Universidade do Minho Instituto de Letras e Ciências Humanas Maria Luísa de Sousa Coelho amination ts and Helena Almeida ation and Cont ober epresent The Feminine in Contemporary Art: : R t Representation and Contamination in the y Ar Work of Helen Chadwick, Michèle Roberts and Helena Almeida ork of Helen Chadwick, Michèle R eminine in Contemporar he W The F in t Maria Luísa de Sousa Coelho 2 1 UMinho|20 Janeiro de 2012 FCT Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia MINISTÉRIO DA CIÊNCIA, TECNOLOGIA E ENSINO SUPERIOR Universidade do Minho Instituto de Letras e Ciências Humanas Maria Luísa de Sousa Coelho The Feminine in Contemporary Art: Representation and Contamination in the Work of Helen Chadwick, Michèle Roberts and Helena Almeida Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências da Literatura Especialidade de Literatura Comparada Trabalho efectuado sob a orientação da Professora Doutora Ana Gabriela Macedo Janeiro de 2012 É AUTORIZADA A REPRODUÇÃO PARCIAL DESTA TESE APENAS PARA EFEITOS DE INVESTIGAÇÃO, MEDIANTE DECLARAÇÃO ESCRITA DO INTERESSADO, QUE A TAL SE COMPROMETE; Universidade do Minho, ___/___/______ Assinatura: ________________________________________________ ii Acknowedgements I would like to thank the many people who have contributed with their time, support and insight to the writing of this thesis. For first encouraging me to undertake this project and for her unfaltering confidence in my ability to see it through, I owe my deepest gratitude to Professor Ana Gabriela Macedo– thank you for being such an invaluable source of ideas, challenges and optimism. The first two years of my research were undertaken at the University of Warwick, in the now defunct Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies. My great appreciation goes to Professor Susan Bassnett, with whom I discussed earlier versions of my work and whose interdisciplinary spirit, vibrant personality and encyclopaedic knowledge have been a constant inspiration. Much is also owed to other colleagues and friends from my time at the University of Warwick, in particular Dr Lynn Guyver, Claire Tsai, Jonathan Morley, Ana Raquel Lourenço and Epaminondas Koronis. I am also indebted to Dr Christine Battersby (from the Philosophy department at Warwick University) and Dr Patricia Odber de Baubeta (from Birmingham University) for sharing their interest on visual art, Portuguese literature and feminism. The last years of my research were spent at the History of Art department, University of Reading, as a postgraduate researcher and lecturer. I would like to express my gratitude to the colleagues from that department: Dr Nicholas Chare (especially for his insights into Kristeva’s work), Dr Paul Davies, Dr Dominic Williams, Dr Matt Lodder and, in particular, Dr Sue Malvern, whose work and conversations, along with her availability to read parts of my thesis have greatly contributed to the success of the same. I also wish to thank my graduate and postgraduate students for their irreverent and honest testing of many of the ideas developed in this thesis. Finally, a huge thank you to Sharyn Sullivan-Tailyour, for the enthusiasm with which she read and commented the final version of this work. The quality of this project was greatly enhanced by the critical and research opportunities created at the Centro de Estudos Humanísticos of Universidade do Minho, directed by Professor Ana Gabriela Macedo. In this context, it is a pleasure to express my gratitude to my friend and colleague Márcia Oliveira: I have benefited immensely from her iii passion for rigorous research, her knowledge of Portuguese contemporary art, feminism, aesthetics and politics and her enthusiastic support. I also wish to thank Dr Claudia Pazos Alonso for inviting me to present and discuss my work on Helena Almeida in a research seminar at Wadham College, Oxford University, in November 2007; Professor Griselda Pollock for inviting me to participate in a day workshop on psychoanalysis and the image, at the University of Leeds, in December 2005, and for being available to discuss gender, feminist criticism and art history; Dr Rosemary Betterton for making available manuscript versions of her work on maternal bodies and women’s art; Michèle Roberts for a brief but rewarding tête-à-tête at a conference we both attended at the University of Lancaster, in January 2006. My analysis of Helen Chadwick’s work would not have been possible without the access to this artist’s notebooks and private papers, held at the Henry Moore Institute. I am therefore thankful to this institute for granting me access to the Helen Chadwick archive, in particular to Victoria Worsley and Ian Kaye for their warm welcome and contagious enthusiasm for Chadwick’s work. In Autumn 2005 I eagerly went to Stockholm, where a retrospective exhibition of Chadwick’s work was taking place at Liljevalchs konsthall. My thanks go to Bo Nilsson, for his helpfulness during this visit, as well as for his insights into Chadwick’s work. I also wish to express my gratitude to Anne Livion-Ingvarsson, who graciously agreed to meet me and discuss feminism and art in the Swedish context. Last but no least, my warmest thanks go to family and friends, who have generously given their love, support and understanding. In particular, I want to lovingly thank my parents, my children, Daniel and Helena, for giving me the opportunity to experience, first hand, motherhood as a contaminated form of being in the world, and Graeme, for his IT skills and ever-present love. This thesis is dedicated to them. I want to acknowledge the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia for awarding me a doctorate grant, which allowed me to undertake my research abroad, attend conferences and seminars and dedicate so much of my time and effort to this project. iv The Feminine in Contemporary Art: Representation and Contamination in the Work of Helen Chadwick, Michèle Roberts and Helena Almeida Abstract Taking contamination and liminality as central methodological and theoretical metaphors, this thesis investigates the strategies through which contemporary women artists, in particular Helen Chadwick, Michèle Roberts and Helena Almeida, represent the female body and subjective female experiences, and place their work vis-à-vis the art and literary tradition. The intention has been to discuss these women’s work within their cultural and historical context and, therefore, to explore the interaction existing between the social, the subjective and the aesthetic through specific instances of visual and literary representation. The research has followed an interartistic or intermedial approach and contaminated such methodology with the insights provided by feminist criticism, specifically on the literary and visual representation of the feminine and on gender politics. Through this methodology the thesis discusses how Helen Chadwick, Michèle Roberts and Helena Almeida have articulated similar responses to a set of issues raised by phallocentrism and its representation of the feminine. Furthermore, it argues that such similarities are the result of their subject position as women (and women artists), who not only have negotiated with the problems arising from the inscription of sexual difference in the socio-cultural domain in general and the literary and visual fields in particular, but also experienced the profound impact generated by the feminist engagement with and revision of that same sexual difference. The main conclusions are that Chadwick, Roberts and Almeida participate in ‘an- other’ literary and visual tradition, created by women, and one that has subverted the dominant norms and hierarchies regarding female subjectivity and its representation. In the work under consideration, such subversion is visible both at the thematic level (through their engagement with topics such as self-representation, maternity, the domestic sphere and the abject body) and in formal ways (by embracing hybrid formats and innovative media). In addition, it manifests an interest in dialogism and contamination processes (sacred/ profane, abject/ beautiful, private/ public, self/ other), in clear opposition to phallocentric binarism. v On the one hand, by bringing together Chadwick, Roberts and Almeida, this thesis ultimately intends to debate the sexual difference implicated in their work and, consequently, draw attention to the parallelism that is possible to be established between women artists and writers who began exhibiting and publishing in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, both in Portugal and in England. On the other hand, given that a politics of location is an important notion for this doctorate project, this also aims to produce a situational analysis of the women and the work in question. Indeed, Chadwick and Roberts (who were born in culturally hybrid families) and Almeida (whose work is placed between a dictatorial and deeply patriarchal past and a democratic present) lead us to engage with a politics of location and with the concomitant juxtaposition of the terms ‘identity’ and ‘difference’. vi O Feminino na Arte Contemporânea: Representação e Contaminação em Helen Chadwick, Michèle Roberts e Helena Almeida Resumo Assumindo a contaminação e a liminaridade como metáforas metodológicas e teóricas centrais deste projecto de doutoramento, pretende-se investigar as estratégias de que se servem artistas contemporâneas, em particular Helen Chadwick, Michèle Roberts e Helena Almeida, na representação do corpo feminino e de experiências femininas subjectivas, bem como no seu relacionamento com a tradição artística