Ways of looking: Women, art and archetypes

A sensuous goddess, a damsel in distress, a femme fatale, a terrifying witch – this limited set of archetypes, found everywhere in cultural images from European art history to contemporary advertising and Instagram posts, has long suppressed women’s identities, influencing ideas of how women should appear and how they should behave. At the same time, women artists have historically been overlooked and hampered from creating more empowering identities. This unit asks you to evaluate what some of the most iconic images in art history and contemporary online images tell us to value, and investigate how women artists have offered us new ways of thinking about women’s identities across differences (gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality) and power. You will look at how archetypal constructions of womanhood have been used to contain and limit women, and how these archetypes endure in our contemporary culture, shaping our ideas of not only beauty and taste, but also national identity, political authority, and gender/sex/sexuality.