The American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) is one of the most outstanding feminist body artists of the 1970s in the United States. This essay mainly deals with an important theme of Woodman's self-representations -- the merger of her body with the building, the space, or the nature she inhabits. I would like to propose a feminist/ psychoanalytic reading of Woodman's formation of the feminine space and subjectivity in order to elucidate the sexual politics of her self-representations.

Transforming Bodies in the Space of Femininity:
Self-Representation by Francesca Woodman

Liu, Jui-Chi
ˇ]Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Art and Art Education, National Taiwan University, Taiwanˇ^

I would like to propose that Woodman's Surrealist-oriented self-representations employ dilapidated house or the mother nature to metaphorically re-create a nostalgic space of femininity, calling to mind her longing for the primal bond between herself and the mother. Feminine space is transformed into a reflection of a daughter's nostalgic desire and phantasy of the maternal space. I will employ some psychoanalytic and feminist theories to forge my interpretation, such as Sigmund Freud's theory of the uncanny (unheimlich), Hal Foster's analysis of the Surrealist space, Julia Kristeva's theory of the semiotic chora and the abject, Alice Jardine's concept of the feminine space. My thesis is that Woodman's metaphorical expression of her yearning for returning to the maternal space exhibits a daughter's nostalgia for an alternative space of femininity against the grain of the patriarchal symbolic order. Since the 1980s, feminist critics have regarded this kind of Woodman's self-representations as analogous to the entrapment of a woman by the wallpaper in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper(1892). I would like to posit that the space of femininity in Woodman's self-representations is not the confined domestic sphere in the late nineteenth century, but a subversive feminine space with Surrealist connotations imaged by a woman artist in the second half of the twentieth century.

I want to further develop my viewpoint of Woodman's active merger with the environment from the perspective of a daughter's fetishism. Feminist theoreticians and artists have explored female fetishism in order to invest in the possibility of women as desiring subjects. Among the theoretical and artistic works related to female fetishism, there are much more works coping with the maternal fetishism. My proposal is that Woodman's self-representations provide precious exploration of a daughter's fetishism -- an important dimension of the female subjectivity. Her self- representations, like the fetishistic objects, metaphorically stage her disavowal of the loss of the symbiotic relationship with the mother through exhibiting her longing for fantasmatic fusion with the womb-like environment. I believe that such an interpretation is much more valid than Margaret Sundell's reading of Woodman's self-representations through Jacques Lacan's notion of the mirror phrase and Roger Caillois's theory of animal mimicry. She posits that Woodman's self-representations oscillate between Lacan's and Caillois's scenarios. I think that Sundell's interpretation does not capture the specific dynamics of Woodman's self-representations. Neither Lacan's theory of the mirror stage misrecognition of bodily unity nor Caillois's concept of the passive dispossession of an animal by its space highlights Woodman's active absorption of her body to the environment.