CALL FOR ARTISTS
PROPOSERS: EXCEL team
ABSTRACT
In our contemporaneous societies, beauty is one of the main female’s responsibility. A woman's worth (or who identifies with the female gender) is based primarily on how close or how far she comes to embodying the ideal. As a result, woman are supposed to conform to the extremely narrow and well-defined standards of beauty. In the consumer culture, a woman body offers a powerful canvas on which to paint persuasive portraits of self, identity, and otherness and to construct or critically deconstruct hegemonic beauty ideals.
Aesthetic surgery and aesthetic procedures are a by-product of the advancement of medical technology has particularly contributed to a new malleability of the body. The almost incessant possibilities for constant molding and reinventing one’s body provided by new technologies reinforce the fundamental importance of the body in processes such as identity-making, self-definition and self-promotion in the consumer society. Doctors as plastic surgeons, aesthetics doctors, dermatologists or even gynecologists conceive the body as a malleable canvas on which they can demonstrate their skill. Depicted as a passive body on the canvas, the imperfect woman is constructed as a victim. The medical doctor will be her hero, in between a savior and a master-artist who prepares the patient for the transformation, just as the painter intervene on a raw material using canvas and paints, or as what the sculptor does with marble, the musician with the staves, the photographer with cling films and the dancer with cleats.
Participants are invited to register sending an email (isabelpires85@gmail.com; federicamanfredi@hotmail.fr) with a brief description of their proposal.
AKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The activity arises from the project ‘EXCEL - The Pursuit of Excellence. Biotechnologies, enhancement and body capital in Portugal’, founded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (PTDC/SOC-ANT/30572/2017), and coordinated by Chiara Pussetti at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa.
At the same conference, Federica Manfredi proposed the paper “Plastic Barbies and bodies made of plastic”.
For more information: www.kismifconference.com
