Date of Award

2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Hassold, Cris

Keywords

Foucault, Michael, Contemporary Art, Feminism

Area of Concentration

Humanities

Abstract

This thesis identifies and formulates the concept of figurations as a new strategy of resistance in contemporary artistic practice. As imaginative subject positions, figurations are tools that challenge normative configurations of bodies outside of hegemonic frameworks of representation and postmodern cultural conditions. I use Michel Foucault's notions of power, domination, embodied subjectivity, and � perhaps most significantly � his ideas surrounding ethical practices of freedom in order to conceptualize their subversive potential. By re-imagining the oppressed body, figurations also produce a new mode of encountering and understanding the other. Thus they are useful tools for feminism as an emancipatory politics that seeks to incorporate radical understandings of difference. I expand upon the concept of figurations through a close reading of two contemporary artists: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose works deals heavily with the AIDS body, and Doris Salcedo, who critically challenges notions of the 'third-world.' By re-signifying the materiality of the artwork, these artists simultaneously re-signify the materiality of the body, producing new formulations of active resistance.

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