With the amount of exposure that female body receives in contemporary culture, one would think there are no mysteries left, yet male gaze continues to define our representational paradigms and harness our imagination; and women’s bodies as symbols of male visual delectation, sexual pleasure, reproduction and nurture do not seem even vaguely shaken.

In this piece, from an ongoing project inhabiting in the intersection of fashion and art, I pursue the expression of grotesque female body; exploring the notion of marked female body, pleasure, and desire as deviant, disorderly, ultimately monstrous which is therefore historically subject to oppression.

 

Like carnivalesque, grotesque female body opens up possible spaces of resistance and allows women to imagine new pleasures in performing the feminine and in female spectatorship, while at the same time draw attention to the fact that the meaning and performance of the pleasure of gender and sexuality can and will continue to change. In embracing the aesthetics of disgust I push against taste to develop new categories for beauty; what is pleasurable and libidinous for women as defined by women, offensive to male taste and its ownership.