Reforming the Female Form

Throughout art history, representation of the female body has been forged and fictionalized by the male gaze. How can women offer a new vision of themselves? With author and critic Lauren Elkin, learn how feminist artists have used art as a tool of resistance, reappropriating the artistic lineage responsible for their oppression.

In her new work Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Elkin proposes an alternative narrative of art history: art as a celebration of beauty, excess, sentimentality, touch, and the politics of the body. She will appear in conversation with art historian and visual culture expert Alice Blackhurst.

Speakers

Lauren Elkin is the author most recently of Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, which redefines monstrosity as a key element in feminist aesthetics; it’s “destined to become a new classic,” according to Chris Kraus. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s, Le Monde, and Frieze, among others. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir’s previously unpublished novel The Inseparables. After twenty years in Paris, she is now based in London.

Alice Blackhurst is a writer, academic, and the author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image recently shortlisted for the 2023 R Gapper Best Book in French Studies Prize. Her writing has appeared more widely in the Observer New Review, the Paris Review, the TLS, Jacobin and the New Left Review Sidecar.  

Co-organized by:

This conversation is part of the Entre Nous series organized in partnership with the The American Library in Paris and Columbia Global Centers | Paris.