'A critical examination of the work played by body fluids with reference to visual culture and feminist art'

Bodily fluids are being used to explore and present a real experience of female bodies and lives against existing taboo, forcing society to rethink preconceived notions of femininity and womanhood. Through reclaiming the female form of a constructed identity that has dominated traditional and modern thought the female body can be reclaimed. Female artists at present are continuing to pave the way for women’s bodies to oppose the normative narratives of femininity, the truth of the female body.  The fluid material of the body in feminist art explores cites of history and our present that oppress and self-representations that depict the raw, intimate realities of the body to provoke and destabilise the viewer’s gaze. Taking subjects from the private into the public realm creates an imbalance, if beautiful and sexualised images are accepted into society then why do natural functions of a women’s body evoke such negative controversy? This is always something that I have identified with but never viewed first hand until a tube journey last year, I viewed a young women standing on the tube with menstrual blood seeping through her jeans. Men around me sniggered and looked disgusted, the women was subjected to a gaze of shock, she was an image that to me propelled the agenda of a false social construct of gender and identity, one that has appropriated the restriction of our biological functions.

The first use of bodily fluid in art is located in the year of 709, the ritualistic blood letting is seen in the lintel of Queen consort Lady Xoc who was one of the most powerful and prominent women in Maya civilisation, the ritual sacrifices she performs is atypical of the time as women were not seen in ancient Maya art. Human bodily mater is a medium here that holds religious, biological and political power. Lady Xoc performs a blood sacrifice, threading a thorned rope through her tongue and placing her blood beneath her in a bowl whilst serpents arise from it and emerging from their mouths are war god ancestors. Lady Xoc actions establish the purpose of women society as a vital linkage and identification ‘of the king with the gods responsible for fertility and renewal’, her sacrifice represents her innate power to continue life and provide guidance for the kings going into battle. The Maya women was glorified, an assertive force of life that through her body enables freedoms and hope for the tribe.

Antonio Solis marble sculpture, La Caridad Romana, ‘Roman Charity’ of pagan origin presents a woman named Pero who secretly breastfed her imprisoned father saving him from starvation. Pero’s act is celebrated for her virtue and compassion. The juxtaposition of eroticism, maternal care and incest occurs through the description of father-daughter. In 1798, a new interpretation among many of this work was created through the interpretation of ‘The Grecian Daughter’, taking on a new agenda. This painting represented an innovation of the Grecian daughter; it described the lives of daughters who had navigated the demands of their father through the American Revolution. Judith Sargent Murray at the fringe of women's republic thinking stated a new idea that ‘women had intellectual and moral capacities equivalent to those of men, that they had full access to the universal human reason promised by the Enlightenment’, her exclamation was in the thought that ‘the persistent deficiencies exhibited by women were caused not by nature but culture’. The use of Roman Charity is a clear cutting example of what Judith Murray argues, ‘showed in every respect women were equal to men’, this was a right for women to access ‘radical egalitarian legacies of revolution’, a destination to begin access to reason and the ‘heroic nobility of sentiment, to all of the qualities shared by republican Cincinnatus and Brutus’ who were leaders through there Roman manliness, ambition and virtue.

The power of the supernatural image of breast milk is seen as magical and sacred, traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary and goddesses in Greek mythology. The act and image of breastfeeding publicly in modernity remains problematic and frowned upon in the public realms of our society. The Spanish artist Alonso Cano’s, The Vision of Saint Bernard, completed between 1642 to 1652 depicted Saint Bernard worshipping the Virgin Mary asking her to ‘show yourself as a mother’, the Virgin then shares her breast milk, it represents the catholic devotion and appraisal of this supernatural act. During the Renaissance milk was believed to be a combination of blood and heat, therefore the Saint receiving the milk is seen to be similar to bathing in Christ’s blood. The group M.A.M.A in 1996 produced ‘Let down’, the installation was performed at a site of a former jail in California. The term let down refers to the moment milk flows from the breast after a painful build up. During the performance only one woman entered the isolated whitewashed jail cell at one time and revealed feelings of ‘breast feeding from its difficulties to erotic pleasures’, the reflective space where milk flowed out of taps is conclusive of the entrapment of women's bodies as breastfeeding was still illegal in public at the time of this act. The social and political norms that affect women breast feeding remain at present, effectively making the breast inferior in motherhood as Iris Marion Young in Breasted Experience states, ‘breasts are a scandal for patriarchy because they disrupt the border between motherhood and sexuality, between love and desire’, where a society requires mothers to navigate spaces and ‘forces bystanders to look and notice, or suffer self-consciousness about not looking or not not looking’, this requires the rethinking of the present gaze in our society. The spiritual, religious and perceived pure act of the Virgin Mary's breast fluid who feeds Priest, juxtaposed with the mother today who wishes to feed her child publicly is a manifestation of sexual beliefs and relations to the public female body that repress the mother.

The body and subjectivity of women prior to the sexual revolution had been one of objectification and sexualisation in male art. The union of feminist art and bodily fluid has been powered through the secretion of menstrual blood. During the 1970’s menstrual blood art emerged, alongside the women's liberation movement. In 1971 Red Flag by Judy Chicago, a photolithograph of a women's hand removing a bloodied tampon from her vagina emerged into the sphere of a shocked society. Judy Chicago created this to ‘introduce a new level of permission for female artists’, transforming the gaze to everyday bodily functions, aiming to normalise bodily fluids in society paralleling the fight for social and political beliefs of women and the freedom of their body. Some thought of the tampon as bloodied penis which is representative of the acceptance and gazed upon male body, the condition culture was able to recognise the phallic male shapes but not that of a used tampon. This work is the epitome of the real woman against the conception of how women have been constructed to be looked upon.

Hyper masculinity is a thread that runs throughout works that capture what society shames and is deemed vulgar, in 1972 artist Carolee Schneeman created Blood Work Diary through drying menstrual blood on tissue paper and securing it with egg yolk. This act was inspired by the reaction to her former lover seeing period blood during intercourse. This is a reaction to the phallocentric of the truth, in regards to Jacques Derrida, stemming from Plato’s construction of logic where from a reactive status the women subjects herself to thinking in the binary of male and female. To place the women in a position of dominance she must subject herself to both castration and anti castration, ‘she knows that such a reversal would deprive her of her power of simulation, that in truth, a reversal of this kind would…force her just as surely into the old apparatus’, Derrida believes the woman is neither inside or outside of this power structure, therefore she is in a position of advantage. The cultural constructions of women in regard to Simone de Beauvoir are created through what society produces as imaginary constructs of what femininity is, ‘capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realised’. Menstrala, the term for menstrual art formed by Vanessa Teigs in the early 2000’s, through ‘Spiralling Moon’ empowered women to form a deeper connection to their cycle for awareness, menstrual creativity and institution, to rid the shame associated with it this. It is to realise the body, the fluid and to what society has formatted as the ideal whilst deconstructing representations of selfhood. 

The theory of ‘abject’ by Jullia Kristeva is a central formula in the works of artists to present societies reaction to our own selfhood and how we react to threats of illness and death that is exposed through our subjection and gaze of vomit or the corpse. The beginning of the Aids crisis in 1981 forged through the 1980s a series of politically and medically centered works of body fluids. The art work ‘Game’ in 1986 by Kiki Smith engaged with the Aids crisis. The artists work consisted of twelve jars of blood piled on a shelf that read, ‘there are approx. 12 pints of blood in the human body’, the fear of bodily fluids in society is what is critiqued. The Untitled exhibition of Smith proposed the ‘abject’ viciousness of human bodily fluid showing twelve glass jugs filled with blood, pus, diarrhoea and tears, where the observer was able to see there own reflection within the gars. The act of the abject draws the viewer to their own materiality that is effectively traumatic, ‘what disturbs identity, system, order, what does not respect borders, positions, rules’, it is the eruption of what is real into society. This materiality of blood as an inflection of a body that has HIV confronts the viewer seeing their own death, ‘there, I am at the border of my condition as a living being’, it is the break down of the body that we establishes and recognise identities.

May Ling Su project titled On My Period presents the artist having spend two years photographing and videoing herself menstruating and smearing her blood over her naked body on the beach. Thus exploring the taboo of spaces avoided during this time and reclaiming the menstruating body in the public gaze. The stigma of the uncleanness of mixing menstruation and sexuality is broken here. Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema conveys through her use of psychoanalytic theory and in the work of Lancan’s mirror stage the first awareness of a unified self is a mis-recognition, therefore the ‘the cinema spectator recognises and misrecognizes his or herself onscreen’. The use of performance video art by May Ling Su confronts gender performativity, re-representing the idea that, ‘traditionally, that the display has functioned on two levels, as erotic object for the characters within the story, and as erotic object for the spectator, shifting tensions between looks on either side of the screen’ there is both an erotic pleasure and feminine struggle of what, ‘On my period’ uncovers. 

South African born artist Zanele Muholi, deals with lesbian oppression in her native country, her exhibition ‘Isilumo siyaluma’ Period Pains of 2011 is created with menstrual blood. It is a commentary on the use of corrective rape in Africa for queer women to become heterosexual, the artist states ‘my menstrual blood is used as a vehicle and medium to begin to express and bridge the pain and loss I feel as I hear and become witness to the pain of ‘curative rapes that many of the girls and women in my black lesbian community bleed from their vaginas and their minds’, this is a radical stance to violence of the inhuman brutality of the rape and murder in democratic Africa. Each patterned piece of art within the series represents a survivor of the violence, ‘the physical and spiritual blood that is shed from our bodies’, it moves beyond menstrual bleeding to what the artist states, ‘I continue to bleed each time I read about rampant curative rapes’, it is about using body fluids as hope, a representation of survival in the brutality of society experienced by women.

Chilean artist Carina Ubeda in 2013 unveiled ‘Cloths’ an exhibition that displayed five years of cloth that Ubeda has used during Menstruation, suspended from the ceiling alongside apples to symbolise the artists ovulation. The use of women's blood in art is still considered repulsive and unhygienic, a body fluid which remains to shock and disgust. The photograph of Menstruation bathroom showing a white bathroom filled with used menstrual products of in 1972 by Judy Chicago is again a reflection of females own uncomfortable view of exteriorising the period, ‘however we feel about our own menstruation is how we feel about seeing its image in front of us’. In comparison to Ancient cultures that honoured fertility we still exist in a culture that teaches to hide and conceal natural bodily fluids.

A series of photographs by artist Ingrid Berthon-Moine using menstrual blood smeared on women as lipstick using media ideologies where each photograph is named of ‘forbidden red’ and ‘red temptation’ terms typically used by cosmetic brands. To name there lipsticks in an act to assert fixed gender normative identities over women, ‘models of femininity projected by the media to encourage imitation and identification’, through use of blood as make up the stereotype is jarred, the facial lips thus representing the bleeding vagina. This intern destroys notions of dominating ideals of beauty and female eroticism in media advertisement. The stereotypical names of women lipstick associated with sexual ideals of women are interrogated here, ‘the stereotypes and assumptions necessary to get each picture are found in our own head’, the artist using blood as lipstick rejects fixed femininities that media create to overtly sexualise women to attract the male gaze.

The 1990s saw a growth in the use of bodily fluids in feminist art, with artists expanding into the realms of spit. Janine Antoni 1993 sculpture Gnaw, through using saliva and her teeth carves objects out of two chocolate and lard cubes. The cubes were a signification of female body in our culture and the subject of eating disorders, ‘minimalist macho is de-formed and re-formed by female anxiety and its classic patterns of realise', whilst incurring the cannibalism reflected as a societies consumption of her femininity. Antoni exhibition of Lick and Lather performed the artist re-sculpting with her spit chocolate breasts of herself and as a daily ritual she ingested and bathed in her own features to, ‘rethink the relation of the body to the object in ways that foreground the gendered associations of embodiment’, the use of sculpture by Antoni ruptures traditional normative ideals of the female body and its fluids determined by culture that ‘comes to signify difference as positivity, a joyful reappropiation of the attributes of the other’.

Tracey Emin in 1998, My Bed, represents her own personal bed that is covered in menstrual blood, semen, condoms, vodka bottles and cigarettes. Emin’s depression is captured in this piece, rupturing the imperfect realties of a society where women have to exist undamaged and flawless. The aesthetic of Emin from the suffering of shame and being ‘unhinged’, ‘but is passionate for the release of diffuse joy, for conatus’, it is a narrative of abuse, humiliation and rebellion of women in society. The artist collectively brings awareness to shame across all sexualities, as Emin states, ‘it was above all a confessional’, asking us to question our own realities and subjections, ‘a metaphor for our own messy lives’, by making public issues of real life it is a voyeurism into the understanding of hidden realities of turmoil. Feminist art during the 2000’s began to merge science and technology. The Topography of Tears by Rose Lynn Fisher stored one hundred dried human tears over a five-year period photographing them under a microscopic eye. This presented tears compositions such that happiness or grief differed radically in composition, Fisher named them, ‘aeriel views of emotion terrain’, the tears are emblems of collective human experiences. The fluids of tears translate ‘the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger and as complex as a rite of passage’. 

From the 1970s to our present feminist artists use of bodily fluids are still in a continuous struggle to normalise these natural bodily functions. In 2015 Rupi Kaur a Canadian student posted an image of herself with period blood stained underwear whilst lying on her bed, ‘communities shun this natural process. Some are more comfortable with the pornification of women. The violence and degradation of women than this’, addressing the taboo and disgust of menstrual blood. This image was removed by Instagram as it was a violation of their community guidelines, a direct reflection on the specific limit of the female body that persists today unless it is sexualised and deemed beautiful. The censorship on social media of what is deemed offensive has made no progressive since the plight of 1970s artist. Women on instagram are persisting in these acts of liberation and freedom of the body and its fluids. The world of the Internet that is the key element in this present to dictating and formulating cultural and social normatives women in the struggle for the normalisation of our bodies and fluids, as the artist Katya Grokhovsky says of our current societies ideals of that they would, ‘ prefer you were a hairless, ageless, oh-so-cool-sexy, tiny, easily manipulated, shiny machine-object, not a visceral, bleeding, odor-and-noise-and-fluids-producing, food-needing, bathroom-going, valuable, capable, ambitious, smart, emotion-and pain-feeling, gloriously human being."

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