectivity and the understanding of ‘women as a medium’ in the Chinese art world in the late 1990s. The investigation into the reversal and reclaiming of the gendered positions of power in art, ‘man as the bearer of the look’ and ‘woman as the image’, became the focal point of many contemporary female Chinese artists. Flipping the ‘binary opposition’ of ‘male and female’ subjectivity through the muguang 目光or guankan shixian 觀看視綫, (gaze) or the (viewer’s gaze).
Yu Hong is a ‘female contemporary Chinese artist’ who focuses on ‘female authored pictorial representation of women’ as an act of feminist reclamation. Her work, like the Twelve Beauties, reflects the ‘cultural positioning’ of Chinese women in society. Hong’s work centralised on the assertion of her ‘own sense of positionality’ enabling an exploration into ‘multiple issues from women’s perspectives. In 2003 Hong showed her series She includes the diptych Female Writer; itcombines painting and photography transcending traditional mieren hua images of idealised beauty seen in Twelve Beauties. Hong allowed her sitter, Zhao Bo, to accompany the painting with an image of herself of her choice, assigning a sense of subjectivity back to the female pictorial subject. Hong also creates an interesting multiplicity in the work’s perspective linguistically in the Chinese series title- Ta 她. The character is the ‘third-person singular feminine pronoun’, 她 is either subjective or objective- Hong uses the ‘objective’. The works in Female Writer represent women as the ‘object of Hong’s gaze’ and simultaneously allow their ‘own subject position’.
The Chinese title of Female Writer, ‘meinü’, a synonym for “beautiful woman” creates a clear connection to the Twelve Beauties. Hong creates a ‘reinterpretation’ of the female pictorial subject from the ‘late imperial eras’ in Female Writer. The work stands as a 21st century feminist response to the archetypal images in Twelve Beauties and other mieren hua works. Hong doing so subverts and interrupts the ‘concept of gaze as a path to patriarchal pleasure’ through the feminine pictorial subject. Hong used similar iconography and compositional choices: interior spaces, personal belongings, and single female figures. However, the most significant yet subtle difference is the subjectivity of the female subject. In Twelve Beauties, the women are ‘generic idealised symbols’ only differentiated by stylistic choices like clothing or the spaces they exist within, the women lack any sense of personal agency. Hong used Chinese women diverse in age and ethnic groups across the She series as a means of recasting and reclaiming self-agency. Female Writer shows the ‘power of female authorial point of view in art’ and the currency of the feminist debates of ‘female subjectivity’ in art as a reflection of our patriarchal culture.
In conclusion, Chinese women’s participation in art creation is transcendent across Chinese history in multifarious ways: maker, muse, and model. The understanding and redefining of the patriarchal influences on women’s representation in Chinese art is a vital cultural tool. Works like Twelve Beauties and Female Writer stand together as a beautiful illustration of the progress that Chinese women have made in 21st Century China. However, they simultaneously highlight the struggles for self-agency women like Yu Hong and many other Chinese women have defied and continue to fight for through participation in art creation.
[1] Yunong and Fraser, ‘Chinese Calligraphy and Painting’.
The world of the arts and the artistic canon is historically masculine. No question. Gombrich, the “godfather of art history” wrote “The Story of Art” (a quasi-art history gospel) without mentioning one woman. Women, in art and society, are so often reduced to genius cursed by their gender like Tracey Emin, Frida Kahlo or Artemisia Gentileschi. Or silent muses like Lydia Délectorskaya the muse of Henri Matisse and traditional archetypes: virgin mothers, doting wives and Madonna whores. The women in this world of antiquity so often exist in the domestic sphere enchained by the patriarchy and they have gone unseen and unheard.
In amidst the storm of biblical images and the masculine world of the Renaissance, one painter from the city of Delft in the Netherlands emerges back in the 17th Century. Without the drive of the masculine ego or “making his mark on the world and his fortune in the process” behind him, he quietly diverges from this homogenised world in almost every was possible.
Enter, Johannes Vermeer.
Vermeer is one of the most venerated Dutch artists of all time, a national icon of the Netherlands. Yet his image endures as a rather mystical and enigmatic one. Countless galleries are inundated with Rembrandts’ and Rubens’ but only 37 Vermeer’s exist. Alone there are more Rembrandt’s self-portraits then entire oeuvre of Vermeer. He is only seen once in his work, his back turned away from us remaining anonymous. Or twice if one considers the portrayal of Vermeer in “Girl with the Pearl Earring” by Pride and Prejudice star and OG heart throb Colith Firth. There are no letters or diaries, no students or masters, merely his children and his paintings. Vermeer challenges this concept of these problematic and big-headed old masters like Caravaggio or Da Vinci and instead remains true to himself.
A trademark “Vermeer” consists of a small canvas that is transformed into a window, exquisite shading, colour, deep folds of fabric, immense detail and young women just existing. Everything in the painting feels precious and is visually articulated with such precision and craftmanship. Traditionally the work of this period, the 17th century, were these obscenely large grand pictures almost imposingly towering over us. Embellished with extravagant shows of wealth or religious devotion.
Vermeer was a master of the intimate, amplified by his use of small-scale. His works become mini worlds into a corner of a room, absorbing and relishing in just a singular moment. His glorious vision is shared with us and we are invited in. It is an invitation of the ordinary, masterfully elevated to the marvellous. Our presence with these women, oblivious of their observance and unaware of being seen, feels like a kind of privilege. We encounter them indulged in their solitude, absorbed in their occupations, in “A Room of ones own”.
Vermeer diverges from the sexually pervasive heterosexual male gaze of the art world. Think: Virgin Suicides, Quentin Tarantino, Zach Snyder Justice League Cut, Cassie Howard and the Birth of Venus. Women in media are non-consensually and voyeuristically perverted but Vermeer doesn’t engage in this. He leaves these girls be and simply go on: making lace, pouring milk or reading a letter.
Vermeer also used new methods to create his own style. He didn’t use harsh lines in the face just shadows. Vermeer’s women are bathed in light and shadow, he is a master of this. Da Vinci said one could just use black for shadows but Vermeer uses colour in his shadows. Take that Da Vinci. A particular pigment called, green earth, near the eye and in the base of the flesh tones. Vermeer is the only painter to do this, it is unique to him. He is the king of shadows.
It is heavily theorised that Vermeer gained such an astute understanding of shadows through embracing emerging technology, the camera obscura. His neighbough’s back in Delft were the Jesuits. The Catholics living next door made the Protestant-raised Vermeer see the light. Literally. Supposedly (TW Art history conspiracy theory incoming), upon the neighbour’s death in 1656 Vermeer MAY have acquired his camera obscura and in his works from this year characteristics of camera projections begin to emerge. The Optical instrument can be simply explained as: a ray of light passing through a small hole or a lens into a darkened room and projects an image of the outside world onto a bright surface inside. The picture produced is upside down and left-right reversed unless a second lens is placed where the light enters.
Vermeer may have just used this device to simply observe the world around him. Seeing light and shadows from new perspectives. This may have aided him in his innovation of artistic expression, never before seen.
While writing this, I looked over to my left and saw a little rabbit looking at me, sporting a little blue dress in the Vermeer blue we have come to know and love.
Enter, Miffy.
Miffy like Vermeer was “born” in the Netherlands, created in 1955 by graphic designer, Dick Bruna. Bruna, fused stories he told to his children with geometric papercutting techniques of Matisse and Mondrian. The result of this artistic fusion is a perfected and newfound expressive minimalism. She is called Nijite in Dutch or Miffy in English.
Like Vermeer, there is very little information available on Bruna. They are both these understated genius figures, resistant to the mainstream and demands of capitalism. They do what they love. With the simplicity of Miffy’s design Bruna can convey the slightest change in emotion through the two dots and cross for her eyes and mouth. His work is so evocative of the subtlety of emotion like Vermeer, there is a kind of magic. Both have made a career of stripping characters down to their very essence.
Although on the surface, Vermeer and Bruna are from different generations and from polar opposites of the art genres. One being a “high art” grand master and another childhood graphic design storybooks. Perplexingly Vermeer and Bruna have these strange time defying connections.
Both were captivated by small, intimate stories, focusing on a single activity, often taking place in and around the home. They share a fondness for the colour blue, such a particular shade that even now writing this the very tone and hue springs into mind. The connection I love the most between Vermeer and Bruna is the expression of girlhood.
These girls are left to simply exist. On the page, in the canvas, in the corner of the room. No nudity, no abuse and no sexualisation. They unassumingly are there.
I must admit to you now, I am filled with a sense of sadness even having to express delight at a young women being shown in such a simple way but I know these girls. I know how it feels to sit, get dressed and put on my jewellery piece by piece like amour or go to a gallery and revel in such a childhood feeling of joy often disparaged by society, shown by Miffy through the two dots and cross of her face.
Both Vermeer and Bruna through their lives and artistic careers fused new concepts and techniques in each of their retrospective works. But the messages intertwined in their work, becomes even more potent when fused together. I think they are artistic soulmates, defying time and mortality. They live on through their work and acknowledge the experience of girlhood so often forgotten, but not by them and not by me.
A single cog in a massive machine, paying their dues, perfecting their craft with a pair of tweezers painstakingly applying almond slivers onto a perfectly cooked cod and hand sorting micro herbs. The “idea” of a chef permeates the whole of media, in Bob’s Burgers, Bob, is an ‘Artist who paints with beef, a Beefartist’. This common idea of chefs as these belligerent artists using flavour and texture to create an individual experience of excellence has slowly evolved through media.
When one thinks of an artist, they may think calm, intune with themselves in a slightly unhinged and hysterical way. Chefs are not immune to this. Chefs are notoriously phyco.
Gordon Ramsey has created a whole career around it. Hell’s Kitchen, a show consisting of professionals willingly submitting themselves to abuse, “This fish is so raw, he’s trying to fucking finding Nemo.”, has had over 20 seasons. Ramsey himself has claimed, “Chefs are nutters. They’re all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls, and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.”
Marco Pierre White, the first “celebrity chef” and mentor to Ramsey catalysed this whole phenomenon back in the 1990’s. White gained a reputation for regularly ejecting patrons if he took offence at their comments, one man asked for chips with his lunch thus prompting White to hand-cut and personally cook chips at the low price of £25 a portion. White would lob cheese plates, cut a chef’s jacket open with knife and even assaulting a chef who had recently broken his leg. Akin to Ramsey, this childish tempura tantrum behaviour was self-aware, “I used to go fucking insane”. During his time working for White, Ramsey was reduced down, like a red wine jus, in the corner of the kitchen, head in buried in his hands and sobbing.”
The cycle of abuse in the food industry is inescapable. The student and the master.
But the question is where does this anger come from? And why is this disturbing display of toxic masculinity and workplace abuse normalized?
Its undoubtable like many other industries in society, food is male dominated. When you think of a chef you think of the likes of the forementioned Michelin Hall of Famers or the swine Jamie Oliver and the gorgeous Marcus Wearing. According to a survey published by in January 2021, 71% of female workers had been sexually harassed during their time in the industry. An uproar was caused in the industry back in 2017 when industry giant Mario Batali was publicly exposed as a serial rapist and having a room in his restaurant building labelled the “rape room”. On Hell’s Kitchen the word “bitches” and “cunt” appear more than “chicken” or “delicious”; even though12 of 18 winners are women. The misogyny that undercuts the restaurant industry is so painfully ironic. The simplest misogynist insult “get back to the kitchen” is somehow forgotten when on the professional level and the kitchen is now “a man’s world”.
But Professional kitchens are confrontational. They are busy. And if you can’t take the heat, then maybe you should get out of the fucking kitchen.
Ramsey’s, White’s and many others style of abusive management has arguably damaged an entire generation of chefs. From tears and nervous breakdowns to depression and suicide. Those who choose to work in the restaurant industry put themselves at the mercy of a high-pressure work environment and bullying bosses. Critism of this infinitely macho culture emerged earlier in 2022 through the show “The Bear”.
The show follows, fine dining chef Carmy Berzatto, and his return to Chicago to take over his brother’s restaurant, after he unexpectedly takes his own life. He is forced to face both the complicated past relationship with his brother Michael and grief at his death but his own mental health, abuse in the industry and morphing into the abuser. The 2021, one shot film “Boiling Point” follows this similar narrative. A talented chef spirals inexorably towards destruction balancing along a knife’s edge as his life descends into chaos during one dinner service. These programmes had great critical acclaim winning numerous awards but most importantly brought a self-aware and critical perspective on this destructive industry into focus.
My personal favourite chef and documentarian of all time is Anthony Bourdain. He focused on the exploration of international culture, the restaurant industry, and the human condition. He died of suicide in 2018 after a long mental health battle stemming back to his work in the industry. While this tempest of abuse, misogyny and suffering infects the industry and is engrossed on in the media, we lose the heart of it. Food.
“Food brings people together on many different levels. It’s nourishment of the soul and body; it’s truly love.” – Anthony Bourdain
Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone, anymore than we can.
– Jack Spicer
The Thieves, a collaborative exhibition shown in February at the CCA, was a partnership of coloured drawings by artist Josie Perry and a science fiction text by Francis Jones. Josie Perry is a Glasgow based artist mainly working with drawing and collaborative projects in a long term collaboration with Daphne Simons, centering around a series of comics fictionalising art historical figures through a queer lense. Francis Jones is an Irish writer and artist living in London, and they are both a “waiter” and a “writer”- remember that. It felt as though Perry and Jones created a patchwork quilt, weaving together our phones: the chaos catalysed within us by our news feeds, saturday night rampages and nostalgia. The exhibition placed us within the sphere of rage, sadness and precarity visible in the world around us. It created an overlapping conversation between understandings of community, queerness and exclusion and how this manifests for the youth of society.
The Thievesintroduced us to a collective, or a kind of artistic liberal queer avengers, who stand against the machinations of power in hatred of capitalism.
They are so real for that.
Alongside a reading of Francis’s text that reverberates throughout the room, around the walls of the small room on the top floor of the CCA hung Josie’s colour pencil drawings. Imagine a sci-fi text detailing the escape from a hellish neoliberal city illustrated like a Klandinsky, Lisa Frank, acid trip, folk story. Ya get me. Perry used visual codes and a y2k aesthetic to produce a sense of a teenage cultural capital. Whether it be embedded in the graffiti on bathroom walls, including the famous S symbol we all know and love, stickers, or selfies or. Perry also echoed the design of tarot and pokemon cards in her work which added to this aura of fun and whimsy. It was so refreshing to see work made for the “youth” of our generation by our own peers. These escapist and psychedelic “fun” visuals contrasted the deep political messages of Jone’s text, a contrast that only made each part sing louder.
The dystopian genre is one of the most popular genres of media across film and literature. It functions as a means for writers to raise awareness of a myriad of political issues that have changed with the times. The protagonist is often an emblematic or representative figure, like Winston from 1984 or Guy Montag from Fahrenheit 451. Even Neo from The Matrix. While this allows for authors to project wider issues, it often leaves readers with a sense of disconnection from the work given the impersonal quality of the characters. Even more modern dystopian tales like The Hunger Games, Divergent and Maze Runner place greater emphasis on characters being cool and edgy rather than politically conscious individuals (Katniss Everdeen, I love you).
The genius of The Thievesand, in turn, what Jones and Perry have done, is to give a face to these protagonist figures, and they chose to do so with the faces of their friends. With their vital organs illuminated, meshed with glowing flowers and hugged by deep blanketing shadows of love, they all looked like excellent people to conspire bringing down the capitalist system with. At the exhibition opening, looking around, you could match the face of the character as drawn on the wall to the person in real life standing to your left, chatting and sipping a bottle of Peroni. This meant the issues raised in The Thieves, like capitalism, identity, isolation and war, were brought out of the text and shown in relation to our lives, in relation to who we are. Whether it be the ongoing genocide in Palestine or the rampant cost of living crisis in the UK, on our doorstep and on our phones we are engulfed in a hellish world.
However, the joy of Josie’s illustrations and the power of Francis’ text show us a path of hope. By banding together, going out into nature and being as one we can find a way to cope with these stresses of modern life. The positions of “worker” (or proletariat if you enjoy a bit of Marxist lingo) and poet aren’t separated by Jones. It doesn’t show wage labour, a vital act to exist in a capitalist world inhibiting one’s ability to dream and give into childish nostalgia. One can be both a waiter and a writer. The experience of living in an ultra laborious exploitative world catalyses moments of resistant hyper-consciousness that Jones gives sound to and Josie visualises through their collective poetry and artwork. Through reflections on our own identity and our future, Jones and Perry invite us to be our own dystopian protagonists of the now. To steal back our happiness and become The Thieves.
This is an all too familiar scenario, right? Trying to arrange a date, a coffee, or to find out if there was reading for the seminar you have in 20 minutes. Despite us all having a phone, we are patched, pied, or left alone at the edge of this digital-social universe. Be it an iPhone 6, 14, or 86 coming soon, Samsung, Google, Huawei, or the trusty Nokia Brick. Or a laptop, desktop, iPad loaded with a uni email, personal email, Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, iCloud, then maybe your personal social concoction of Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, iMessage, Whatsapp, work number, home number, personal number, and many more.
Our ability to be connected is more advanced than ever. On our little planet of 7.95 billion people there are over 8.58 billion mobile subscriptions in use: we are out-populated by our little black screens. There are 7.9 billion email accounts worldwide – think of all that two step verification. This results in 347 billion emails being sent and received every day, pinging through the air replacing the trusty messenger pigeon. We are living in the height of our technological development; long gone is the need to encode a message in morse code, dial a landline, or fax a tax document. Thanks to the Silicon Valley Bros, yes Zuckerberg I’m looking at you here, we have entered a new age which combines our most innate human desire to feel connected with the vice of our generation – technology.
Our drive to connect with other people and form relationships is not just a whimsical motivation or casual coincidence. Social connection is an essential human need which has provided many advantages for survival, and we can thank our hominid ancestors for this. Put simply, we found strength and safety in numbers – no wonder we are drawn to that corner of the internet where we can indulge in sub culture groups and fan bases. Anthropologists have claimed that the reason why humans developed such large brains compared to our friends in the animal kingdom was so that we could deal with the growth and complexity of social interactions and social networks. They showed that a species’ group size was the strongest predictor of the size of an animal’s neocortex (the outermost part of the brain). The bigger the group, the bigger the brain. The act of navigating the tempest of numerous social interactions, relationships, and networks was so cognitively demanding we had to develop bigger brains to accommodate it. Just like we update our apps to send and receive messages quicker, we upgraded to bigger brains in order to connect.
Neuroscientists have used a form of MRI scanning to better understand how our brain functions to support us socially. Researchers have found that there are two distinct brain networks: social and non-social thinking. Our social brain network is always activated, regardless of if we are engaged in a social or non-social task (texting vs doing a sudoku). But what’s most interesting is what the brain does when we’re not doing anything, when we’re just lying in bed and our social brain network remains engaged. When finished with a non-social task and the sudoku is complete, the social brain turns back on almost instantly like a reflex. Our brain’s default mode is social. This results in that sinking feeling in your gut when being left on read or the phone going to voicemail.
I felt this recently. When going on my first. Ever. Date…Yes, a baddie like me was left waiting on Byres road by a boy in a band. It happens to the best of us. While frantically ringing my mother in utter despair at this feeble “man’s” (a generous term I’m aware) inability to answer the phone – my mother, an epic LOTR fan, came out with a belter:
‘IT WOULD BE QUICKER TO LIGHT THE BLOODY BEACONS!’
If you are a deprived soul who is unconscious of the beautiful work of Lord of the Rings, I take great pity on you as the lighting of the beacons of Gondor is a cinematic masterpiece. As the beginning stages of the final battle looms, large bonfires lie dormant across the mountain skyline of the cities of men ready to blaze a bright burning light to communicate the need for aid. Pippin (one of the good guys) sneakily lights the beacons, and within a montage of what feels like minutes the message is sent and received. Aragorn (the sexy fella with the long hair and even longer sword) bursts through the doors to proclaim ‘GONDOR CALLS FOR AID’. How is it with all these modern means of communication at our literal fingertips, that the ability to contact someone feels impossible? It inevitably feels like it would be faster to embrace a more primitive and effective means of communication and light the beacons of Gondor than to send a message on Hinge.
This new sense of connection paradoxically creates a desire to be disconnected. In a study done for Student Edge with Vodafone, of 1000 people 25.9 said they had their phone on Do Not Disturb most of the time, and 17.6 said their phones were turned off all of the time. Homosapians – the creators of societies, the builders of pyramids, and splitters of the atom – have been reduced to quivering wrecks by a simple red circle of pixels on the top right corner of our apps with a number slowly rising inside.
While there is a tiny, weeny, little, baby possibility that this isn’t a universal problem and that maybe people just don’t want to answer my calls and don’t like my Hinge, I am utterly unwilling to admit that. So, in the meantime I’m going to sit with my iPhone 13 on Do Not Disturb and ponder in a never-ending pit of anxiety, somewhat satiated by my sertraline, if our appetite for human connection and communication can be quenched in this new digital age. Or should we reject modernity, embrace tradition, and light the bloody beacons on goddamn fire?
He stalks towards me and places his hand on my cheek. His digits run across my face and then he-
‘DINNER TIME!’
Dirty stories found on AO3, Wattpad, Tumblr (the holy trinity) featuring favoured fictional hunks have become a significant part of the hormonal sexual awakening. Wattpad has around 90 million monthly users and over 665 million stories. “Revolutionary” works by ‘great novelists’, i.e. old white men, pale in comparison to the pen[wo]manship of middle school girls. Her dog is ill, she’s moving house, and her parents are divorcing during exam season and yet, she’s created a masterpiece.
Can Shakespeare say the same?
Often following trends, such as the ever-evolving “White boy of the Month” on TikTok, or catalysed by new films or series, recently it’s TheBallad of Songbirds and Snakes or House of the Dragon, these stories elicit millions of readers. Most are completely unhinged sexy romps, à la After,that go on to be made into equally cringey movie adaptations. These variations on traditionally formatted video porn are at times comically cringey, hot asf, or genuinely concerning, as real world people are often slowly roped into the narrative. The result? Most teenage girls not blinking an eye to the ‘scandalous’ Saltburn, having read much worse. Regardless, smut of all forms can be an entirely valid avenue to climax.
Fanfics and smut are mostly written and consumed by young women. A common joke online is that smut readers need to assign a designated individual to delete their reading history upon their death, taking their scandalous smutty vices to the grave. Smut is so popular due to the taboo of female sexuality. At school I remember boys openly talking about their favourite porno (a troubling thought then and now, ugh!). It was an unspoken truth that if their female peers mentioned anything of this ilk, public ridicule would have ensued.
The increasing objectification of the women in porn is off-putting. How does one find pleasure in something that fails to keep your perspective in mind? Fanfiction does just this: it reallocates humanity and identity in sexuality. There’s no worry of hackers or viruses, and it is completely free. Only an ad for ‘Mistplay’ between chapters on Wattpad. It is customisable through tags and the genius design of AO3. Choose your man, trope, length, and rating.
It gives us a vivid space for escapism. In an age where misogyny is on the rise due to the cretins of the internet like Andrew Tate, teenage boys can be repulsive. So log on to Wattpad and be with a respectful beefy superhero who is in love with you. Watch edits of your man and evade being tied down; on the internet you can have multiple boyfriends. It’s a community space happily centred around celeb obsession and disrupting the taboos of female sexuality. While female interests are ridiculed by men on podcasts, these spaces become safe havens. The comment section on Wattpad will forever be the funniest place on the internet.
Still, fanfics remain the bastard of the literary family. They dominate the debate of High Art and true literature; the erotica of Nabokov is allowed but not mine, why? ‘Respectable’ modern-day literature has no shortage of derivative works: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius are Hamlet fanfics. Pamela Morgen’s series based on Pride and Prejudice was acquired by Simon & Schuster and is widely cited as a fanfic author crossing over into “real” publishing. Yet no one slapped the fanfic label on Sally Beauman’s Rebecca’s Tale, a retelling of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, when it was released by a major publisher in 2001.
In 2020 a tumblr post went viral. It described the link between – wait for it – 9/11 and Fifty Shades of Grey, illustrating the significance of fanfiction in mainstream media. Catalysed by Gerard Way, lead singer of My Chemical Romance who formed the band post witnessing 9/11. MCR’s music inspired Stephanie Meyers to write the Twilight saga, a self-insert vampire angst filled slow burn romance. The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series originally titled Master of the Universe and published on fanfiction websites by ‘Snowqueen Icedragon’. Full of BDSM, slowburn angsty smut, it leaked into Hollywood and the homes of millions around the world in a “respectable” fashion.
Fanfiction is a symbol of teenage female sexuality that, after being shamed by society for decades, has now found sanctity on the internet. Fanfiction is all around us whether you like it or not.
Swan Soul Stories 