Exposing the 'natural' woman: Female bodies in American visual culture, 1785--1830.

摘要

This project provides the first extended critical study on how representations of the female body---in various media and iconographies---contributed to the discourse of the "natural" woman in early national America. This influential, sometimes contradictory, discourse defined specific feminine roles and characteristics to women based on the assumption that femininity was constituted bodily. Moving well beyond the limited scope of previous scholarship, I examine pictorial manifestations of the natural woman in three thematic categories: allegorical, maternal, and erotic. Fraught with positive and negative significations, the natural woman performed important cultural work, helping to shape an identity for the new Republic and its citizenry during a formative period in its history. Ultimately, the multivalence of such imagery reveals that femininity was not a "natural" condition in this period, but rather subject to cultural negotiation.