Thread by @monaeltahawy

A sculpture that was unveiled this week in honour of the 18th century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft has caused a huge stir.

My new essay is about the sculpture, nudity, public art, and the white feminist fantasy of "Everywoman."

RT & share & tx!
feministgiant.substack.com/p/for-mary-wol…

I call “For Mary Wollstonecraft” the sculpture “For white women”: the latest installment in a parochial feud amongst white women over who owns white feminism,in which a white artist has given shape to a slim, white “everywoman” in homage to the white feminist “Mother of Feminism”

“She’s everywoman and clothes would have restricted her... “As far as I know, she’s more or less the shape we’d all like to be,” the artist said.

Who the fuck is “we” and who the fuck is the “every” in that “everywoman” and why the fuck is she young and white?

Much of the ire directed has come from people who think it’s diminishing or disrespectful to portray Wollstonecraft naked. Fuck that. Let’s be clear already: there is nothing shameful or disrespectful about nudity or the naked female form--in art or otherwise.

The backdrop for all my Zoom and webinar meetings is this glorious portrait by artist Nadine Faraj of the Egyptian feminist activist Aliaa Mahdy with “There will be millions of us”
written across her topless chest.

Western art is not completely devoid of the naked female form, as any visit to the Classical and Renaissance galleries of museums can avow. There, you can take your pick: women being raped or women being desexualized.

I’ll never forget how audio guide in an Italian museum urged us to admire deftness with marble of sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini in The Rape of Proserpina, esp lifelike way Pluto’s hands grab the thigh of Proserpina as he rapes her. The gaslighting,not the artistry,is breathtaking

When the women of ancient western art are not being raped, they have the genitals of a five-year-old girl, as Syreeta McFadden assailing in an essay on the absence of genitals in female statues from the Greek and Roman era of art. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

And so at least we have the bush on the female figure that stands atop of Hambling’s sculpture. I will take pubic hair on public art.

But what I will not take is the magical thinking of white feminism: behind “everywoman” is a white woman feministgiant.substack.com/p/for-mary-wol…

If the Guerilla Girls asked in 1984 “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” then how much longer did we have to wait for women who are not white to not just get into that museum - as artists and subjects - but to stand atop the pedestal of public art?

Only a white woman can so blithely say “everywoman” in the year 2020 and offer a slim white nude as its prototype in a country with a history of imposing Victorian Christian prudishness to shame colonized people whose public nudity was used against them.

To say “everywoman” is to ignore conventional notions of beauty that are born from white European colonial legacies, that hold up white femininity as the pinnacle of beauty, that promote whiteness as default.

If you spend any time wading through the minefield known as social media you would quickly find out that that is who is allowed to be naked. The body that is not too large, not too overwhelming, not too much, and which is white. Ask model Nyome Nicholas-Williams.

She fought Instagram & won after it kept deleting her pics. “Millions of pictures of v naked, skinny white women can be found on Instagram every day...But a fat Black woman celebrating her body is banned? It does make a difference to be out there as a fat, Black woman & be proud”

Shaming & moralizing are in eye of the beholder which is why “gaze” is a central consideration. Who shames fat Black & Brown bodies? Whose body is displayed & for whose gaze? Who determined that female form in Hambling’s sculpture is “more or less the shape we’d all like to be?”

You can trace Hambling’s “everywoman”  directly to Wollstonecraft’s 1792 pamphlet, A Vindication on the Rights of Woman, in which she compared the plight of the white, middle class women she advocated for to slavery. Wollstonecraft was an abolitionist who was unable to see that

a white middle class British woman’s life, no matter how limited by sexism, wasn’t comparable to that of enslaved Black woman. She was as guilty of what white feminists continue to be guilty of: refusing to see how race, class & gender render “everywoman” a white woman’s fantasy.

To appreciate how anemic & parochial “For Mary Wollstonecraft” is, to see how public art can wrestle with all that “Mother of Feminism” & adherents did not, see Kara Walker.

If you want to challenge that white patriarchal gaze with nudity, defy it with more than just perky tits and a big Bush. Challenge others with HEFT! Kara Walker’s A Subtley, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby

The women Walker pays homage to are the women that Wollstonecraft didn’t see. Of course a Black woman knows patriarchy is more than sexism: it is colonization,capitalism, enslavement too.Of course an artist like Walker overwhelms your gaze so that you wonder who is looking at who

When will women who are not white be considered part of “everywoman” by women who are? And when will women who are not white and skinny be the colour and shape “we all want to be?” feministgiant.substack.com/p/for-mary-wol…

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