Women Seeking Men (Dirty Housewife)

In 1991, Barbara Kruger was asked to write about "American Manhood", an ideal she summed up as an image of perfection for us to desire; advertisers 'want interchangeable figures, not bodies', she claimed. I find this particular quote incredibly relevant to my current practice, and for considering the stereotypes of femininity and masculinity with which we are constantly presented with. Taking of transvestism, Grayson Perry stated male cross-dressers to be ‘boys who have been constricted in some way in that very narrow male role’, and I believe it is through exposing the extremes of these roles and stereotypes that we begin to break them down. ‘The paradox of phallocentrism…depends upon the image of the castrated women to give order and meaning to its world’ claimed Laura Mulvey in the seminal 1975 ‘Visual Pleasure and NarrativeCinema’, and it is through the lack of penis that the woman becomes embodied "other", existing as a binary opposite to men, and as Butler argues, gender distinctions are only valid upon accepting a social system based upon binary opposites. The woman can only hope to enter into the male - and penis centred - world by becoming an object of male heterosexual desire. Employing the layout of newspaper adverts, the patchwork quilt below employs traditional "feminine crafts" to re-contextualise both this domestic object, and the adverts presenting women as the sexual other and object. When discussing the work of Tracey Emin, Rosemary Betterton described her work as a subversion of 'techniques and genres historically gendered (albeit not exclusively) as feminine, such as embroidery and patchwork quilts... on the one hand, the patchwork quilt was a confirmation of daughterly or wifely skills and virtues, a symbol of the long tradition of domestic femininity... on the other, appliquéd texts and banners were used in Suffrage demonstrations and were revived in women's peace protests in the 1980s as public and political statements of women's rights and identities'. In relation to blanket works such as 'Helter Fucking Skelter' 'the iconoclasm of the texts is at odds with the painstaking and detailed procedure of sewing each letter one by one onto the ground, just as the violent expression of the words belies the warmth and security implied by the blanket... the work refuses any simple reading of female identity' - it is this sense of a multi-narrative work which I hope to have created through selecting examples informed by Lakoff's study of 'women's language'.

'Women Seeking Men (Dirty Housewife)' (2012) embroidery, appliqué and image transfer on appropriated textiles

Kruger states "direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work", and I believe such influence can be seen clearly in this work, using appropriated images and text drawn from mass media, manipulating meaning and cultural value whilst feeding upon ’the image repertoire of popular culture’ (Kruger, 1982). Direct address however requires spectatorship, a position which naturally will be embodied and gendered. Here the speaker has no 'body', and thus I hope to question, confuse and perhaps even to collapse traditional gendered readings and viewing positions - presented alongside sexuality suggestive images of women, the selected text forces us to consider how we view these bodies. Phrases such as 'I WANNA MAKE U COME' and 'WANT 2 HELP U' sends mixed messages - are these figures here for our sexual pleasure, or is this how we should feel towards them. Ultimately, the 'I' and 'U' are interchangeable, unfixed and ungendered, and call into question such a presentation of female sexuality, in which 'we are taught that the needs of women are in direct conflict with the needs of men' and that sexuality and desire is in effect based upon a power struggle; reporting upon sexual violence, an article in the Guardian summarised this struggle as 'an insistence on "purity" [which] is just the other side of the coin of insisting on sexually servicing other men. In both cases, the body of a woman exists in the battlefield of male control.'