Mas(k/t)ectomies: Losing a Breast (and Hair) in Hannah Wilke's Body Art
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is still a silence shrouding the loss of breasts and hair in art historical literature. While the A¢â¬Aexplicit 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¬Aperformative 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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it