Phantasmagoria The Female Body Analysis

time of Betty Friedan liberating the housewife and the outspoken Gloria Steinem. This feminist movement in culture artists began to “embrace the persuasive powers of art to communicate with a wide audience.” These artists were investigating social dynamics of power and privilege, focusing in on gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Since Sherman created artwork during this time that held many qualities as discussed before, many have looked at the effectiveness and method of creating compelling feminist photography. Sherman has an influence over feminist art because she is the first well known artist to do what she does. Female photographers never before had been respected as much as male photographers, but Sherman additionally pointed the camera at herself. Sherman is a groundbreaking feminist photographer because she was the first to only shoot self portraits that had a narrative behind it to expand her feminist agenda.
Laura Mulvey, a feminist film theorist, claims Sherman to be “not a photographer but an artist who uses photography.” In her essay, “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman,” she uses her background with film to understand the reasoning behind Sherman’s use of film stills from imaginary movies. By making it seem like they were created in 1950’s

By making the images seem to appeal to the male gaze, she is actually deconstructing these patriarchal power structures by enacting them. Kerchy remarks her as a feminist because of her “transgressive texuality to female spectators by subverting from within the masculinized subject position, the phallogocentric language and the patriarchal society.” A paradoxical position is created to show these subversive parodies, which in alliance to the constructionist feminist theory, deconstructs