I have just found time to read this properly and want to express my thanks
and gratitude at seeing the dilemma so clearly and cogently examined.
very clarifying and helpful
Liz
For an artist, a danger of countering these distorting assumptions by
asserting the female is that one might become trapped in the Feminine, and
become purely reactionary, following an agenda of opposition rather than
one?s own. And one might inadvertantly be limited by its perceived
possibilities, and simply find oneself in another trap, which is all the
old ideas of the female dressed up in new clothes. It?s that old dilemma
of the body again, how it is at once freeing and unfreeing. Too often
those who trumpet the Female Voice as a liberating force are sniffing
nostalgically at the very idea of the feminine which has been shaped for
centuries to the advantage of men: the voice which speaks quiet and low,
the pretty, the helpmeet, the passive, the solely phsyical world. And yet
in these desires towards the feminine is a recognition that there is
something still which is undervalued or censored, a sense of an imbalance
in cultural perceptions of the female, which somehow has to be addressed if
we are to see our worlds clearly.
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