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Record W1494135618

Mas(k/t)ectomies: Losing a Breast (and Hair) in Hannah Wilke's Body Art

2007· article· en· W1494135618 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Julia Skelly

Bibliographic record

VenueThirdspace · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicVisual Culture and Art Theory
Canadian institutionsQueen's University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPerformative utteranceSilenceFemininityContext (archaeology)TabooIdentity (music)HistoriographyAestheticsArtPortraitFeminist theoryPerformativityGender studiesSociologyFeminismLiteratureArt historyHistoryAnthropology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

There is still a silence shrouding the loss of breasts and hair in art historical literature. While the A¢â‚¬A“explicit bodyA¢â‚¬Â of the feminist artist is no longer a taboo subject due to the work of scholars such as Amelia Jones (1998) and Rebecca Schneider (1997), illness has not been given the scholarly attention it deserves in the context of feminist art. My objective in this article is not to merely contribute to a historiography of feminist artists who have produced artworks inspired by breast cancer, although I do see the importance of such an undertaking. Rather, I am concerned with how a womanA¢â‚¬â„¢s illness, the treatment for that illness, and the resulting loss of a breast or hair forces the woman to engage in new performative acts to signify gender identity. In this article I discuss some of Hannah WilkeA¢â‚¬â„¢s photograph-based works, focusing primarily on Portrait of the Artist with her Mother, Selma Butter (from the So Help Me Hannah series, 1978-81), and the Intra-Venus series (1992-93). I argue that WilkeA¢â‚¬â„¢s art documents the loss of hair and a breast (her motherA¢â‚¬â„¢s), and captures women in new performative acts of femininity, using props, poses, and costumes to reconstruct their gender identity. This reconstruction calls attention to the fact that gender identity is just that: a construction dependant on a series of enactments. Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble that a A¢â‚¬A“performative theory of gender actsA¢â‚¬Â offers a framework through which to read discursive practices that denaturalize the categories of body, sex, gender, and sexuality (xii). I suggest that WilkeA¢â‚¬â„¢s photographs, the Intra-Venus series in particular, are self-portraits that might be described not only as performance art, in that Wilke is performing stereotypical feminine roles for the viewer, but also representations of performative acts that disrupt the idea of a coherent or intelligible femininity.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.020

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0070.007
Scholarly communication0.0030.001
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.250
Teacher spread0.234 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2007
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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