notes on Mirror images ; women, surrealism, and self-representation by whitney chadwick

Pg 3 "But all her life the woman is to find the magic of her mirror a tremendous help in her effort to project herself and then attain self identification.... man, feeling and wishing himself active, subject, does not see himself in his fixed image, it has little attraction for him, since mans body does not seem to him an object of desire, while woman, knowing and making herself object, believes she really sees herself in the glass". - Simone De Beauvoir, the second sex

"Rare are the moments when we accept leaving our mirrors empty.... still, we persist in trying to fix a fleeting image and spend our lifetime searching after that which does not exist. This object we love so, let us just turn away and it will immediately disappear." - Trin T. Min-Ha, Woman, Native, Other.

pg 4
- The complex and ambiguous relationship between the female body and female identity".

collective body of self portraits and other self representations that in taking the artists own body as the starting point and in collapsing interior and exterior perceptions of the self continues to reverberate within contemporary practices by women that articulate how the body is marked by feminity as lives experience, subjectivity produced through new narratives, and the possibility of a feminine imaginary enacted.

11 - Claude Cahun, eveux non avenus: - A sheet of glass. Where shall I put the reflective silver? on this side or on the other; in front of or behind the pane? Before. I imprison myself. I blind myself. What does it matter to me, a Passer by, to offermyself a mirror in which you recognise yourself, even if it is a deforming mirror and signed by my own hand?... Behind I am equally enclosed. I will not know anything of outside. At least I will recognise my own face and maybe it will suffic enough to please me"

AS tanning suggests women often produce self representations that suggest a complex relationship to social ideologies of the feminine.
13 - Louise Bourgeois - More so than men who are coaxed toward social success, toward sublimation, woman are body.

In the work of artists like Francesca woodman cindy sherman etc, the body has become the site of cultyural mediations, the sign of political and social chalenges to assigned meanings, and an important measuere of female subjectivity. Bodies and body parts swell mutate dissolve double and decompose before our eyes as the body registers cultural as wel as personal fears and anxieties.

23 - self as masquerade / self as absence - womanliness could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods. the reader may now ask how i define womanliness or where i draw the line between genuine womanliness and the "masquerade". my suggestion is not however that there is any such difference. - Joan Riviere "womanliness as a masquerade".