CONTENTS
List of illustrations x
Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xviii
PART I
Firing the canon
1 About canons and culture wars 3
Theoretical models for the critique of the canon: ideology and myth 6
What is the canon - structurally? 9
Psycho-symbolic investment in the canon, or, Being childish about artists 13
2 Differencing: feminism's encounter with the canon 23
Three positions 23
About difference and differance 29
Thinking about women ... Artists 33
PART II
Reading against the grain: reading for ...
3 The ambivalence of the maternal body: re/drawing Van Gogh 41
A feminist reading of Van Gogh? 41
Bending women 43
Inside a studio behind the vicarage in Nuenen 46
Sexuality and representation 50
What are they really talking about? 53
Class, sexuality and animality 55
Freud, Van Gogh and the Wolf Man: Mater and nanny 57
Who's seeing whose mother? Feminist desire and the case of Van Gogh 60
4 Fathers of modern art: mothers of invention: cocking a leg at Toulouse-Lautrec 65
Late-coming and premature departure 65
Debasement and desire: registers of social and sexual difference 67
Looking up to dad 70
When small is not enough 75
Whose [who's] missing [the] Phallus? What's in the gloves? 77
Deconstructing the derriere: the physical other 81
Loving women 87
Conclusion 90
PART III
Heroines: setting women in the canon
5 The female hero and the making of a feminist canon: Artemisia Gentileschi's representations of Susanna and Judith 97
Seeing the artist or reading the picture? 98
Feminists and art history: what women? 98
Susanna and the Elders 103
Trauma, memory and the relief of representation 108
Decapitation or castration: judith Slaying Holofernes 115
6 Feminist mythologies and missing mothers: Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, Artemisia Gentileschi and Cleopatra 129
A feminist myth of the twentieth century: murdered creativity and the female body 129
Lucy Snowe meets Cleopatra: the resistant feminist reader and the female body 132
Missing mothers: inscriptions in the feminine: Cleopatra 138
Coda: rapish scenes and Lucretia 158
7 Revenge: Lubaina Himid and the making of new narratives for new histories 169
A post-colonial feminist revenge on the canon? 169
On some painting in Revenge 173
History painting 186
On mourning and melancholia 189
Covenant versus terrorism 191
PART IV
Who is the other?
8 Some letters on feminism, politics and modern art: when Edgar Degas shared a space with Mary Cassatt at the Suffrage Benefit Exhibition, New York 1915
Letter I: On the question of I and non-I 201
Letter II: On the social other 213
Letter III: On the jouissance of the other 226
Letter IV: On the mortality of the other 230
Letter V: On the exhibition with the other 234
9 A tale of three women: seeing in the dark, seeing double, at least, with Manet 247
Introduction: Laure, Jeanne and Berthe 247
Berthe 258
Jeanne 261
Laure 277
Conclusion 305
Epilogue 317
Bibliography 318
Index 328